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The headline is my theory as to why when it comes to aging and cognitive decline, Biden is judged more harshly than Trump. Both Biden and Trump are old, both get names wrong, both flub words, but Trump is crazy. Trump gets a pass on his false, weird and/or anti-democratic statements. He's like the crazy, bigoted uncle people tolerate because they don't expect much from him. -- Curt
(The Bulwark)Trump [is] still boasting about a cognitive test he passed in 2020 that required him to repeat a series of words in order. As he recalled, the words were: “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.” [Trump obviously lied. The words in a cognition test are purposely randomized; they never have an obvious relationship.] He claimed his performance prompted the testers to exclaim, “That’s amazing. How did you do that?” The test, it turns out, was meant to detect signs of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, and similarly serious conditions. This was, noted Jonathan Reiner, a cardiologist at the George Washington School of Medicine and Health Sciences, “a very, very low bar for somebody who carries the nuclear launch codes in their pocket to pass and certainly nothing to brag about.” And he passed it four years ago.
Paul Quirk, a politics professor at the University of British Columbia, assessed the cognitive functioning of the two major candidates for president and concluded that while they both showed signs of decline, “Biden’s age should be less of an issue than Trump’s more apparent cognitive decline—displayed in slurred speech and gross, repeated errors in one campaign rally after another.”
A recent poll found that 63 percent of Americans had major concerns over Biden’s mental capability to serve as president as compared to 57 percent who had major concerns on this score for Trump. Perhaps these numbers will change as a result of Biden’s State of the Union performance last Thursday. Perhaps not.
On Saturday, both candidates held rallies in Georgia. Biden made no notable gaffes. Trump, meanwhile, assured his audience that he could have easily prevented the Ukraine war with a quick call to “Poten.” He mocked Biden’s stutter, and called him “the worst president, the most incompetent, and the most corrupt” in U.S. history. (Project much?) And he falsely accused Biden of having “announced a plan to send our brave U.S. military men and women into Gaza to resupply the terrorists of Hamas.”
