But his birth certificate

I think this is right, and it’s going to be a big problem over the next year:

This situation is now spiraling into a typically bizarre meta-narrative, in which people like Nate Silver are obsessing about how the mainstream media aren’t covering the issue of Biden’s age enough, when as Parker Molloy points out, there’s an enormous and increasing amount of coverage of this issue from the very outlets that Silver claims are downplaying it.

Another bizarre feature of all this is that Trump is old as hell as well — he would spend more than half of the next presidential term in his 80s — so even on the basis of this single isolated metric he’s barely preferable to Biden, leaving aside the whole “he tried to overthrow the government after he lost the election and he’s facing close to 100 criminal charges and counting” thing.

This is all actually much worse than the but her emails nonsense. In 2016 it was still possible to pretend that Donald Trump might not actually be Donald Trump after all, because “Donald Trump” was all schtick, and there was really a semi-normal person lurking underneath the schtick, plus guardrails the Constitution blah blah blah. In 2023 it’s impossible to have any illusions about any of this any more, so the fact that Biden is too old in the abstract — and he is, no question about it — is just wildly irrelevant in the concrete here and now, where the choice is between the suboptimally old Biden and fascism.

That the last sentence still sounds like hyperbole to the Nate Silvers of the world is part of the reason we got into this mess in the first place.