A lot of the examples in this thread seem like gaffes. The sort everybody makes. If you do enough talking, you’re going to mix things up. Every one of us does it all the time and you brush it off and/or forget it because you’re not doing it in a worldwide broadcast being recorded and analyzed constantly by people looking for any mistakes to use against you.
But not this one. I mean, maybe it just slipped his mind for a moment but it seemed like more than a simple gaffe. That was completely a case where he could not remember the word, and if you can’t remember the word “abortion” when it’s currently one of the biggest political issues in the country, and you’re trying to get elected POTUS, that’s a huge problem.
I guess I meant this part. But I should have emphasized it, and perhaps it is tangential.
Ironically, Trump is now the oldest candidate ever to be nominated for president. He has made a show of his relative robustness compared with Biden, a line of argument that puts him in a precarious position. Although he doesn’t appear frail, health records released during his presidency indicated that he was obese and had hypercholesterolemia and heart disease. And although he doesn’t drink alcohol or smoke, he eats a lot of fast foodand seemingly doesn’t exercise beyond slow-paced golf games. It’s impossible to diagnose a person from afar, but his multiple instances of inaccurate recall and disjointed, tangential speech call into question his basic communication and leadership abilities, and raise the question of cognitive change beyond that of normal aging. If Trump came to my clinic, I would do the same physical and cognitive assessment on his as I would on Biden. I would also explore his interest in taking a healthier approach to aging given how his many risk factors increase his chance of adverse health events, functional loss, and death. I hope Trump’s doctors are having such conversations with their patient now.
As someone who has trouble pulling up the right word, i think that looks a lot worse than it really is. I made the same defense of both the younger Bush (who made some peculiar gaffes) and Biden.
I think losing the thread is a more significant failure than substituting the wrong word. When Trump and Biden were rambling on about golf scores in a national debate, i was dismayed for my country. By both of them.
I wouldn’t characterize that as having “trouble pulling up the right word”. He was trying to say a very common (for US politicians in 2024) easy to pronounce word but instead nonsense came out instead. That’s much more concerning
Thank you for posting that. I was hoping that ‘limited gift link’ meant ‘limited time’, as opposed to a limited view of the article. But it faded out at the second paragraph and said I had to subscribe.
I figured there was some reference in the body of the article that wasn’t permitted with the limited gift link. But that was the problem. If no one can read the relevant part unless they are a subscriber, then it becomes off topic.
I think you may be onto something, here, although a teleprompter should be far enough a way that reading glasses wouldn’t matter.
I’d add a third (for Opal!):
He only seems to do this at a rally, where he is surrounded by adorant fans, who knows what he means without his even saying it. He doesn’t think think he can make any mistake these people would hold against him. To him, it doesn’t matter so he isn’t going to anything about it.
I’m also of the opinion that Trump’s literacy is not that great. He can read but not very well and he doesn’t like reading. He may be dyslexic or have some other difficulty that would not have been diagnosed in his childhood beyond “well, this kid is a shit”. He has no interest in overcoming this and doesn’t realize that to some, his struggle with comprehension is obvious.
Not sure that’s true. There are plenty of examples during interviews too, like the one where he went on an incoherent rant about California fishes and had to be steered back onto the subject by his friendly interviewer
Which is very shortsighted, because any time he’s speaking in public he’s speaking to the whole world, since it will be broadcast. And if he looks stupid to everyone not in that tiny crowd around him, he’s hurting his campaign.
I mean, if he thinks he can win just through his cultish base alone, good luck with that Donny.
Honestly, I don’t believe he even puts that much thought into it. He has just spouted whatever weird crap comes into his head, and doing that got him elected in 2016, and worked to get him nominated in 2024, so he’s going to keep doing it.
He’s referring to windmills killing birds. He’s not super coherent, but the underlying point is just a lie, or exaggeration, not something he’s confused about.
I dropped my subscription to the New York Times years ago, because their covid coverage was unhinged and misleading. (They seem to really be into lying with statistics. Mind you, their numbers were accurate, as best as i can tell, but they sure present them in misleading ways.)
So i have no idea what they’d say. I don’t speak for the NYT.
