If you watched Donald Trump on Thursday speaking from a news conference in Florida, you may notice he seemed extremely incoherent, especially when he was talking about Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz.
"She picked a radical left... uh, man... that is... he's got things done, that, he has positions that just are not even possible to believe they exist," he said. "He's going for things that nobody's ever even heard of."
Trump's affinity for word soup isn't new, but the increasing disarray of his speech is striking for the 78-year-old candidate. Case in point, a group of experts interviewed by STAT say that Trump's speech patterns have deteriorated in recent years, a common sign of worsening cognitive health.
"There’s reasonable evidence suggestive of forms of dementia," clinical psychologist Ben Michaelis told STAT after reviewing recent Trump speeches. "The reduction in complexity of sentences and vocabulary does lead you to a certain picture of cognitive diminishment."
Not good for Trump - he seems to be labouring and suffering - struggling to tie up sentences here.
Compare that with the punchiness & sheer enjoyment of Harris and Walz right now. pic.twitter.com/ghJ93qNhfp
— Mike Galsworthy (@mikegalsworthy) August 8, 2024
What's even more telling is that one of the experts, University of Texas at Austin social psychologist James Pennebaker, used statistical software to analyze Trump's speech patterns between 2015 and the present, finding "significant changes in Trump’s linguistic tendencies."
Ever since Trump was booted out of office in 2020, Pennebaker said the business magnate has been using more "all-or-nothing thinking," with increased usage of words like "always" or "never" — a behavior that President Joe Biden, who stepped aside from the race amid growing concern about his health, has also been exhibiting.
This verbal tick is associated with depression and decreasing cognitive ability, Pennebaker said.
STAT previously analyzed Trump's speech in 2017, finding that his speech patterns had broken down since the 1980s.
His speech back in the 1980s and 1990s sounded eloquent and intelligent. Nowadays, Trump has a tendency to ramble and make tangental longwinded asides. He's also derailing from his talking points more so than in previous years.
"Tangentiality certainly amped up and it’s difficult to follow him," Michaelis said. "You’d expect some cognitive diminishment of course, he’s 78 years old — if he was your grandfather you wouldn’t expect anything different. He just happens to be running for president."
Others, like ex-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have observed that the former president seems to be suffering a decline.
Trump has been sounding tired and beaten, especially at Thursday's press conference.
"Does Trump actually want to run anymore," pondered New Yorker contributor Jay Caspian Kang on X.
It's worth noting that Trump survived an assassination attempt less than a month ago, and he may well be suffering trauma from that event.
Though Biden abdicated the party ticket after his disastrous debate performance in June, there's very little likelihood that Republicans will abandon Trump despite showing a noticeably less sharp mind — meaning that if he wins the race, this is the man who will occupy the Oval Office.
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