Trump Acts Erratically. Is This
Age-Related Decline?
Oct. 26, 2024, 7:00 a.m. ET
Opinion Columnist
What
should we think as Donald Trump urges people to vote in January, confuses places and
names, fumbles for words, simplifies his speech patterns, describes recent
experiences that did not happen and in public seems increasingly vulgar,
menacing and unfiltered?
When
President Biden showed his age and stumbled through the June presidential
debate, I was among the first commentators to call on him to withdraw from the race. So what
about the 78-year-old Republican nominee? Frankly, I wavered about writing this
column, for there is an unfortunate history, notably during Barry Goldwater’s
run for president in 1964, of using quasi-medical language to undermine
candidates one disapproves of. That is grounds for great caution. But if we’re
trying to gauge a nominee’s fitness for office over the next four years, we
also should acknowledge questions of Trump’s aging and capacity to do the job,
as we did with Biden.
It’s
unarguable that Trump is acting even more erratically than he has in the past.
It’s also indisputable that Trump is at an age when many people see a physical
or mental decline over the following four years. Perhaps one lesson from the
Biden agonistes of this summer is that just as companies move C.E.O.s out
before they struggle, we should be wary of electing elderly presidents from
either party.
Let’s acknowledge the risks of armchair analysis at a
distance and note that Trump still has physical vigor and a defense against
suggestions of cognitive decline: For decades, he has behaved outrageously and
sometimes been rewarded for it. And some people do not think Trump’s behavior
is related to aging. Mark Esper, an honorable man who was Trump’s defense
secretary and has criticized him as
a “threat to democracy,” told me that Trump looks older to him but not
obviously changed beyond that.
Others
do see significant change.
“It’s
hard to see how anybody thinks my uncle is still tethered to reality,” wrote Mary
Trump, the former president’s niece and a clinical psychologist.
All
of us misspeak at times or can’t find the car keys. For sleep-deprived
presidential candidates on whom a camera is always trained, slip-ups are to be
expected — and critics aren’t always fair. In February, it was widely reported
that Trump had called his wife, Melania, “Mercedes”; even Biden mocked him for
that. The fact-checking website PolitiFact reported, however,
that Trump did not err: His references were to Mercedes Schlapp, his former
aide sitting in the front row.
That
said, Trump’s innumerable blunders are well documented. Some may be phonemic
paraphasia, the muddling of different sounds common in the elderly, such as
referring to “Leon” Musk or to the city of “Minnianapolis.” Trump described the
“MK-47” assault rifle, a weapon he said he knew “very well” — even though he
meant the AK-47.
One
startling lapse came two years ago during a deposition in a legal case. Trump
was shown a photo of E. Jean Carroll, who had accused him of rape. After
examining the photo, Trump said it was of Marla Maples, his second wife.
An examination this month by my Times colleagues
Peter Baker and Dylan Freedman found that Trump’s speeches had grown
increasingly dark, profane, angry, unfocused and fixated on the past; they said
he sometimes seems “confused, forgetful, incoherent or disconnected from
reality.”
A
computer analysis for that article found that Trump uses swearwords 69 percent more
often now than he did eight years ago, and also more all-or-nothing words like
“always” or “never.” Some experts see that as a possible marker for declining
complexity, subtlety and filtering.
STAT
News, which covers health issues, compared Trump’s
speeches this year to those of 2017, and found that the recent ones were marked
by increased short sentences, confused word order, repetition and digressions.
Since 2020, there has also been a 44 percent increase in Trump sentences
focused on the past.
What
does all this mean? It’s possible that Trump decided that he can communicate
better with angrier, shorter, blunter sentences focused on the past. Some
statements perceived as gaffes — such as assertions that immigrants are eating
pets — may be a calculated effort to get everyone talking about immigration.
But that doesn’t explain his telling people this month that they had another
couple of months to cast ballots. Or his mixing up of Joe Biden and Barack
Obama, or his apparent confusion of Nikki Haley and Kamala Harris.
There
are, I think, many other reasons to be wary of Trump. His record. His policies.
His immorality. His reported admiration
for Hitler. We should layer onto that concerns about aging, for Trump by the
end of a new term would be the oldest president in history. In that context,
his erratic behavior should be disqualifying.
If any of us had an aging parent like Trump, we would
gently remove the car keys. As a nation, we should keep him from the nuclear
launch codes.