Trump’s speeches, increasingly angry and rambling, reignite the question of age

WASHINGTON — Former President Donald 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 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 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, Trump was still speaking as if he were running against President Joe Biden, five weeks after his withdrawal from the race.

With Biden out, 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 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, Trump’s rally speeches now last an average of 82 minutes, compared with 45 minutes in 2016. Proportionately, he uses 13% more all-or-nothing terms such as “always” and “never” than he did eight years ago, which some experts consider a sign of advancing age.

Similarly, he uses 32% more negative words than positive words now, compared with 21% in 2016, which can be another indicator of cognitive change. And he uses swearwords 69% more often than he did when he first ran.

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% of people own a smartphone. If sometimes he seems stuck in the 1990s, there are moments when he pines for the 1890s.

Sarah Matthews, who was Trump’s deputy press secretary until breaking with him over the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, 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.”

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 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.

The former president has not been hobbled politically by his age as much as Biden was, in part because the incumbent comes across as physically frail while 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 Trump was “doing well” after being grazed by a bullet in an assassination attempt.

How much his rambling discourse can be attributed to age is the subject of some debate. 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 Trump’s mental fitness for years.

John Kelly, his second White House chief of staff, was so convinced that 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.

A 2022 study by a pair of University of Montana scholars found that Trump’s speech complexity was significantly lower than that of the average president over American history. (So was Biden’s.) The Times analysis found that Trump speaks at a fourth-grade level, lower than rivals such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who speaks at an eighth-grade level, which is roughly average for modern presidents.

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.

Experts said it was hard to judge whether the changes in 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.”

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 writer E. Jean Carroll, who accused Trump of raping her in the 1990s. Shown a picture of Carroll, Trump confused her with his second wife, Marla Maples. (A jury later found that Trump sexually abused and defamed Carroll.)

Roberta Kaplan, who was Carroll’s lawyer, said 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 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 Trump in his classified-documents criminal case until resigning last year.

Either way, watching recordings of 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, Trump was interviewed for an Errol Morris documentary about “Citizen Kane,” the iconic Orson Welles film about a media tycoon. 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, Trump addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference and sounded more partisan notes. 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.” He now lobs four-letter words and other profanities far more freely.

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.”

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.

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.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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