Donald Trump’s gaffes are becoming more frequent and more indecipherable by the day.
At a National Rifle Association gathering in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on Friday, Trump made plenty of strange blunders in front of his thousands of supporters, in his rambling, incoherent auctioneer style.
“I didn’t need this—I had a very nice life—nice Saturday afternoon,” Trump began the speech, apparently mixing up the days of the week.
He went on to claim he won Pennsylvania twice (he didn’t win in 2020) and warned voters that Democrats plan to “change the name of Pennsylvania” if Joe Biden wins this election.
“We have to win in November, or we’re not going to have Pennsylvania. They’ll change the name. They’re going to change the name of Pennsylvania,” Trump said.
There haven’t been any moves to change Pennsylvania’s name, and it’s not clear what he was referring to.
In the same speech, Trump said that if he wasn’t running for president, he wouldn’t be in Harrisburg and would instead be in a “very nice place,” a slight dig at the state capital. He then suddenly tried to walk back those comments, making mention of “beautiful columns” and “powerful tractors” and assuring he knows “all about the marbles—I can tell you every marble.”
He also appeared to suggest that Barack Obama is still in office, a mistake he has made repeatedly on the campaign trail.
The gaffes come amid rising concern about mental acuity of both party’s front-runners. Last week, a Department of Justice investigation by special counsel Robert Hur presented President Joe Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory.”
According to the report, which Democrats have slammed as a “partisan hit job,” Biden could not recall key dates, like when his son Beau died or when he was vice president.
While Biden is 81 years old and Trump is 77, and as both seem to be stumbling on the campaign trail, notably, even the remaining third-party candidates in the race, Cornel West and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., are over 70. This makes them older than Ronald Reagan was when he was elected as the oldest president at the time.
Over the past several months, Trump has confused fellow GOP candidate Nikki Haley with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, mixed up countries and major world leaders, and described missile defense as “ding, ding, ding, boom, whoosh!”
It’s hard to say if the gaffes Trump continues to make are any worse than what he says with full cognition.
Also this weekend on the campaign trail, the Republican front-runner seemed to imply that Russia should attack NATO countries, encouraging Russia to “do whatever the hell they want.”
When The New York Times asked Senator Lindsey Graham about the former president’s statements, he replied, “Give me a break—I mean, it’s Trump.”
