What’s the secret to being old — unabashedly, openly old — and also popular, charismatic, beloved?

David Roffe, 72, might know. Scraggly-haired and mustached, he’s one of the faces of the lifestyle brand Old Jewish Men of New York. Its social media accounts have hundreds of thousands of followers, whom Roffe and fellow Old Jewish Men keep entertained with videos of themselves doing things like digging into pickles at Katz’s Delicatessen or holding up a sign at Costco that reads “KEEP HOT DOGS $1.50” and yelling “Enough is enough!”

“Basically,” Roffe explains, “I’m saying what’s on my mind, in a nice way, that I think people find refreshing.” The trick is doing it in a manner that’s “aggressive, but not really aggressive.” Keep the topics “harmless,” he says.

Annie Korzen, 85, a humorist and author in Los Angeles, has earned millions of views for her videos rhapsodizing over Mexican appetizers and asking if Krispy Kreme doughnuts are actually crispy. “I’m willing to explore my foibles,” says Korzen, who has north of 400,000 followers on TikTok. She says that fans online seem to like aspects of her personality that some people in her life used to criticize her for, like being “too talkative, too opinionated, too blunt about expressing my opinions.”

Joe Biden, an 81-year-old Pennsylvania native currently serving as president of the United States, made his TikTok debut last weekend, wearing a quarter-zip and khakis as he answered Super Bowl-related questions in a husky murmur.

“Jason Kelce or Travis Kelce?” asks a younger-sounding voice off-screen, referring to the famous football brothers.

“Mama Kelce — I understand she makes great chocolate chip cookies,” Biden says, squatting slightly for emphasis.

Biden and his allies have spent years trying to figure out how to make his age work for him — or, at least, not work against him. Older politicians are not rare, especially these days; Bernie Sanders, Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell are octogenarians like Biden. But Biden is the oldest person ever to be president, and discussions about what that means haven’t grown any quieter in the three years since it became true. Special Prosecutor Robert Hur recently declined to charge Biden with any crimes related to his handling of classified documents in part because, according to Hur, a jury would likely view the president as “a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” (Some legal experts have called that commentary inappropriate for this kind of report, as has Biden.)

Both the president and his likely opponent in November, Donald Trump, 77, are older men. Trump wears his age differently, and in the eyes of some voters, age is more Biden’s problem than Trump’s: An ABC News-Ipsos poll in January found that 47 percent of Americans believe Trump has the mental acuity the presidency requires, while only 28 percent said Biden does.

The president’s surrogates have recently been riding the talk-show circuit to emphasize that Biden, when he’s actually conducting presidential business, is “sharp” and “on his game.” On his 81st birthday, last November, he posted a photo of himself on Instagram sitting before a cake that looked like it was topped with a bonfire. “Turns out on your 146th birthday, you run out of space for candles!” he wrote. At last year’s White House correspondents’ dinner, he quipped that he believed in the First Amendment, and “not just because my good friend Jimmy Madison wrote it.” During his 2020 campaign, Biden answered concerns about whether he was up to the job by saying: “Watch me.”

Voters have watched what he has done: Getting bipartisan legislation through a polarized Congress, trying to deal with two wars that have been closely watched in the United States. They’ve also watched him occasionally trail off and struggle to read note cards listing the names of reporters to call on, as he did during a September visit to Hanoi. They’ve seen the shuffle-y way he walks, the whispery way he talks.

Now some are watching Biden on TikTok, making granddad jokes. Not everyone thinks that is going to be much help.

“How do you go on TikTok and end up looking older?” wondered “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart.

Making Biden seem younger than he is doesn’t seem to be an option. And some well-meaning elderly people have managed to find fans online by acting their age.

Being openly old in the public eye can work for some people.

Could it work for a president?

President Ronald Reagan was a mere 73 when he ran for reelection in 1984 but had been plagued by the same age questions as Biden now faces. Reagan answered them, in part, by emphasizing his physical fitness, which he had improved through a weightlifting regimen he’d kept up after he’d been shot during his first term.

Campaign manager Ed Rollins was part of the effort to shape perceptions of Reagan’s age. “I asked the president what he was most proud of,” Rollins says. “He said, ‘I’ve put an inch on each arm, I’m working out every day, I’m feeling great.’” So Rollins helped get a photograph of an iron-pumping Reagan on the cover of “Parade” magazine. “That made a big difference — 40 million people saw that,” he says.

So Reagan didn’t really run as an openly old guy. He never really lost his movie star swagger. “He was always aware of his age,” Rollins says, “but had great skills — a guy who could read a script and go when the TV cameras turned on.”

Pelosi was Speaker of the House into her 80s and made her matriarchal wisdom an asset. “I’m a mother of five, grandmother of nine,” Pelosi once said after a West Wing meeting with Trump. “I know a temper tantrum when I see one.” She also speeds across the Capitol’s marble floor in stilettos, often eschewing the elevator for several flights of stairs.

In 2016, Sanders, now 82, built a youthful political movement on slumped shoulders and a shock of white hair. He spoke like a cranky Jewish grandfather with grandfatherly complaints, like the cost of health care and prescription drugs. But he was also SICK and TI-YAHD of the same things that alarmed younger voters, like climate change and the cost of higher education. The Vermont senator made being openly old an asset.

“A big part of it is that he’s not trying to appear young,” says Ari Rabin-Havt, a former top Sanders aide. “What you see is what you get. That natural behavior makes him more youthful, in a way.”

What about Trump, just four years Biden’s junior? The former president tries to maintain the glow of youth via whatever he uses to make his skin that color. He dances at rallies and keeps up his boisterous marathon monologues — even when he’s doing classic old-guy things like mixing up names or uttering garbled sentences. (“We are an institute in a powerful death penalty. We will put this on,” the former president said at a rally last month, in an apparent attempt to suggest that drug dealers should get the death penalty.)

The Trump campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment on this subject.

The Biden campaign did respond, but its comment didn’t mention age at all.

“Election after election, voters are telling us that they are heading to the ballot box to protect their rights, fight for our democracy, and make sure the economy works for everyone,” read part of a statement from a Biden campaign spokesman. “November 2024 will be no different. Joe Biden has an unrivaled story to tell about how he’s fighting and delivering on these very issues, while Donald Trump actively fights against the American people’s interests, including endorsing a national abortion ban today.”

Some of the elder TikTok stars find the fixation on Biden’s age judgmental, irrelevant, or a distraction from bigger issues.

Mick Peterson, 67, a member of the TikTok-famous quintet known as the Old Gays, says of Biden’s and Trump’s gaffes: “The whole question about well, he mistook the name of the president of Mexico for the president of Egypt or he confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi — I look at both of those arguments, and to me, that’s a wash. It doesn’t mean anything.”

In Washington, it’s much more common to see officials to trying tuck away the signs of aging than being openly old. Noëlle Sherber runs a plastic surgery and dermatology center on 15th and L, away from public view, where she treats those faces that get beamed out to the rest of the country via television and social media.

“I was just having a conversation with a patient who was thinking of running in this election year,” she says. “Now, it looks like it’s going to be four years from now, for this particular office. And so the discussion is, how do you stay ready? What is our plan?”

No one’s looking for a major overhaul, she says. They all want “plausible deniability.”

“It’s sort of a relief psychologically for them,” says Sherber’s husband, Ariel Rad, who runs the clinic with her, “where they can feel as though their message is getting across without the negative impact of tired-looking eyes or a bit of a loose jaw line suggesting that their influence is waning because the years are ticking by.”

If a politician wanted to run away from their age, that clinic is where they might go.

But let’s put all that aside, because some superficial markers of old age don’t have a cosmetic solution: The way someone moves. They way they speak.

In Biden’s case, the president might have no choice but to (literally) walk the walk and talk the talk of an openly old man — not just physically, but politically. He might have adapted some of Sanders’s ideas, but he’s not a cranky activist channeling the passions of the youth wing of his party.

What can he do?

“I think Joe would do himself a very good favor in the campaign to go to a university campus and go to a university town hall meeting and take questions from the students,” says Peterson, of the Old Gays. “That way, you’re going to see the interaction and see how he relates to the young people and how he comes across.”

“He would also do wonders if he did some TikToks,” he adds. “Maybe with us. Maybe with Nicki Minaj.”

Korzen thinks politicians should be more open about themselves, like her. “They should talk about their failures and what they have learned from their mistakes, but that would require admitting to having made mistakes, which none of them seem to be able to do.”

“When you hear a politician — anyone, I don’t care who it is — say something, and you go, ‘You know what? That’s exactly what this guy thinks, he’s saying what’s on his mind,’ you find it refreshing, even if you don’t like what they’re saying,” says Roffe, one of the Old Jewish Men.

For Roffe, the best example of Biden being openly old happened IRL — when he was responding to the special counsel’s characterization of his memory and his “well-meaning, elderly man” vibe.

“I am well-meaning, and I’m an elderly man, and I know what the hell I’m doing,” Biden had said. When a Fox News reporter pressed him on his memory, he snapped back: “My memory is so bad, I let you speak.”

“If you look at that news conference, that was him,” Roffe says. “He was mad about the story, about his son, about all these things. And he said so.”

It was as if Biden was saying: “You know what? I have a pulse. Yes, I am 81. But I have a pulse.”

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