US Presidents and the relative age of their successors
By: Nick Barlow
Tags: Aging, History, Presidential Trivia, US Politics, President

When he takes office on January 20th, Joe Biden will become the oldest ever US President. And, assuming Donald Trump doesn’t rage quit the Oval Office before then, it’ll also mark the second time in a row a US President has handed over to a successor who’s older than them after Trump replaced the younger Obama in 2017.

That got me wondering about how different Presidents and their successors have been in age over the years. Because time remains stubbornly linear, and no one has yet lived to be the 289 years old they’d need to be older than George Washington, we’d expect that it would be more likely for a President to be replaced by a younger successor than an older one.

There have been 44 Presidential transitions so far (George Washington obviously didn’t succeed anyone, though he was older than King George III and Prime Minister William Pitt) and 31 of them have seen Presidents being followed by younger successors, while 13 Presidents have been older than the man they replaced. Those thirteen were:

Andrew Jackson, 118 days older than John Quincy Adams

William Henry Harrison, 9 years and 299 days older than Martin Van Buren

Zachary Taylor, 10 years and 343 days older than James Polk

James Buchanan, 13 years and 214 days older than Franklin Pierce

Andrew Johnson, 45 days older than Abraham Lincoln

Chester Arthur, 2 years and 45 days older than James Garfield

Benjamin Harrison, 3 years and 210 days older than Grover Cleveland

William Howard Taft, 1 year and 42 days older than Theodore Roosevelt

Woodrow Wilson, 261 days older than William Howard Taft

Lyndon Johnson, 8 years and 275 days older than John F Kennedy

Ronald Reagan, 13 years and 238 days older than Jimmy Carter

George W Bush, 44 days older than Bill Clinton

Donald Trump, 15 years and 51 days older than Barack Obama

(Joe Biden is 3 years and 206 days older than Donald Trump)

A huge gap, record-breaking, the biggest (picture: BBC)

The only other time both a President and his successor were followed by someone older was the early 20th century — Theodore Roosevelt succeeded by the older William Howard Taft in 1908, who was then defeated (with the assistance of Roosevelt) by the older Woodrow Wilson in 1912. However, the age difference between the youngest and oldest of the three (Roosevelt and Wilson) is less than that between Trump and Biden.

Also of note in that list is that George W Bush and Bill Clinton are the closest in age of any two successive US Presidents, born just over six weeks apart in 1946, while Bush and Donald Trump are the closest in age of any two Presidents, having just 22 days between them. (The closest gap between a President and a younger successor is the 160 days between Ulysses Grant and Rutherford Hayes)

Biden will be the first President to be older than four of his predecessors (Trump, Obama, Bush and Clinton). Previously, the record was three, held by James Buchanan (older than Pierce, Filmore and Polk) and Ronald Reagan (older than Carter, Ford and Nixon).

The 15 years between Obama and Trump is the biggest gap between a younger President and their older successor. The counterpart in the other direction is when Dwight Eisenhower handed over to John F Kennedy, who was 26 years and 227 days younger than him, beating the previous 17 years and 290 days between James Buchanan and Abraham Lincoln.