Campaign communications director Stephen Chan called Trump “the strongest and most capable candidate” and rejected suggestions that he has weakened with age. “President Trump has more energy and 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 held back politically by age as much as Biden, in part because Trump still exudes energy, while the incumbent is physically Because they are considered weak. But the Trump campaign refused to release the medical records, instead releasing a one-page letter from a former White House doctor in July reporting that Trump was “doing well” after being grazed by a bullet during an assassination attempt. Just pointing it out.
Whether his ramblings (some experts call him “tangential”) are due to age is a subject of debate. Trump has always entertained and charmed his supporters with his unique speaking style, even though his critics say he is out of touch with reality. Indeed, questions have been raised about Trump’s mental health for years.
John F. Kelly, the second White House chief of staff, believes Trump is mentally unstable and writes a letter from 27 mental health experts seeking to understand Trump’s mental state. I bought a book called “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.” My boss is better. In effect, Mr. Kelly has come to refer to Mr. Trump’s White House as “Crazy Town.”
Some of Mr. Trump’s cabinet members have questioned whether the president is “crazy, crazy,” as one of them said in an interview after leaving office, or just someone who promotes “crazy ideas.” The discussion continued. There has been much debate over whether to invoke the 25th Amendment’s disability clause to remove him from office, but the idea never made much headway. His own estranged niece, clinical psychologist Mary L. Trump, wrote a book identifying the disorder she believed he suffered from. Trump was outraged by the stories, claiming he was a “very stable genius.”
“There was a lot of discussion about whether he understood policy, and we knew he didn’t really understand those things,” Matthews said of his time in the White House. . “No one wanted to say that openly in that environment — was he mentally okay?” — but there were certainly times when he had his doubts personally. ”
A 2022 study by two University of Montana academics found that the complexity of Trump’s speeches was significantly lower than that of the average president in U.S. history. (Mr. Biden did the same.) A Times analysis found that Mr. Trump’s conversational skills were at a fourth-grade level, lower than rivals like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and about the average modern middle-schooler. It turned out that his conversational skills were at the level of a second-year student. Presidents.
Analysis shows that Trump’s level of complexity has remained relatively stable and has not declined in recent years. But now that he is about to return to public office, concerns about his age have grown, concerns not allayed by unsubstantiated debate claims that immigrants are “eating pets” in small towns.
Opinion polls show a majority of Americans think he is too old to be president, and his critics have sought to focus attention on that point. A group of mental health, national security and political experts held a conference on Trump’s health last month at the National Press Club in Washington. The Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group made up of former Republicans, regularly mocks Harris with ads that claim she failed a “cognitive test” in a debate with Harris.
Trump has shown fatigue at times and has maintained a far less active campaign schedule this time around, holding fewer rallies in 2024 than 283 in all of 2016, according to a Times analysis. has been held only 61 times so far. recent pace. He appeared to be nodding off during his hush money trial in New York before he was convicted of 34 felonies.
Experts said it was difficult to determine whether Mr. Trump’s change in speech was indicative of the typical effects of aging or a more serious condition. “It can change with normal aging,” says Dr. Bradford Dickerson, a neurologist at Harvard Medical School. “But if you see a change in a person’s speaking ability compared to their baseline over just a few years, I think that really raises a red flag.”
One person who noticed the change was Ramin Setoudeh, author of a new book about Trump’s time as host of “The Apprentice.” Mr. Setoude, who has written about Hollywood for years and first met Mr. Trump during his television days, said when he arrived at Mar-a-Lago for the first of the book’s six interviews, he realized how much the former president He was surprised at how much had changed. , “The Apprentice in Wonderland.”
“The Donald Trump I interviewed on the early seasons of ‘The Apprentice’ had a stronger sense of time and space, and his story was much clearer,” Setoude said. “And Donald Trump, who I interviewed for my book, ironically remembers things that happened during his ‘Apprentice’ days well, but struggles with recent events. ”
