Trump's rhetorical walkabouts: sign of 'genius' or cognitive decline?

Sept. 25, 2024 3 AM PT

Trump says English teachers marvel at his ability to bring disparate topics together.
A detailed study of Trump’s speeches over time found more “confused word order, and repetition, alongside extended digressions.”
Trump said Vice President Kamala Harris has “bigger cognitive problems” than President Biden.

Is he rambling? Indifferent to his audience? Exhibiting symptoms of cognitive decline? Or, instead, could former President Trump’s extended discourses demonstrate his genius — an ability, as he says, to “weave” disparate stories into a beautiful tapestry?

The 78-year-old Republican nominee’s meandering speaking style — and what it might say about his mental state — has become a new fixation in a race already upended when President Biden, 81, dropped out this summer amid questions about his own age and mental acuity.

In recent weeks, Trump has said he would deport Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, “back to Venezuela.” He said he was being supported by “the vice president’s family” — meaning relatives of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who is running for the office but is not vice president.

He insisted — incorrectly — he had been in a helicopter crash with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. Trump has repeatedly hurled critiques at former President Obama, when his real target seemed to be President Biden, misstatements he insisted were “sarcasm.”

In August, the science-and-health-focused website Stat News published a detailed analysis of Trump’s speech patterns in recent months, comparing them with public speeches in 2017. Several researchers noted “more short sentences, confused word order, and repetition, alongside extended digressions.”

Those changes “could be attributed to a variety of possible causes,” the experts told Stat, “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.”

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. Using statistical software, he found a roughly 60% increase in use of absolute terms such as “always,” “never” and “completely.”

Trump’s recent dialogue also contained fewer positive words. Increased all-or-nothing thinking can also be linked to changes in cognitive ability, Pennebaker wrote, adding: “Another person whose all-or-nothing thinking has gone up is Biden.”

I do have to say, so I give these long, sometimes very complex sentences and paragraphs, but they all come together.

— Former President Trump

Last week, critics on the left picketed the New York Times’ headquarters, demanding that the media stop “sane-washing” Trump’s disjointed statements.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a co-founder of FactCheck.org and director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, said in an interview that “there’s always been the question: Is Donald Trump in touch with a knowable reality?”

Trump’s speaking style, she said, has always been defined by braggadocio and exaggeration, but, these days, he is making more comments that are outright bizarre. “He’s doing it more now than he was in the past,” she said. “He’s more tangential.”

Jamieson said Americans need to be asking two questions about his ability to communicate: “Does this tell you something important about his capacity as president? And should it factor into our votes or not?”

Trump has made clear he’s aware of the criticism, defending his speaking style repeatedly in recent weeks. He assured a Pennsylvania rally that even English professors marvel at the intricate “weave” of his storytelling. He blamed the “fake news media” for intentionally misrepresenting his sarcastic flourishes to claim he suffered a cognitive impairment.

Speaking in Savannah, Ga., on Tuesday, Trump sounded off on Biden’s mental state and questioned the competency of Vice President Kamala Harris.

“You talk about cognitive problems? She’s got bigger cognitive problems than [Biden] has,” he said of the Democratic nominee.

Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told The Times that reporting on mental acuity would create “a garbage article based upon a bunch of ‘sources’ who have no idea what they’re talking about and are trying to deflect from the fact that our sitting president, Joe Biden, was ousted off the Democrat ticket due to his clear cognitive decline.”

“President Trump is sharp as a tack,” Leavitt added, “and executes a rigorous campaign schedule every single day.”

Trump suggested at a Tucson rally this month that it wasn’t just his enemies questioning his onstage behavior. He said he called former First Lady Melania Trump, who had watched a recent speech on television, and asked whether she “saw how great my speech was tonight, darling.” People loved it, he said he told her.

“Well, yeah, they might, but you look really bad,” Trump said she replied. “You couldn’t find the stairs off the stage.”

Feigning exasperation, he said he had to explain to his wife that he had been joking — that he was imitating Biden but that “the fake news” was distorting his sarcasm.

Trump’s supporters plead for a more generous interpretation when it comes to Trump on the stump: They say they go to the former reality TV star’s rallies knowing that he will entertain — including with convention-defying remarks and flights of fancy, as when he has mused about whether it would be preferable to die by shark attack or electrocution. (“I’ll take electrocution every single time.”)

To MAGA adherents, those moments offer more proof that their hero is blunt. Real. Unlike Harris and other politicians glued to their teleprompters.

Amid questions about his speaking style, media analyst Jamieson urged journalists to let Trump be Trump, but in a different sense. She said reporters should throw off the traditional journalistic imperative of brevity and simplicity and quote Trump in full, revealing how he actually expresses himself.

As good a place to start in that regard might be Trump’s defense of his verbal walkabouts during a town hall meeting last week in Michigan with Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders:

“I do have to say, so I give these long, sometimes very complex sentences and paragraphs, but they all come together. I do it a lot. I do it with Raising Caine, that story. I do it with the story on the catapults on the aircraft carriers. I do it with a lot of different stories. When I mentioned Dr. Hannibal Lecter, I’m using that as an example of people that are coming in, from ‘Silence of the Lambs.’ I use it. They say, ‘It’s terrible.’ So they say — so I’ll give this long, complex area, for instance, that I talked about, a lot of different territory.”

He went on, bringing up automobiles:

“The bottom line is, I said, the most important thing: We’re gonna bring more plants into your state and this country to make automobiles. We’re gonna be bigger than before. But the fake news — and there’s a lot of them back there, you know, for a town hall; this is a lot of people. But the fake news likes to say, the fake news likes to say, ‘Oh, he was rambling.’ No, no, that’s not rambling. That’s genius. When you can connect the dots.

“Now, now, Sarah, if you couldn’t connect the dots, you got a problem, but every dot was connected, and many stories were told in that little paragraph.”

The Harris campaign, on X, quoted Trump’s remarks with no comment.

Trump's speaking style

Trump’s recent answer to a question about how to make childcare more affordable:

“It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about that — because the child care is, child care, it’s, couldn’t, you know, there’s something, you have to have it. In this country, you have to have it.

“But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to, but they’ll get used to it very quickly — and it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care.”

Concerns about mental fitness and age have long been a feature of presidential politics. The media questioned whether Bob Dole and Ronald Reagan were too old to serve as chief executive.

The subject became most prominent in 2020, when Trump and Biden ran as two of the oldest candidates to seek the presidency. Trump famously challenged Biden to take a cognitive exam, boasting that he had passed such a test himself, in part by remembering a string of words: “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.”

(Experts said the exam sounded like the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, or MoCA, which is used for early detection of mild cognitive impairment.)

In 2024, Biden’s stiff walking gait and sometimes distracted affect again raised the issue of geriatric cognition. The topic became unavoidable when he and Trump debated in June, with Biden’s incomplete thoughts and vacant stare setting off alarm bells among Democrats. Biden soon abandoned his reelection campaign.

Since then, Democrats have demanded to know why Trump’s public behavior hadn’t gotten as much scrutiny, noting that he would be 82 by the end of another term in the White House. Critics point to his “word salad” diatribes and his misidentification of key players — for instance, saying it was former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley who had not done enough to defend the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection when he meant then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco).

Trump’s camp has made clear that it will not exempt his current opponent, the 59-year-old Harris, from cognitive critiques.

Video of Harris’ sometimes meandering sound bites have become a staple of GOP critics. That includes the time Harris made an obscure reference to falling out of a coconut tree and her oft-repeated line about being “unburdened by what has been.” Previously fodder for detractors, those same moments have been remixed by Harris fans into laudatory TikTok videos, Instagram memes and Etsy merch.

Before Biden and Trump, the media tended to treat the mental fitness of would-be presidents gingerly. Part of that caution showed a desire for objectivity, but part of it also reflected the fear of duplicating what happened to Barry Goldwater, the Republican senator from Arizona, when he ran for president in 1964.

An article in the now-defunct Fact magazine — headlined: “1,189 Psychiatrists say Goldwater is Psychologically Unfit to be President!” — quoted an informal poll of U.S. psychiatrists, none of whom had actually met Goldwater.

After losing in a landslide to Lyndon B. Johnson, Goldwater successfully sued the magazine for libel. The American Psychiatric Assn. then produced the “Goldwater Rule,” which states that it is “unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.”

As a result, psychiatrists today generally hesitate to issue armchair diagnoses.

Dr. Zaldy Tan, director of the Memory and Aging Program at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, noted that partners in law firms are sometimes required to get neurological evaluations. There is no such requirement in politics. And what would the standards be?

“I think the difficulty there would be drawing the line between what is ageist and what is really fair,” Tan said. “And the evaluation would depend on the tasks that are deemed important,” which, he said, would also be hard to agree upon.

Jamieson recommended that voters study the candidates closely and try to separate behavior of real concern from trivial incidents. In the latter category, Jamieson included misnaming individuals and bragging about crowd sizes. Many people slip in identifying people, she said. And Trump has a long history of boasting.

Other comments, she said, merit more scrutiny, including Trump’s claim that the size of Harris’ audiences has been faked by the use of images generated by artificial intelligence.

“If he really believes that,” Jamieson said, “then he’s delusional.”