
The daughter of the once-oldest president, Ronald Reagan, who was 77 when he took office, thinks cognitive tests for presidential candidates would be “a good idea,” she said in an interview that aired Sunday.
“Just what we know about what age can do, it doesn’t always do that, but it would probably be a good idea,” Patti Davis said on NBC’s Meet the Press, in response to a question from host Kristen Welker about whether she agreed with the prospect.
Reagan was elected in 1980, when he was 69-years-old; by the end of his second term, in 1989, he was 77-years-old. (He announced his Alzheimer’s diagnosis five years later, though his son, Ron, later alleged his father began suffering the effects a decade earlier, while campaigning for his second term.)
“It seems so young now, doesn’t it?” said Davis, who has written that she has never been a Republican and has heavily criticized Trump.
Indeed, Reagan has since been surpassed as the oldest president by the two frontrunners for the next election—the current and previous presidents. Trump was 70 when he was elected in 2016, and Biden was 78 when he took office. They’re now 77 and 81, respectively. Their advanced ages have led to calls for cognitive tests—notably, from Trump’s GOP rival and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, who launched her campaign last year by calling for “mandatory mental competency tests for politicians over 75 years old.”