Kos wrote this the other day:
Thursday, November 09, 2023 at 5:04:16p EST
Donald Trump gets the facts wrong, but the media won’t tell you about it
Well, looks like it’s begun. At least from NYTimes and WaPo:
Media is beginning to report on Trump’s gaffes and mental lapses
I promised you some good news at the end here. The New York Times andWashington Post have both run stories now about Trump’s multiple verbal slips during recent rallies, pointing out that this is weakening one of his strongest attacks: Biden’s age.
These are more than just his usual “freewheeling” style. Even as Trump mocks Biden’s physical appearances and speech patterns, “Trump has had a string of unforced gaffes, garble and general disjointedness that go beyond his usual discursive nature,” wrote the Times. After earlier pretending to be Biden getting Idaho and Iowa mixed up, Trump thanked supporters in Sioux City, Iowa—by calling their city Sioux Falls, which is in Idaho. An aide had to correct him. In recent weeks, he’s told his own followers not to vote and claimed to have defeated President Obama in an election.
His challengers, including Gov. Ron DeSantis, have grabbed onto this as a campaign issue. “It’s sad to see,” DeSantis said. “It’s just a different guy.” Nikki Haley has mocked Trump lately for getting his world leaders mixed up, including saying that President Kim of North Korea leads 1.4 billion people, who are Chinese. Trump also confused the presidents of Turkey and Hungary in his speeches.
The attack ads are coming as well. Both the DeSantis and the Biden campaigns have produced compilations of the gaffes, missteps and ramblings that show a man presumably in significant cognitive decline.
Trump’s mental decline is only likely to accelerate from here, and the attack ads are probably going to write themselves.
NYTimes
How Trump’s Verbal Slips Could Weaken His Attacks on Biden’s Age
Donald Trump, 77, has relentlessly attacked President Biden, 80, as too old for office. But the former president himself has had a series of gaffes that go beyond his usual freewheeling style.
Published Oct. 30, 2023Updated Nov. 1, 2023
One of Donald J. Trump’s new comedic bits at his rallies features him impersonating the current commander in chief with an over-the-top caricature mocking President Biden’s age.
With droopy eyelids and mouth agape, Mr. Trump stammers and mumbles. He squints. His arms flap. He shuffles his feet and wanders laggardly across the stage. A burst of laughter and applause erupts from the crowd as he feigns confusion by turning and pointing to invisible supporters, as if he does not realize his back is to them.
But his recent campaign events have also featured less deliberate stumbles. Mr. Trump has had a string of unforced gaffes, garble and general disjointedness that go beyond his usual discursive nature, and that his Republican rivals are pointing to as signs of his declining performance.
On Sunday in Sioux City, Iowa, Mr. Trump wrongly thanked supporters of Sioux Falls, a South Dakota town about 75 miles away, correcting himself only after being pulled aside onstage and informed of the error.
WaPo
Trump’s rivals seize on opportunities to challenge his acuity
Biden’s team seeks to neutralize the age issue, while GOP hopefuls are urgently looking for ways to dent Trump’s lead
By Marisa Iati and Isaac Arnsdorf
November 11, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EST
The DeSantis campaign recently posted a thread of more than two dozen clumsy or confusing remarks by former president Donald Trump, positing that “this is why his handlers won’t let him debate.”
Former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, speaking to Jewish donors, mocked Trump for speaking positively about the leaders of China and North Korea, saying he is evidently “confused” about which countries are American allies and which are adversaries.
And the Biden campaign has also stepped up its posts about Trump’s verbal fumbles, including a minute-long video compilation of various miscues. In press statements, it has slammed Trump for mispronouncing “Hamas” and for musing aloud that the abbreviation for United States is spelled like the word “us.”
As Trump’s Republican rivals face growing pressure to stop his momentum, while Democrats seek to neutralize concerns about Biden’s age, the two sides are converging on a common argument — that Trump’s cognition has declined too far for him to lead the country again.
[...]
In recent speeches, Trump has incorrectly described Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban as the leader of Turkey and falsely suggested Hungary shares a border with Russia. He has repeatedly referred to the Obama administration when he meant the Biden administration, and at one point he inaccurately suggested he’d beaten Obama — rather than Hillary Clinton — in the 2016 election.
Trump has also mispronounced “on purpose” as “on perfect” and “Marxist” as “markers,” and he has combined the names of Florida Democrat Andrew Gillum and Florida Republican Adam Putnam to get “Pullam.” At the end of one speech, he warned that the world must not slide into World War II.
[...]
…..while the slips can be minor and not necessarily reflective of a broader issue, such mistakes have become political fodder at a time when critics scour Biden’s public appearances for evidence of age-related blunders — though Biden, like Trump, has a history of gaffes that goes back years or even decades.
But Stable Geniuses take dementia tests and ACE THEM!!!!
'Person, woman, man, camera, TV': Trump insists cognitive test was difficult
US president’s pride in his own mental agility on display during interview in which he lists five things repeatedly
Thu 23 Jul 2020 01.23 EDT
Donald Trump, the president of the United States, has insisted that a cognitive test he took recently was “difficult”, using the example of a question in which the patient is asked to remember and repeat five words.
“Person, woman, man, camera, TV,” Trump explained, saying that listing the words in order was worth “extra points”, and that he found the task easy.
“They said nobody gets it in order, it’s actually not that easy. But for me it was easy. And that’s not an easy question,” he told Fox News medical analyst and New York University professor of medicine Marc K Siegel.