Source: Jared C. Tilton / Getty
We’ve talked about this before—a couple of times, actually—but now that President Joe Biden has dropped out of the presidential race, it’s worth circling back. When it comes to the subject of apparent cognitive decline, the only real difference between Biden and Donald Trump is the audience.
Is Biden an old, feeble-looking, doddery senior citizen who is prone to barely coherent mumbling and misspeaking? Sure. I mean, we all saw that debate performance in June. But how does that not also describe Trump, who, lest we forget, is only three short years younger than Biden?
Does “Sleepy Joe” have a tendency to stare off into space mid-conversation and appear to be momentarily disconnected from whatever is going on at the time? Sure. But those optics don’t look any worse than Trump’s when neither a courtroom nor an RNC stage can stop the former president from falling asleep with a camera in his face.
Remember when Trump famously said in 2016 that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and he still wouldn’t “lose any voters?” Well, he could also probably stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue in an open hospital gown screaming at traffic about sentient voting machines from Skynet changing Trump votes to Biden votes while zombie voters rose from the dead to rig the election while he works hard to inject Lysol in everyone’s veins to kill COVID before the cancer-causing windmills get them—and the MAGA electorate would still have his back.
Biden never had the same luxury with his constituents–or even his party–so, again, it’s just the audience that’s different.
Take, for example, Trump’s recent speech at a rally on one of his golf courses in Florida.
From USA Today:
During the event, the former president slurred words, claimed his son Don Jr. is married when he’s actually just engaged, and consistently described the world around him in a manner wholly inconsistent with reality.
During one heartbreaking moment, Trump stopped talking for a full minute while the usual eerie music favored by an unhinged conspiracy group called QAnon played in the background. He sweatily moved his head back and forth and randomly pointed at people, appearing to not know exactly what he was doing.
At one point during Tuesday’s rally, Trump said tourists who go to Washington, D.C., and visit the Jefferson Memorial or the Washington Monument “end up getting shot, mugged, raped.” It was troubling to see a man hoping to become president again act so confused. Violent crime in the District of Columbia is down more than 20% this year, as crime nationwide has plummeted.
Trump’s delusions continued as he incorrectly identified America as “a Third World nation,” babbled confusingly about the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter and then very freely said, without a hint of irony, “We are a nation where free speech is no longer allowed.”
Trump in Doral: "We will take over the horribly run capital of our country in Washington DC … right now if you leave Florida — 'oh, let's go darling, let's look at the Jefferson Memorial' … and you end up getting shot, mugged, raped. We're gonna take over our capital and… pic.twitter.com/NFnuQSMnoq
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 10, 2024
Trump: Did you ever hear of Hannibal Lecter? pic.twitter.com/G2a4qLfNia
— Acyn (@Acyn) July 10, 2024
Trump on his speech to NATO: I didn’t even know what the hell NATO was too much pic.twitter.com/yO9lJZPv6i
— Acyn (@Acyn) July 10, 2024
It's a cult (I did not add the music) pic.twitter.com/s3uQxGJAYv
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 10, 2024
Don’t get me wrong: a lot of what you see in these clips is just Trump speaking his favorite love language, which is ridiculously delusional and easily provable lies. He wasn’t always necessarily having what some might describe as “senior moments.” Still, the slurred speech, the jumping around from subject to subject, the constant fumbling and fidgeting around, the long pauses to listen to weird QAnon music as if he’s forgotten what he’s in the middle of—these are all examples of the kind of behavior Biden couldn’t get away with without his party and his base trying to force him out of the Oval Office and into a retirement home.
Earlier this year, House Democrats put together a Trump gaffe reel and presented it before the House Judiciary Committee during testimony by former special counsel Robert Hur, who was called to explain his recent report in which he claimed that if Biden was tried for mishandling classified documents, he would present himself to the jury as an “elderly man with a poor memory,” which he would be able to do easily because, in reality, his memory does appear to be “significantly limited.”
Oof — Nadler put together a brutal supercut of Trump gaffing and shorting out pic.twitter.com/98bFgTzkTP
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 12, 2024
Another Trump gaffe reel plays lol pic.twitter.com/w0v1QzILWR
— Acyn (@Acyn) March 12, 2024
In response to the Hur Report, the Democratic Party released a host of the commander-in-covfefe’s gaffes, which Trump tried to claim was generated by “artificial intelligence” as if we didn’t see all of those presidential blunders in real time. He also suggested Biden was responsible for the reel despite having no reason, let alone evidence, to believe he was.
Quick refresher on covfefe from USA Today:
President Trump unexpectedly unleashed a new word on the world on May 31, 2017, when he tweeted out a confusing partial sentence shortly after midnight.
“Despite the negative press covfefe,” the tweet read, and nothing more.
He soon deleted the tweet, but instead of pretending it never happened, he leaned into it.
“Who can figure out the true meaning of ‘covfefe’ ??? Enjoy!” he said nearly six hours after the original tweet went out.
And so, people did. They wondered what it meant. They wondered how it was pronounced. They wondered why it existed in the first place.
His then-press secretary, Sean Spicer, later said, “I think the president and a small group of people know exactly what he meant.” I wished he’d named names of those who knew. Was he one of them?
Artificial Intelligence is all Donald Trump has. pic.twitter.com/t9a3KzyIjB
— Jamie Schler (@lifesafeast) March 13, 2024
Mind you, Trump and the GOP strategically took shots at Biden’s mental acuity in 2020, when Biden went on to beat the incumbent despite his claims that the 81-year-old was too old and mentally declined to hack it. And Biden isn’t the one out here rambling in non-sequiturs about shark-attracting boat batteries and whether he’d rather be electrocuted or eaten by a shark during an unhinged rant railing against environmental activists pushing the U.S. Army to make their war machines sustainable, which Trump thinks wouldn’t work because—*checks notes*—the batteries are too big for Army tanks.
Last week Trump gave his famous TED Talk on Sharks vs Batteries.
How do you think it affected our "kitchen table issues?" What did MAGA talk about after Trump's speech?
MAGA 1: I hate what's happening at the border.
MAGA 2: And the damn gas prices.
MAGA 1: President Trump… pic.twitter.com/ztX5KMoufr— Zero Dark Twenty-Nine (@herotimeszero) June 12, 2024
Trump: The problem with the Army tanks like cars and like trucks, the problem is that you would have to bring a battery pack along. You're going to pull it like a little wagon, like a child pulls a wagon. So they want to build a army tank. But, you know, the battery is very big pic.twitter.com/ezyt4AHZ0x
— Acyn (@Acyn) June 15, 2024
Again, Trump benefits from having a constituency that easily resonates with anti-intellectualism and all-out idiocracy. Here’s what I wrote about that previously:
Look, if Trump supporters were willing to apply the same logic to their cult leader that they do to Biden, they would have been ready to put Trump in a home as soon as he started rambling to anyone who would listen about widespread voter fraud that dozens of judges across lower courts, appellate courts and the Supreme Court, the former head of election cybersecurity, Trump’s own attorney general, and the Department of Justice were unable to find a shred of evidence to support. Trump was out here ranting about rigged voting machines, dead people voting and election workers hiding all the Trump ballots, and no one could see any of those things except him.
Trump is still telling these same delusional lies, and it still won’t lose him any voters, because, no matter how mentally not-all-there he sounds, he’s saying exactly what they want to hear and believe is true. Biden didn’t have that luxury, and neither will Kamala Harris, who appears to be next in line to run against Trump now that Biden has stepped aside.
Sure, Harris is nearly a full 20 years younger than Trump, and standing next to him, she’s much more spry and in tune with reality—but will that be enough?
See More:
Latest Trump Speeches Highlight Same Cognitive Fears That Republicans Express About Biden
Videos Of Donald Trump Falling Asleep At RNC’s Opening Night Go Viral
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