 For as furiously as Biden's advisers have pushed back on concerns about his age, the now 81-year-old president's halting soft-spoken and scattered responses to former President Donald Trump shattered the party's magical thinking on the subject. That the president's difficulties came as such a shock was largely the result of how effectively his top aides and the White House on the whole has, for three and a half years, kept him in a cocoon, far away from cameras, questions, and more intense public scrutiny.