The playwright George Bernard Shaw once wrote, “You don’t stop laughing when you grow old; you grow old when you stop laughing.” It’s one of those greeting card-type sayings that sound good until you stop and think about it. Then it gets disturbing. It’s like that movie Speed in which, if the bus Keanu Reeves is driving falls below 50 miles an hour, it blows up. So keep laughing. No pressure.

We admire and value old stuff—antique furniture, old shoes, mastodons. In 2022, a Wayne County resident came across a mastodon leg bone (femur) which recently led to unearthing the creature’s skull and part of a tusk. Radiocarbon dating placed the discover at around 13,600 years old. Iowa archeologists were all excited and happy about it. But did they criticize the Wayne County mastodon for having too many wrinkles? For moving slower than a regular live elephant? Did they sneer at it for having only one remaining tusk? No, scientists and the public love the Ice Age mastodon because it is old.

Maybe if Joe Biden had been 13,000 years old, he might have gotten more respect in his last year as president. At 82, Biden was mocked for walking like a marionette. He sometimes stumbled in his speech and lost his train of thought. Still, he was running the United States at the time.

At 91, Charles Grassley is the oldest sitting US senator. And he’s not always sitting. He’s working. Lately, he’s been angry at Trump for firing the Inspectors General and he isn’t quiet about it either. Unlike Biden, nobody has told Grassley he has to retire.

FAA rules state that airline pilots must retire by age 65 for the safety of passengers. My dad was still driving his truck at age 93. Sure, sometimes he was driving in the wrong lane toward oncoming traffic and would leave his left turn signal on for hours. When Dad passed, nobody ever drove his old truck again. It had so many quirks and homemade fixes, nobody else even knew how to get it started. The great supreme court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. retired at age 90 (it seems funny to keep the “Jr.” at that age). When Holmes retired, the nation was deprived of the wealth of knowledge and wisdom he acquired over his lifetime.

At 78, Donald Trump is at that odd age when he may be too old to be trusted with the nuclear codes or sharp scissors and too young to be fussed over by archeologists. We smile indulgently when he rattles on about immigrants who eat cats and dogs and refers to the fictional cannibal Hannibal Lector as “a great man.” He’s terrified by sharks and germs. He is so protective of his fragile hairdo, carefully engineered to appear youthful, that once during a photo shoot for a magazine, when the director said he had to take off his sweater, Trump had his Loro Piana cashmere pullover snipped off of him rather than risk mussing up his hair.

Maybe it’s nothing to worry about that Trump is growing old. But have you noticed that he never laughs?