Trump’s Speeches,
Increasingly Angry and Rambling, Reignite the Question of Age
With the passage of time, the
78-year-old former president’s speeches have grown darker, harsher, longer,
angrier, less focused, more profane and increasingly fixated on the past,
according to a review of his public appearances over the years.
By Peter Baker and Dylan Freedman
- Oct. 6, 2024
Former
President Donald J. Trump vividly recounted how the audience at his climactic
debate with Vice President Kamala Harris was on his side. Except that there was
no audience. The debate was held in an empty hall. No one “went crazy,” as
Mr. Trump put it, because no one was there.
Anyone
can misremember, of course. But the debate had been just a week earlier and a
fairly memorable moment. And it was hardly the only time Mr. Trump has seemed
confused, forgetful, incoherent or disconnected from reality lately. In fact,
it happens so often these days that it no longer even generates much attention.
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.
He seems confused about modern technology, suggesting
that “most people don’t have any
idea what the hell a phone app is” in a country where 96
percent of people own a smartphone. If sometimes he seems stuck in the 1990s,
there are moments when he pines for the 1890s, holding out that decade as the
halcyon period of American history and William McKinley as his model president
because of his support for tariffs.
And he heads off into rhetorical cul-de-sacs. “So we built
a thing called the Panama Canal,” he told the conservative host
Tucker Carlson last year. “We lost 35,000 people to the mosquito,
you know, malaria. We lost 35,000 people building — we lost 35,000 people
because of the mosquito. Vicious. They had to build under nets. It was one of
the true great wonders of the world. As he said, ‘One of the nine wonders of
the world.’ No, no, it was one of the seven. It just happened a little while
ago. You know, he says, ‘Nine wonders of the world.’ You could make nine
wonders. He would’ve been better off if he stuck with the nine and just said,
‘Yeah, I think it’s nine.’”
While
elements of this are familiar, some who have known him for years say they
notice a change. “He’s not competing at the level he was competing at eight
years ago, no question about it,” said Anthony Scaramucci, a former Trump ally
who has endorsed Ms. Harris. “He’s lost a step. He’s lost an ability to put
powerful sentences together.”
“You
can like Trump or hate Trump, but he’s been a very effective communicator,” Mr.
Scaramucci continued. But now, he added, “the word salad buffet on the Trump
campaign is being offered at a discount. You can eat all you can eat, but it’s
at a discount.”
Sarah
Matthews, who was Mr. Trump’s deputy press secretary until breaking with him
over the Jan. 6, 2021, attack, said the former president had lost his fastball.
“I
don’t think anyone would ever say that Trump is the most polished speaker, but
his more recent speeches do seem to be more incoherent, and he’s rambling even
more so and he’s had some pretty noticeable moments of confusion,” she said.
“When he was running against Biden, maybe it didn’t stand out as much.”
Mr. Trump dismisses any concerns and insists that he has
passed cognitive tests. “I go for two hours without teleprompters, and if I say
one word slightly out, they say, ‘He’s cognitively impaired,’” he complained at
a recent rally. He calls his meandering style “the weave” and asserts that it
is an intentional and “brilliant” communication strategy.
Steven
Cheung, the campaign communications director, called Mr. Trump “the strongest
and most capable candidate” and dismissed suggestions that he has diminished
with age. “President Trump has more energy and more stamina than anyone in
politics, and is the smartest leader this country has ever seen,” he said in a
statement.
The
former president has not been hobbled politically by his age as much as Mr.
Biden was, in part because the incumbent comes across as physically frail while
Mr. Trump still exudes energy. But his campaign has refused to release medical records, instead simply
pointing to a one-page letter released
in July by his former White House doctor reporting that Mr. Trump was “doing
well” after being grazed by a bullet in an assassination attempt.
How
much his rambling discourse — what some experts call tangentiality — can be
attributed to age is the subject of some debate. Mr. Trump has always had a
distinctive speaking style that entertained and captivated supporters even as
critics called him detached from reality. Indeed, questions have been raised
about Mr. Trump’s mental fitness for years.
John
F. Kelly, his second White House chief of staff, was so convinced that Mr.
Trump was psychologically unbalanced that he bought a book called “The
Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” written by 27 mental health professionals, to
try to understand his boss better. As it was, Mr. Kelly came to refer to Mr.
Trump’s White House as “Crazytown.”
Some
of Mr. Trump’s cabinet secretaries had a running debate over whether the
president was “crazy-crazy,” as one of them put it in an interview after
leaving office, or merely someone who promoted “crazy ideas.” There were
multiple conversations about whether the 25th Amendment disability clause
should be invoked to remove him from office, although the idea never went far.
His own estranged niece, Mary L. Trump, a clinical psychologist, wrote a book identifying disorders she believed he
has. Mr. Trump bristled at such talk, insisting that he was “a very stable genius.”
“There
were often discussions about whether he could comprehend or understand the
policy and knowing that he didn’t really have a grasp on those kinds of
things,” Ms. Matthews said of her time in the White House. “No one wanted to
outright say it in that environment — is he mentally fit? — but I definitely
had my moments where I personally questioned it.”
A
2022 study by a pair of University of Montana scholars found that Mr. Trump’s
speech complexity was significantly lower than that of the average president
over American history. (So was Mr. Biden’s.) The Times analysis found that Mr.
Trump speaks at a fourth-grade level, lower than rivals like Gov. Ron DeSantis
of Florida, who speaks at an eighth-grade level, which is roughly average for modern presidents.
Mr.
Trump’s complexity level has remained relatively steady and has not diminished
in recent years, according to the analysis. But concerns about his age have
heightened now that he is trying to return to office, concerns that were not
alleviated by his unfounded debate claim about immigrants “eating the pets” in
a small town.
Polls
show that a majority of Americans believe he is too old to be president, and
his critics have been trying to focus attention on that. A group of mental
health, national security and political experts held a conference at the
National Press Club in Washington last month on Mr. Trump’s fitness. The
Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group of former Republicans, regularly taunts
him with ads like one calling his debate with Ms. Harris “a cognitive test” that he failed.
Mr.
Trump has appeared tired at times and has maintained a far less active campaign
schedule this time around, holding only 61 rallies so far in 2024, compared
with 283 through all of 2016, according to the Times analysis, although he has
picked up the pace lately. He appeared to nod off during his hush-money trial
in New York before being convicted of 34 felonies.
Experts
said it was hard to judge whether the changes in Mr. Trump’s speaking style
could indicate typical effects of age or some more significant condition. “That
can change with normal aging,” said Dr. Bradford Dickerson, a neurologist at
Harvard Medical School. “But if you see a change relative to a person’s base
line in that type of speaking ability over the course of just a few years, I
think it raises some real red flags.”
One
person who has detected a change is Ramin Setoodeh, author of a new book on Mr.
Trump’s days hosting “The Apprentice.” Mr. Setoodeh, who has written about
Hollywood for years and first met Mr. Trump during his television days, was
surprised at how much the former president had changed when he arrived at
Mar-a-Lago for the first of six interviews for the book, “Apprentice in Wonderland.”
“The Donald Trump I interviewed in the early seasons of
‘The Apprentice’ had a stronger sense of time and space, and his narratives
were a lot clearer,” Mr. Setoodeh said. “And the Donald Trump I interviewed for
my book, ironically, could remember things that happened in the ‘Apprentice’
years well, but he struggled with more recent events.”
For
instance, Mr. Trump could not remember the day in 2015 that NBC called to cut
ties with him after he made derogatory remarks about Mexican immigrants. “He
was very clear in terms of his memory of the shows,” Mr. Setoodeh said, even
though his versions were often exaggerated or fabricated. “But when we went to
more recent years, things got foggier.”
So
foggy, in fact, that he forgot Mr. Setoodeh himself. After interviewing Mr.
Trump in May 2021, Mr. Setoodeh returned in August. “When I said, ‘Do you
remember sitting down with me?’ he said, ‘No, that was a long time ago,’” Mr.
Setoodeh said. “It was like we started from square one. He started telling me
the exact same stories. He didn’t remember what we had talked about. He didn’t
remember me.”
Others
who have encountered him since he left the White House have likewise described
moments of forgetfulness. Most notable, perhaps, was his deposition in the
defamation lawsuit brought by the writer E. Jean Carroll, who accused Mr. Trump
of raping her in the 1990s. Shown a picture of Ms. Carroll, Mr. Trump confused her with his second
wife, Marla Maples. (A jury later found that Mr. Trump sexually abused and defamed Ms. Carroll.)
Roberta
Kaplan, who was Ms. Carroll’s lawyer, said Mr. Trump lost control at times
during the proceedings, blowing up when he should have remained calm. “I assume
that was always part of his personality,” she said in an interview. “But it may
be getting worse.”
Others
who have spent time with Mr. Trump in private, however, insist that they notice
no difference.
“I
never felt that cognitive ability or age was an issue,” said James Trusty, an
attorney who represented Mr. Trump in his classified-documents criminal case
until resigning last year after reported friction with another lawyer close to
Mr. Trump.
“Like
any high-powered executive, there were going to be times when he didn’t like
hearing what I had to say or when we had spirited disagreements over strategy,”
Mr. Trusty added. “But it was never something where I felt there was an
intellectual disconnect.”
Sam
Nunberg, a former Trump political adviser, said he still talked with people who
see him almost daily, and had not heard of any concerns expressed about the
former president’s age. “I don’t really see any major difference,” he said. “I
just don’t see it.”
“He’s
not linear,” he added. But “he was never linear.” At the debate with Ms.
Harris, Mr. Nunberg said, Mr. Trump “seemed like he was tired” and “had an off
night.” And, he added, “of course he doesn’t prepare.” But “that’s not like a
Biden off night.”
Either
way, watching recordings of Mr. Trump over the years yields a pretty clear
evolution. The young media-obsessed developer and reality television star who
spoke with a degree of sophistication and nuance eventually gave way to the
bombastic presidential candidate with the shrunken vocabulary in
2016 and eventually to the aged former president seeking a comeback in 2024.
Consider the following: In 2002, Mr. Trump was interviewed for an Errol Morris
documentary about “Citizen Kane,” the iconic Orson Welles film
about a media tycoon. Mr. Trump gave a thoughtful analysis of the movie with a
degree of introspection that would be hard to imagine today. “In real life, I
believe that wealth does in fact isolate you from other people,” he said. “It’s
a protective mechanism. You have your guard up much more so than you would if
you didn’t have wealth.”
In
2011, as he was contemplating a run for the presidency, Mr. Trump addressed the Conservative
Political Action Conference and sounded more partisan notes.
While many of the themes would be familiar to today’s voters, he stuck closer
to his script and finished his thoughts more often. His speeches in 2015 and
2016 were more aggressive, but still clearer and more comprehensible than now,
and balanced with flashes of humor.
Now
his rallies are powered as much by anger as anything else. His distortions and
false claims have reached new levels. His adversaries are “lunatics” and
“deranged” and “communists” and “fascists.” Never particularly restrained, he
now lobs four-letter words and other profanities far more freely. The other
day, he suggested unleashing the police to inflict “one really violent day” on
criminals to deter crime.
He does not stick to a single train of thought for long.
During one 10-minute stretch in Mosinee, Wis.,
last month, for instance, he ping-ponged from topic to topic: Ms. Harris’s
record; the virtues of the merit system; Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s endorsement;
supposed corruption at the F.D.A., the C.D.C. and the W.H.O.; the Covid-19
pandemic; immigration; back to the W.H.O.; China; Mr. Biden’s age; Ms. Harris
again; Mr. Biden again; chronic health problems and childhood diseases; back to
Mr. Kennedy; the “Biden crime family”; the president’s State of the Union
address; Franklin D. Roosevelt; the 25th Amendment; the “parasitic political
class”; Election Day; back to immigration; Senator Tammy Baldwin; back to
immigration; energy production; back to immigration; and Ms. Baldwin again.
Some
of what he says is inexplicable except to those who listen to him regularly and
understand the shorthand. And he throws out assertions without any apparent
regard for whether they are true or not. Lately, he has claimed that crowds Ms.
Harris has drawn were not real but the creation of artificial intelligence,
never mind the reporters and cameras on hand to record them.
He
mispronounces names and places with some regularity — “Charlottestown” instead of
“Charlottesville,” “Minnianapolis” instead of “Minneapolis,” the
website “Snoops” instead
of “Snopes,” “Leon” Musk
instead of “Elon.”
In Rome, Ga., he went on an extended riff about Mr. Biden in
swim trunks on a beach. “Look, at 81 — do you remember Cary Grant? How good was
Cary Grant, right? I don’t think Cary Grant, he was good. I don’t know what
happened to movie stars today. We used to have Cary Grant and Clark Gable and
all these people. Today we have — I won’t say names because I don’t need
enemies. I don’t need enemies. I got enough enemies. But Cary Grant was like,
Michael Jackson once told me, ‘The most handsome man, Trump, in the world.’
Who? ‘Cary Grant.’ Well, we don’t have that anymore. But Cary Grant at 81 or 82
— going on 100, this guy, he’s 81 going on 100 — Cary Grant wouldn’t look too
good in a bathing suit either, and he was pretty good-looking, right?”
Talking
on another occasion about how tough illegal immigrants are, he drifted off into
a soliloquy about whether actors could portray them in a movie: “They can’t
play the role. They’ll bring in a big actor and you look and you say, ‘Look,
he’s got no muscle content. He’s got no muscle! We
need a little muscle!’ Then they bring in another one. ‘But he’s got a weak
face! He looks weak!’” Still, he has rather high regard for his own physique.
“I could have been sunbathing on the beach,”
he said at another point. “You have never seen a body so beautiful. Much better
than Sleepy Joe.”
He
considers himself the master of nearly every subject. He said Venezuelan gangs
were armed “with MK-47s,” evidently
meaning AK-47s, and then added, “I know that gun very well” because “I’ve
become an expert on guns.” He claims to have been named “man of the year” in Michigan, although no such
prize exists.
He
is easily distracted. He halted in the middle of another extended monologue
when he noticed a buzzing insect.
“Oh, there’s a fly,” he said. “Oh. I wonder where the fly came from. See? Two
years ago, I wouldn’t have had a fly up here. You’re changing rapidly. But we
can’t take it any longer.”
But like some people approaching the end of their eighth
decade, he is not open to correction. “Trump is never wrong,” he
said recently in Wisconsin. “I am never, ever wrong.”
