The NY Times Usually Avoids Writing About The Toll Age Is Taking On Trump's Cognitive Functions

A friend of mine ran a firm that owned the Palm Beach clinic where Trump would go regularly for botox and other treatments to make himself look younger, And that was decades ago! It’s a Show Biz thing. When I worked at Warner Bros half the people who were older than I was looked younger because they were dying their hair or wearing toupees and having work down on their faces. I was never attracted to that… but Trump sure was. That’s part of why Biden appeared to be so much older than he does. But Trump isn’t running against Biden now. He’s running against a woman who’s 2 decades younger than him.

And Trump’s steep cognitive decline is on display— when not covered up by the media— every day. His father died of Alzheimer’s. Trump will too. And the effects are starting to ravage him in ways that are hard to deny. Yesterday, Peter Baker previewed today’s debate brought up the question— very gently— that The Times bends over backwards to not discuss: what age is doing to <> Trump’s capacity to function<>. After all, he’s nearly 80 and a  babbling mess. He still uses drugs do appears energetic and loud but mixes up names, confuses facts and stumbles over his points. “Trump’s rambling speeches, sometimes incoherent statements and extreme outbursts have raised questions about his own cognitive health and, according to polls, stimulated doubts among a majority of voters… Trump is now the oldest person ever to run for president on a major party ticket and, if he wins, would become the oldest president in history by the end of his term, when he would be 82” and he’s already regularly wandering through a thicket of unfinished sentences, non sequitur clauses and confusing logic in his public statements.

A clip of the [NY Economic Club] exchange went viral and prompted headlines with words like “incomprehensible,” “incoherence” and “gibberish.” The White House and Harris’ allies pounced, mocking the “word salad,” as multiple Democrats put it. “He couldn’t string together a coherent sentence,” Representative Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, the No. 2 House Democrat, wrote on social media.

As a result, analysts said, Trump will face renewed scrutiny at the debate. “Because the Harris campaign and press drew attention to the incoherence of Trump’s answer to the question about child care, he is now subject to the same ‘coherence’ test as was Biden,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a scholar of presidential communication at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication.

Trump has long engaged in discursive, roundabout, off-script speaking that would not pass muster with an English teacher. Diagraming his sentences with a noun, verb and object can be daunting. He floats from one subject to another seemingly at random, often baffling listeners looking for a main point, a pattern that experts call tangentiality that increases with age. And he throws out wild assertions with no basis in fact.

He has mixed up Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi, declared more than once that he beat Barack Obama instead of Hillary Clinton and while arguing that he is mentally fit gave the wrong name for his former. During a June rally in Nevada, he wandered into a bizarre rhetorical cul-de-sac speculating about being on a sinking boat and whether it would be better to be electrocuted in the water or attacked by a shark. “I’ll take electrocution every single time,” he volunteered. “I’m not getting near the shark. So we could end that. We’re going to end that for boats.”

… Sometimes he makes false claims that are so far-fetched, they make him appear detached from reality. At the end of last month, he suggested that schools were sponsoring transgender transition surgery. “Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation,” he said. “The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.”

He seems bent on self-destructive behavior that causes even allies to roll their eyes. Last Friday, without being asked, he raised allegations that he once molested a woman on an airplane in the 1970s. “I know you’re going to say it’s a terrible thing to say,” he said, “but it couldn’t have happened, it didn’t happen, and she would not have been the chosen one.”

…[S]ome Republicans think that age is a factor in a country where more than half the population is under age 40 as polls show increasing excitement for Harris among younger voters. Even aside from questions of capacity, Trump’s references are often rooted in decades-old touchstones, as in his repeated and mystifying allusions lately to the 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs. 

“Many others have outlived their most productive years; Joe Biden and Donald Trump reached that inconvenient reality,” said Al Cardenas, a former Florida Republican Party chairman. “Biden made the right decision, perhaps helped to do so by his party’s leadership. It’s stunning to watch the lack of internal fortitude from the GOP’s hierarchy to have the same conversation with their presidential candidate.”

Voters have long harbored concerns about Trump’s age, but more of them were worried about Biden’s, according to polls. Without the president to focus on, more Americans have expressed doubts about Trump’s capacity. Fifty-one percent of registered voters in a survey released last month by Morning Consult said that Trump is too old to run for president, up from 44 percent when he was running against Biden. Fifty-seven percent had that view in a poll by Marquette Law School.

Moreover, fewer voters now consider Trump mentally fit for the presidency. Just 48 percent in the Morning Consult poll said the former president was capable of handling the office, down from 53 percent. Nearly four in five said they were not sure he could serve another full four-year term, and roughly the same proportion were concerned about his ability to make decisions.