The following words were taken verbatim from a campaign speech given by former President Donald Trump in Potterville, Michigan, on Thursday as he attempted, at least initially, to criticize Kamala Harris’ performance in San Francisco. allegedly with reference to her term as district attorney there:
It destroyed the city of San Francisco, it’s – and I own a big building there – it’s no – I shouldn’t talk about it, but that’s OK, I don’t care, because that’s what I do. I should say it’s the most beautiful city in the world – sell and get out, right? But I can’t do that. I don’t care, you know? I lost billions of dollars, billions of dollars. You know, somebody said, “What do you think you lost?” I said, “Probably two, three billion. That’s OK, I don’t care.” They say, “Do you think you would do it again?” And that’s the least of the problems. Nobody. They always say, “I don’t know if you know. Lincoln was treated terribly. Er, Jefferson was treated pretty terribly. Andrew Jackson, they say, was the worst of them all, he was treated worse than any other president.” I said, “Do that study again, because I don’t think there’s anyone close to Trump.” I even got shot! And who the hell knows where that came from, right?
This is… impossible to understand. Trump’s remarks are so thick that even professional political observers are dizzy from trying to figure out what he’s getting at. Why would a presidential candidate jump from Harris’s political record to the bath he took on a property he owns, landing on the list of presidents treated “terribly”? His remarks themselves are often incomprehensible. What is this supposed anecdote about his San Francisco property supposed to convey? What does he even mean by how terribly presidents have been treated? To top it all off, Trump casually throws in an insidious conspiracy theory, suggesting we don’t know who shot him, when of course we do. Trump has been ingrained in the public consciousness as a rule-breaker for so long that it’s easy to forget how far he is from meeting the basic requirement for a politician to speak clearly.
Trump’s speeches seem to be getting more rambling and incomprehensible by the day. His speeches make it difficult, if not impossible, for listeners to understand what he intends to do with his power in office and are said to be turning off voters. They also raise the question of whether the chaos he will create in office will be even less intentional than last time.
Trump’s declining ability to communicate clearly is a key feature of his 2024 candidacy. That deterioration may not have been as noticeable when Trump, 78, was up against 81-year-old President Joe Biden. But it is all the more evident now that he is running against 59-year-old Vice President Kamala Harris. Questions about Biden’s mental acuity have been rightly raised this election cycle. Questions about Trump’s mental acuity should be raised as well.
The incoherence of the Potterville speech is just one of countless examples. At a recent event in Wisconsin, Trump responded to an audience question about lowering inflation by suddenly jumping from his belief that Americans no longer eat bacon to his claim that wind energy doesn’t work. In speeches this spring, he stumbled from an attack on Biden’s age to a nonsensical reverie about the actor Cary Grant, which then segued into an anecdote about a conversation he had with Michael Jackson. Even compared to his first term, Trump’s inability to focus on a train of thought seems to be getting significantly worse.
Trump’s supporters notice this. A reporter for the Guardian pointed out that at a recent rally in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, many spectators left the event after Trump rambled for nearly two hours. “I voted for him in 2016 and had a Trump flag in my front yard,” one audience member told the Guardian. “But after listening to this, I’m actually scared that Trump will be president again. I don’t know what he was talking about half the time. Maybe he’s always been like this, but he seems worse, more unstable.” This fits with reports from the early stages of the campaign, in which many spectators left Trump’s speeches and supporters complained about his “rambling.”
Trump was able to dodge some questions about his cognitive abilities for several reasons. First, he had long had as his opponent Biden, who had not only shown a demonstrable decline in his ability to communicate but also seemed to have less energy than Trump. During their debates, Trump often spoke incoherently, but Biden was barely audible before saying things that undermined his own policies in confusing ways.
Furthermore, as I have pointed out before, Trump’s qualities as an entertainer, as an agent of disinformation, and as a proud political illiterate have made it easier for him to disguise his obvious decline and to discern its precise meaning. Finally, there has been a tension between the left’s narratives that Trump is an extremely dangerous autocrat and claims that Trump may be mentally incapable of governing. These two qualities can be present in the same politician, but highlighting both qualities requires different communication strategies that operate on entirely different and sometimes opposing emotional levels.
As my colleague Jim Downie has pointed out, Biden’s exit from the race not only raises public awareness of Trump’s age and communication difficulties, but also protects Democrats from accusations of hypocrisy. Now that Harris is forcefully laying out how she wants to improve the country, Trump’s bizarre speeches seem even more troubling than before. After all, Trump’s imprecise, impulsive style of communication made him exceptionally dangerous during his first term when it came to sensitive diplomatic and national security issues, such as his policy toward North Korea. Those risks will only grow if he becomes president again. And it’s truly terrifying to imagine a less capable, less focused Trump having to deal with another major health crisis like Covid. Trump’s apparent decline is not his worst trait — but it would likely exacerbate many of his vices.
