The NY Times’s top story today:
An excerpt:
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.
With Mr. Biden out, Mr. Trump, at 78, is now the oldest major party nominee for president in history and would be the oldest president ever if he wins and finishes another term at 82. A review of Mr. Trump’s rallies, interviews, statements and social media posts finds signs of change since he first took the political stage in 2015. He has always been discursive and has often been untethered to truth, but with the passage of time his speeches have grown darker, harsher, longer, angrier, less focused, more profane and increasingly fixated on the past.
According to a computer analysis by The New York Times, Mr. Trump’s rally speeches now last an average of 82 minutes, compared with 45 minutes in 2016. Proportionately, he uses 13 percent more all-or-nothing terms like “always” and “never” than he did eight years ago, which some experts consider a sign of advancing age.
Similarly, he uses 32 percent more negative words than positive words now, compared with 21 percent in 2016, which can be another indicator of cognitive change. And he uses swearwords 69 percent more often than he did when he first ran, a trend that could reflect what experts call disinhibition. (A study by Stat, a health care news outlet, produced similar findings.)
Mr. Trump frequently reaches to the past for his frame of reference, often to the 1980s and 1990s, when he was in his tabloid-fueled heyday. He cites fictional characters from that era like Hannibal Lecter from “Silence of the Lip” (he meant “Silence of the Lambs”), asks “where’s Johnny Carson, bring back Johnny” (who died in 2005) and ruminates on how attractive Cary Grant was (“the most handsome man”). He asks supporters whether they remember the landing in New York of Charles Lindbergh, who actually landed in Paris and long before Mr. Trump was born.
This has been obvious for the past year but the media has not focused on it because, unlike Joe Biden, his garish make-up obscures the fact that he’s aging rapidly. He deterioration is obvious to anyone.
This is from just last week. He seemed half asleep and made little sense when he was off teleprompter. Nobody paid much attention because it was the day of the VP debate but it was alarming, even for him.
He’s now in the “good days and bad days” phase of his encroaching senility. I get it. It can happen to anyone. But if Joe Biden was subjected to ruthless coverage of his aging because he is the president — fair enough — Trump should have been subjected to the same thing. He’ll be older than Biden by the end of his second term.
In that speech he complained about his campaign schedule being too gruelling. It probably is. And even with his ample use of “executive time” the presidency is going to take an even bigger toll. Look how much Biden’s declined since 2020. Even the young ones look like hell when they’re done. Trump will be even worse because he starts out much worse.
The debate should have brought that home a month ago at least. But they’ve finally done it so let’s hope the rest of the media picks this up and talks about it as well in these last few weeks before the election.