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Trump’s Unwieldy Speeches Raise Questions About His Mental Acuity

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2 months ago

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Trump’s Unwieldy Speeches Raise Questions About His Mental Acuity

Topline

Former President Donald Trump’s mental acuity faces increased scrutiny after a strange conclusion to his Monday town hall where he danced to music for 30 minutes, along with his refusal to release his medical records—two of the latest examples of what Vice President Kamala Harris and her allies have described, with increased frequency as Election Day nears, as signs of cognitive decline in the 78-year-old former president.

Key Facts

Trump danced to his personally curated Spotify playlist while interacting with attendees during the final 30 minutes of his town hall in Oaks, Pennsylvania, on Monday after the event was paused when two people in the audience experienced medical episodes: “Who the hell wants to hear questions? Right?” Trump asked the crowd before the mini concert began.

The Harris campaign highlighted the episode on its X account, writing that Trump looked “lost, confused and frozen,” which Harris reposted with the caption “Hope he’s okay,” emphasizing the notion that Trump was somehow out of it.

The event happened just days after Harris released a medical report declaring she is in “excellent health” and as Trump has refused to release his own up-to-date report, prompting Harris to question whether his campaign is “afraid that people will see that he is too weak and unstable to lead America?” she said during a rally in North Carolina over the weekend.

In interviews and speeches that have grown progressively longer during his third White House campaign, Trump often leaps back and forth from one topic to the next, appears increasingly unhinged, and mixes up and mispronounces words.

He jumped from discussing the dollar to French President Emmanuel Macron during an interview with Bloomberg at the Chicago Economic Club on Wednesday, and he responded to a question from the outlet’s Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait about whether Google should be broken up by mentioning a partisan court battle over Virginia’s election protocols.

During a rally in Arizona on Sunday, he mispronounced “Arizonians” as “Azurasians,” drawing ridicule on social media, and he described fighters in Afghanistan as “a million Rambos” in response to a question from a reporter about Iran’s attack against Israel earlier this month in Wisconsin.

During the Oaks town hall, he responded to a question about grocery prices with a rant about migrants, who he likened to the fictional serial killer, Hannibal Lecter, a comparison he’s made frequently in recent months; he also told attendees to vote on “Jan. 5,” two months after Election Day.

Contra

Trump has described his roving thought pattern as “the weave” on several occasions recently, including in his interview with Micklethwait. Trump told a crowd in Johnstown, Pa., in September: “I’ll talk about like nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together.” He dismissed observations that he tends to “ramble” during his speeches during an interview with the “Flagrant” podcast earlier this month, telling the hosts “I do a thing called the weave, and there are those that are fair that say ‘this guy is so genius’ and then others would say ‘oh he rambled.’ I don’t ramble.”

Key Background

Biden’s decision to exit the race amid a growing number of incidents widely viewed as evidence of mental deterioration linked to age—culminating with his June 27 debate performance—has turned the spotlight to Trump’s own mental fitness and advanced age. At 78, he would be the oldest president ever elected. The Harris campaign, her allies, and Trump’s enemies have sought to capitalize on the age concerns by incessantly highlighting Trump’s rambling and bizarre tangents in his speeches, factual errors and nonsensical answers to questions from reporters and voters. Trump has faced questions for years about his mental and physical health. During his first run for president in 2015, his doctor, Harold Bornstein, released a four-paragraph statement on Trump’s health that said he would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency,” though Bornstein later told CNN Trump “dictated the letter.” White House physician Ronny Jackson in 2018 disclosed to reporters that Trump weighed 239 pounds, borderline obese, according to medical standards. He gained approximately five pounds over the next two years, according to his doctors. Last year, Trump released a letter from Dr. Bruce Aronwald, who described himself as “Trump’s personal physician since 2021,” that said he examined Trump in September 2023 and found Trump is in “excellent” health and performed “exceptional” on cognitive exams, noting Trump “reduced his weight.” Trump has repeatedly bragged that he has “aced” cognitive tests, including an exam Jackson administered in 2018. Jackson reported that Trump scored a 30/30 on the 10-minute test. Jackson also examined Trump after the assassination attempt against him in July and wrote that he was “doing well” and “recovering as expected.”

Tangent

Harris is in “excellent health,” according to a letter the White House released Saturday from her doctor, US Army physician Joshua R. Simmons. Harris “possesses the physical and mental resiliency to successfully execute the duties of the presidency,” Simmons wrote, noting that Harris has allergies and is near-sighted. The Harris campaign called on Trump to release an up-to-date medical report after she disclosed her own results, and Trump subsequently urged Harris to take a cognitive exam. Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung told The Washington Post in response to the request that the letters from Jackson and Aronwald were sufficient, pointing to what he described as an “extremely busy and active campaign schedule” as evidence that Trump is in good health.

Crucial Quote

“I invite the public to watch his rallies and be the decision-maker on his acuity,” Harris told reporters in North Carolina on Saturday. “And you will see in his rallies how he goes off on tangents, how he is not focused on the needs of the American people, the solutions to the issues that concern them the most.”

Further Reading

Trump Offers To Take Cognitive Test—With Biden (Forbes)

‘Let’s Just Listen To Music’: Trump Turns Town Hall Into Concert, Prompting Mockery From Harris (Forbes)

Trump Boasts About Acing ‘Hard’ Cognitive Test: Here’s What’s On Those Tests (Forbes)

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