Biden Is Getting Older. Trump Is Losing His Mind.
Both men have trouble recalling names—but that’s where the similarities end.
LATELY THERE’S BEEN A LOT OF TALK about the “cognitive decline” of the two main contenders for the presidency. Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump are said to be mentally unfit for the office. They aren’t. Only one of them is.
Let’s start by looking at the recent evidence that has been offered in support of these claims.
Biden, in talking with investigators looking into his relatively innocent (compared to Trump’s) mishandling of classified documents, purportedly couldn’t remember the year his son Beau died. (We now know that’s not quite what happened.) He also mislabeled Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the president of Egypt, as the “president of Mexico.” He named the late François Mitterrand instead of Emmanuel Macron as the president of France, and confused the late German leader Helmut Kohl with former Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Trump, meanwhile, accused Nikki Haley of failing to step up Capitol security on January 6th, when it was actually Nancy Pelosi whom this untrue statement was about. He has repeatedly indicated that he thinks Barack Obama is the current president, recently telling an audience that “Putin has so little respect for Obama that he’s starting to throw around the ‘nuclear’ word.” He referred to Jeb Bush when he meant George W. Bush and he called Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán “the leader of Turkey.”
So in the category of “sometimes gets things mixed up,” the two are about even. Fumbling for dates and mixing up names is actually quite common—as anyone who has had a parent call them by a sibling’s name can attest.
“To easily recall names, right in the moment, is the hardest thing for us to do accurately,” Dr. Eric Lenze, a geriatric psychiatrist at Washington University in St. Louis, told the Associated Press. Added S. Jay Olshansky, a University of Illinois researcher of aging, “What science will tell you about flubs is that they’re perfectly normal, and they are exacerbated by stress for sure.”
Both Biden and Trump have reacted defensively when confronted with concerns about their age and mental faculties. When Special Counsel Robert Hur, in the documents case, described the 81-year-old Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory,” Biden held a hastily arranged and not entirely successful press conference to insist, “My memory is fine.” (This is backed up by Evan Osnos, writing in the New Yorker on his recent extended sitdown with Biden, whom he last interviewed in 2020: “His voice is thin and clotted, and his gestures have slowed, but, in our conversation, his mind seemed unchanged. He never bungled a name or a date.”)
Trump, meanwhile, is still boasting about a cognitive test he passed in 2020 that required him to repeat a series of words in order. As he recalled, the words were: “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.” He claimed his performance prompted the testers to exclaim, “That’s amazing. How did you do that?” The test, it turns out, was meant to detect signs of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, and similarly serious conditions. This was, noted Jonathan Reiner, a cardiologist at the George Washington School of Medicine and Health Sciences, “a very, very low bar for somebody who carries the nuclear launch codes in their pocket to pass and certainly nothing to brag about.” And he passed it four years ago.
The fact is that neither Biden nor Trump have managed to avoid the encroachments of age. But they are not equally or similarly afflicted. Biden, a recovering stutterer, has always tended to get a bit tongue-tied. Trump, an idiot in the truest sense of the word, has always been known to say startlingly stupid things. But there are clear signs that Trump is far more cognitively impaired than Biden, and getting worse.
“The diagnostic signs are not subtle,” John Gartner, a noted clinical psychologist and one of the contributors to the bestselling book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, recently told Salon. “Trump is evidencing formal thought disorder, where his basic ability to use language is breaking down.” Gartner has called the cognitive journey of Biden and Trump “a tale of two brains. Biden’s brain is aging. Trump’s brain is dementing.”1
Paul Quirk, a politics professor at the University of British Columbia, assessed the cognitive functioning of the two major candidates for president and concluded that while they both showed signs of decline, “Biden’s age should be less of an issue than Trump’s more apparent cognitive decline—displayed in slurred speech and gross, repeated errors in one campaign rally after another.”
And how.
AT A MARCH 2 RALLY IN NORTH CAROLINA, Trump made a passing reference to the nation of “Venezuhwhereuhunbelievable” and told his audience, “We’re a nation that just recently heard that Saudi Arabia and Russia will re-feh-ur-ah.” That’s what he said. Whatever he was trying to say was never made clear.
But even when he gets his words out, they are often chilling in their randomness. Here’s a clusterfuck of Trumpese from that same speech in North Carolina: “Can we be energy independent? Can we be energy dominant again? Oh, yes. Oh yes and quickly, says President Trump. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. And quickly.”
Ron Filipkowski, a self-described “Republican Party Insane Asylum Escapee,” made a video montage from Trump’s North Carolina speech as well as one that same day in Richmond, Virginia. It catalogues 32 instances in which the former president “mispronounced words, got confused, mixed up names, forgot names, and babbled insane nonsense.” The nonsense about energy independence did not make the cut.
And even when Trump is not being painfully inarticulate, he says some crazy shit. Like his invitation to Russia to “do whatever the hell” it wants to U.S. allies. Or his reckless assertion that Biden’s record on the border “is by any definition a conspiracy to overthrow the United States of America.” Or his jaded assessment of life under Biden (or Obama, or whoever the hell is president): “Our cities are choking to death, our states are dying, and frankly our country is dying.” Or his twisted judgment in using the appellation “Martin Luther King on steroids” to describe Mark Robinson, the Republican nominee for North Carolina governor, who has called gay people “maggots” and declared, “I absolutely want to go back to the America where women couldn’t vote.”
For a full glimpse into the maw of madness that is Trump’s mind, consider his recent words about Jack Smith, the respected career prosecutor who has brought criminal charges against him in two cases:
He’s just a terrible human being. But he’s a deranged person who wants to hurt people. And we’re hurtin’ him. I’ll tell ya, we’re hurtin’ him. He stinks. That’s not the kind of people. You know, being a prosecutor is a very important thing, being a fair and good prosecutor is a very important thing. But some of these animals, I mean, they are bad.
Leaving aside the substance of his remarks, Trump’s syntax sounds like someone mumbling to himself in the shower. Does he not realize how deep-down dumb this makes him sound? Are his followers not embarrassed? The answers are “No” and “No.”
SADLY, THE CRAZINESS EXTENDS beyond MAGA-land. Despite the clear signs that Trump is in an active state of mental disintegration, a broad swath of Americans have somehow gotten it into their heads that Biden is worse.
A recent poll found that 63 percent of Americans had major concerns over Biden’s mental capability to serve as president as compared to 57 percent who had major concerns on this score for Trump. Perhaps these numbers will change as a result of Biden’s State of the Union performance last Thursday. Perhaps not.
On Saturday, both candidates held rallies in Georgia. Biden made no notable gaffes. Trump, meanwhile, assured his audience that he could have easily prevented the Ukraine war with a quick call to “Poten.” He mocked Biden’s stutter, and called him “the worst president, the most incompetent, and the most corrupt” in U.S. history. (Project much?) And he falsely accused Biden of having “announced a plan to send our brave U.S. military men and women into Gaza to resupply the terrorists of Hamas.”
As Hillary Clinton, of all people, recently observed, “We have a contest between one candidate who’s old but who’s done an effective job and doesn’t threaten our democracy. And we have another candidate who is old, barely makes sense when he talks, is dangerous, and threatens our democracy.”
Whatcha gonna do? Clinton’s advice: “Pick between your two old ones and figure out how you’re going to save our democracy.”
Sounds like a plan.
Editor’s note: For a discussion of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, the book to which John Gartner contributed, and the propriety of speculating about the mental fitness of public figures, see this Richard North Patterson article from July 2020.
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