Their Excuse: They Want A One On One Exam First
Trump can’t stay on message and can’t focus. This morning, Shawn McCreesh reported that instead of following the GOP script, “Trump keeps getting tangled up in distractions of his own making. He has gone on tangents about Harris’ biracial identity. He has picked fights with fellow Republicans. He has fantasized that Biden might somehow snatch back the nomination. Many in Trump’s party find this all to be counterproductive, to say the least… Adding to the sense that Trump is flailing about, this week he has been testing out a new mocking nickname for his opponent, referring to Harris as ‘Kamabla.’ It is a departure from the previous epithet he had chosen (‘Laffin’ Kamala’), and nobody seems quite sure how to decipher it... [Ann Coulter:] “Republicans who expected Trump to run a smart, disciplined campaign are going to be sorely disappointed.”
Former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt is looking forward to Trump going away and leaving his party alone. He’s a quintessential NeverTrumper, still hoping the Democrats save the GOP from fascism. And he just loves the Kamala-Walz ticket, which he described yesterday as “perfect… the most natural and compelling ticket of my lifetime.” This really got his heart pounding:
Always the true-believer, he wrote that “Trump continues to melt down as his poll numbers drift downwards… The reason that Trump was winning was because the Biden coalition collapsed while the race became fundamentally about Biden. The reason Trump is losing now is because his coalition has collapsed, and the race has become about him. The MAGA cause is lined up for destruction at the ballot box. Trump’s coalition was sustained by fanaticism and apathy. A sense of hopelessness, dread and resignation by his opponents is what gave him lift. For a brief second, Trump became something that had evaded him all his life. He became a winner— and then it all slipped away. It disappeared into smoke.”
Trump needs to look like a winner to be a winner, and now he looks like a deflated Macy’s Day parade balloon. Mad, mad, mad King Donald, our dime store Mussolini, the wannabe Caesar and convicted felon who was dumb enough to attack Governor Walz over felons voting in Minnesota is finally sinking. The ending appears to be somewhat anti-climactic, and even boring.
It has been scripted by Donald Jr., and no doubt involved no small number of conversations about the future Vance-Trump Jr. ticket in 2032. LOL.
Now, Donald is riding off into the sunset, being tailed by an inauthentic fraud and genuine weirdo who dreams of a country in the desert where most men might hope for a sip of water.
The Democratic ticket must laugh at, poke, mock, diminish and call out the Trumpian strangeness at every turn, while maneuvering through the door labeled “Better.”
…MAGA is falling apart. What a good thing.
Olivia Goldhill provided readers of the health-oriented news website STAT a more serious look into Señor T’s meltdown, a look at his accelerating cognitive decline. Trump’s manor of speech these days is basically to free-associate from barely connected topic to barely connected topic, “a pattern of speech called tangentiality. [It] is one of several disjointed and occasionally incoherent verbal habits that seem to have increased in Trump’s speech in recent years, according to interviews with experts in memory, psychology and linguistics.”
She wrote that “Back in 2017, Trump’s first year in the White House, a STAT analysis showed Trump’s speaking style had deteriorated since the 1980s. Seven years on, now that Trump has the GOP presidential nomination, STAT has repeated the analysis. The experts noted a further reduction in Trump’s linguistic complexity and, while none said they could give a diagnosis without an examination, some said certain shifts in his speaking style are potential indications of cognitive decline… Trump has often said that he’s taken and passed an unspecified cognitive test. Last week, speaking to the National Association of Black Journalists, he said, ‘I want anybody running for president to take an aptitude test, to take a cognitive test. I think it’s a great idea. And I took two of them, and I aced them.’ The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment on this story.” Trump absolutely is suffering from the early onset of Alzheimer’s disease, which also killed his father.
At STAT’s request, four experts reviewed four clips of Trump’s speeches in recent months, and compared them to speeches from 2017. Several noticed Trump’s 2024 speeches included more short sentences, confused word order, and repetition, alongside extended digressions…
These could be attributed to a variety of possible causes, they said, some benign and others more worrisome. They include mood changes, a desire to appeal to certain audiences, natural aging, or the beginnings of a cognitive condition like Alzheimer’s disease.
One other academic, James Pennebaker, a social psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, performed a more formal analysis for STAT based on complete transcripts of 35 Trump interviews from 2015 through this year. Rather than reviewing specific clips, he used statistical software to track word use in detail, highlighting changes in Trump’s speaking style. Although Pennebaker said he’d want to analyze more texts before submitting his findings to an academic journal, he concluded that the texts showed significant changes in Trump’s linguistic tendencies.
Since the end of Trump’s presidency in 2021, Pennebaker’s analysis showed a steep increase in “all-or-nothing thinking,” as indicated by a roughly 60% increase in use of absolute terms like “always,” “never,” and “completely.” This habit, Pennebaker said, can be a sign of depression, which also fits with other changes in Trump’s word choices: His dialogue now has far fewer positive words than previously, and includes more references to negative emotions, especially since his return to civilian life.
Increased all-or-nothing thinking can also be linked to cognitive ability, and such a sharp increase is associated with cognitive decline, said Pennebaker…
Another clear trend from his analysis showed that, since 2020, Trump has increasingly spoken about the past, with around a 44% increase in past-focused sentences, and is spending very little time talking about the future. This is particularly striking, said Pennebaker, given that presidential candidates are typically forward-looking and making promises about what they will deliver. It’s something that Vice President Kamala Harris picked up on in her first campaign speech, in which she criticized Trump’s vision as being “focused on the past.”
Even as Trump speaks with more derailments, Pennebaker found that he’s relied on unusually simple words and sentence structures since before he was elected president. A linguistic metric of analytic thinking shows that Trump’s levels of complexity have always been unmistakably low, said Pennebaker. Whereas most presidential candidates are in the 60 to 70 range, Trump’s speeches range from 10 to 24. “I can’t tell you how staggering this is,” said Pennebaker. “He does not think in a complex way at all.”
[Clinical psychologist Ben] Michaelis, who also reviewed Trump’s speaking style for STAT in 2017 and showed how it had become significantly less sophisticated over the decades, said the most important change in the past seven years is Trump’s increasing digressions and speeches that don’t stay on topic, which he explained can be an indication of diminished cognitive ability. “Tangentiality certainly amped up and it’s difficult to follow him,” Michaelis said. “You’d expect some cognitive diminishment of course, he’s 78 years old— if he was your grandfather you wouldn’t expect anything different. He just happens to be running for president.”
Although Michaelis said he couldn’t offer a formal diagnosis, he said Trump’s speaking style was cause for concern. “There’s reasonable evidence suggestive of forms of dementia,” he said. “The reduction in complexity of sentences and vocabulary does lead you to a certain picture of cognitive diminishment.”
Trump’s habit of speaking off-topic is likely related to the frontal lobe, the part of the brain involved in executive function such as planning and problem-solving, said Andrew Budson, a neurology professor at Boston University and author of Seven Steps to Managing Your Aging Memory. This is the area of the brain and aspect of thinking that is most often affected by aging, which makes it difficult to remain focused on one topic, and leads to jumping around in conversation. Such a habit could also reflect ADHD or poor sleep, he said, though it can also be a sign of impending Alzheimer’s.
“There are absolutely changes that are occurring, without any doubt,” he said. Previously, Trump was more focused on topics and could articulately describe events. “Now, it’s much more about evoking different things, using general terms and saying the same thing again and again, then jumping to something else, then jumping back to it,” he added.
This repetitive speaking style could indicate decreased efficiency in the frontal lobe, said Budson, though this could also happen with normal aging rather than a pathological condition. He added that the changes in Trump’s speaking style since 2017 could also reflect a political strategy and desire to connect with a certain audience, or else an increasingly relaxed manner around crowds Trump feels comfortable with.
In addition to shorter sentences, Michaelis noticed Trump using words in the wrong order or inventing words, which adds to confusion in understanding him, and can be signs of cognitive problems that come either with natural aging or conditions such as Alzheimer’s. He pointed to this passage from a campaign event in January:
“We’re also going to place strong protections to stop banks and regulators from trying to debank you from your political beliefs,” Trump said in the New Hampshire speech. “What they do, they want to debank you. And we are going to debank, think of this. They want to take away your rights. They want to take away your country, the things you’re doing. All electric cars. Give me a break. If you want an electric car, good. But they don’t go far. They’re very expensive.”
“I’m not clear what de-banking means,” said Mark Liberman, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who noticed that Trump also seems to be speaking more slowly now than compared to seven years ago.
Determining a definitive cause for Trump’s shifts in language would require in-person tests and interviews, Lieberman said. And analysis is further complicated by Trump’s long-standard unusual communication manner: “You’ve got to keep talking. Never stop. Make up names for your opponent, make fun of your opponent, promise all kinds of things,” said Liberman, who compared Trump’s style to wrestling promo talk.
On Lawrence Donnell the other night Nancy Pelosi actually stated TFG is insane. His use of language is severely impaired. He does not make any sense and clearly demonstrates cognitive impairment. This is extremely serious and dangerous. It is obvious as hell.
Again, I remember that putin had cancer a year ago and was going to die any day now. You have to take this fluffing with a big dose of skepticism.
Trump's speech has NEVER exhibited more than a 5th-grade complexity. If you must, you can look at old interviews on Letterman and so forth. But he has obviously deteriorated even from that.
But we elected reagan who was also greatly diminished and by the end of his second, he was a figurehead as other unelecteds governed. Nobody cared then. The 25th exists for this very reason, yet the flaw is that it takes someone servile to the party of the diminished to invoke it... and they will always be loat…
Both parties had prospective presidential nominees with visible cognitive deficiencies. One of them (at the last possible moment) avoided nominating their cognitively impaired candidate. That difference is emblematic of where our political system is today.
One of the many concerns about Biden as prospective nominee was his ability to maintain a campaign schedule while simultaneously governing. Trump doesn't have a day job, yet he barely campaigns. Thankfully for him, he has a widely popular VP nominee to spread the MAGA gospel.
There are no excuses for not winning this election by a comfortable margin over such "competition."