Trump cracks about leaving office in ‘8 or 9 years’ — a month shy of his 80th birthday

Donald Trump quipped that he might leave the White House after another two terms on Monday as the soon-to-be-80-year-old president hosted business leaders at the White House, and then launched into a rant about how physically and mentally fit he still is.

Trump made the remarks — which some have taken as a clear threat to try and challenge the 22nd Amendment provision that "no person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice" — at a small business summit on Monday.

“When I get out of office in, let's say, eight or nine years from now, I'll be able to use it. I'll be able to use it myself,” Trump quipped about one provision in that legislation meant to allow businesses to deduct the costs of new facilities. The remark drew laughs from around the room.

Trump will turn 80 on June 14. His second election to the presidency followed the collapse of the campaign of his opponent, Joe Biden, around Biden’s own issues of age and fitness for office. The former Democratic president was seeking a second term that would have begun as he was 82 years old.

Later during the president’s remarks to small business leaders he swerved back into discussing his age and fitness in a longer rant during which he suggested that Biden would not have passed cognitive tests administered as part of the president’s annual physical.

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“Anybody running for president or vice president, should take a cognitive test. And no president has ever taken one except me. I've taken three of them, and I've aced each one, one in the first administration, two over here,” Trump claimed. “How do you think Biden would have done? I don't think... he might not have gotten that first question right.”

He also suggested that his guests wouldn’t be able to ace the test: “I think everyone in this room is brilliant, but nobody's going to get all 30 questions correct, nobody. Because when you get to those last questions, they're pretty hard. You got to be pretty sharp.”

The president has frequently turned to mentioning the results of what are typical cognitive tests often given to aging patients at risk of developing forms of dementia at White House events as well as campaign events on the road, often confusing or bemusing his audiences.

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He has faced accusations of declining mental acuity, off and on, since his first presidency. He first boasted of acing such a test in 2020, during his race for re-election against Biden.

“It was 30 or 35 questions. The first questions are very easy. The last questions are much more difficult. Like a memory question,” Trump said in a Fox News interview in July of that year. His description of the object identification quickly became a meme: “It’s like, you’ll go, ‘Person, woman, man, camera, TV.’ So they say, ‘Could you repeat that?’ So I said, ‘Yeah.’ So it’s, ‘Person, woman, man, camera, TV.’”

Faced with those questions, Trump’s press team ofter compares him to Biden and the protective bubble erected around the former president by his senior advisers as his presidency went on, noting the 47th president’s comparatively frequent media appearances and press availabilities. On Monday after the summit the president exited quickly without taking questions.

Joe Biden’s mental acuity became a major anchor around his neck in 2024 after a disastrous debate with Trump, during which Biden appeared lost onstage and unable to coherently get across his thoughts at times. But it was an issue long before that, too, as Republicans long accused Biden’s advisers as well as the Washington press corps of shielding the public from the extent of Biden’s mental decline.

Actor George Clooney later put many of those arguments to bed — and enraged many Biden supporters, who accused him of lying — when he penned an op-ed accusing the president of having not being able to recognize him at a fundraiser, claiming that the president appeared frail and confused.

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