It was nine days ago when Donald Trump decided to lean into a provocative new attack targeting Kamala Harris. The Democratic vice president, the Republican said, was born “mentally impaired.” The former president also compared her actions to that of “a mentally disabled person.”
In case that weren’t quite enough, Trump said his 2024 rival is “stupid” and has “cognitive problems.”
The GOP candidate’s rhetoric was obviously as ugly as it was untrue, but it also opened the door to an awkward conversation about the Republican’s own age, fitness and mental acuity.
In fact, just a few days after attacking Harris as “a very dumb person,” Trump held an event in Wisconsin in which he struggled to pronounce United Arab Emirates, flubbed the basics of hurricane season, mixed up Iran with North Korea, falsely claimed government agencies can’t determine the U.S. population, and referred to an African country before concluding, “I don’t know what that is.”
A Washington Post report told readers soon after, “Trump, 78, often speaks in a digressive, extemporaneous style that thrills his fans at large-scale rallies. But Tuesday’s event, in front of almost entirely reporters, was especially scattered and hard to follow.” Around the same time, Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii noted an online video in which the Republican falsely said North Korea was trying to kill him and concluded, “I think it’s reasonable to watch this clip, add the withdrawal from a ’60 minutes’ interview, and wonder if there’s something actually going on. I don’t know — maybe he’s fine, but it’s not a wacky or nasty thing to inquire about.”
As the week came to an end, The New York Times ran a related front-page report on the same subject. After noting Trump’s boasts about a debate crowd that didn’t exist, the article noted that this was “hardly the only time Mr. Trump has seemed confused, forgetful, incoherent or disconnected from reality lately.”
He rambles, he repeats himself, he roams from thought to thought — some of them hard to understand, some of them unfinished, some of them factually fantastical. He voices outlandish claims that seem to be made up out of whole cloth. He digresses into bizarre tangents about golf, about sharks, about his own “beautiful” body. He relishes “a great day in Louisiana” after spending the day in Georgia. He expresses fear that North Korea is “trying to kill me” when he presumably means Iran. As late as last month, Mr. Trump was still speaking as if he were running against President Biden, five weeks after his withdrawal from the race.
The same article offered a terrific example of the challenges observers face while trying to listen to the former president and follow his train of thought.
He does not stick to a single train of thought for long. During one 10-minute stretch in Mosinee, Wis., last month, for instance, he ping-ponged from topic to topic: Ms. Harris’s record; the virtues of the merit system; Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s endorsement; supposed corruption at the F.D.A., the C.D.C. and the W.H.O.; the Covid-19 pandemic; immigration; back to the W.H.O.; China; Mr. Biden’s age; Ms. Harris again; Mr. Biden again; chronic health problems and childhood diseases; back to Mr. Kennedy; the “Biden crime family”; the president’s State of the Union address; Franklin D. Roosevelt; the 25th Amendment; the “parasitic political class”; Election Day; back to immigration; Senator Tammy Baldwin; back to immigration; energy production; back to immigration; and Ms. Baldwin again.
This comes on the heels of a related Trump analysis noting that the Republican nominee “has mixed up names, confused facts and stumbled over his points. Mr. Trump’s rambling speeches, sometimes incoherent statements and extreme outbursts have raised questions about his own cognitive health.”
The list of similar instances in support of the thesis is not short. A few days before targeting Harris’ intellect, for example, the former president referred to Charlottesville as “Charlottestown.” A few days before that, he mixed up Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.
In early September, Trump urged people in New Hampshire to vote against Biden, apparently forgetting that Biden isn’t running. Two weeks earlier, he seemed to forget which state he was in during a campaign rally.
It came against a backdrop of weird Trump rhetoric about bacon and wind power, as well as his fear of sharks, which apparently had something to do with electric boat batteries. As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes recently noted, Trump “is very obviously sharply declining before our eyes,” and MSNBC’s Zeeshan Aleem added: “Trump has been embedded in the public consciousness as a rule-breaker for so long that it can be easy to forget how far he is from fulfilling the basic requirement of a politician to speak clearly. Trump’s speeches seem to be growing more discursive and difficult to comprehend by the day.” I continue to be preoccupied with this, not only because he picked a fight over which candidate has “cognitive problems” — a fight that appears increasingly foolish with each passing day — but also because President Joe Biden’s age and fitness were the single most dominant issue in the 2024 race for months. Now, as the campaign enters its final month, and early voting gets underway across much of the country, it’s the incumbent’s former rival — who could become the oldest person ever to serve as president — facing questions about being impaired. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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