The words below were taken verbatim from a campaign speech former President Donald Trump delivered in Potterville, Michigan, Thursday when he was attempting, at least initially, to criticize Kamala Harris’ record in San Francisco, presumably referring to her tenure as district attorney there:
She destroyed the city of San Francisco, it’s — and I own a big building there — it’s no — I shouldn’t talk about this but that’s OK I don’t give a damn because this is what I’m doing. I should say it’s the finest city in the world — sell and get the hell out of there, 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, ‘You think you’d do it again?’ And that’s the least of it. Nobody. They always say, I don’t know if you know. Lincoln was horribly treated. Uh, Jefferson was pretty horribly. Andrew Jackson they say was the worst of all, that he was treated worse than any other president. I said, ‘Do that study again, because I think there’s nobody close to Trump.’ I even got shot! And who the hell knows where that came from, right?
This is ... impossible to follow. Trump’s asides stack atop each other with such density that it’s dizzying for even professional political observers to discern what he’s trying to get at. Why is a presidential candidate leapfrogging from talking about Harris’ policy record to the bath he took on a property he owns to where he ranks on the list of “horribly” treated presidents? His asides themselves are often unintelligible. What is this alleged anecdote about his San Francisco property meant to convey? What does he even mean about how horribly presidents were treated? To cap it all off, Trump casually tossed out an insidious conspiracy theory. He implies we don’t know who shot him, when of course we do. Trump has been embedded in the public consciousness as a rule-breaker for so long that it can be easily to forget how far he is from fulfilling the basic requirement of a politician to speak clearly.
Trump’s speeches seem to be growing more discursive and difficult to comprehend by the day. Those speeches are making it hard, if not impossible, for people listening to them to understand what he wants to do with his power in office, and they’re reportedly turning off voters. They’re also raising questions over whether the chaos he would sow in office would be even less intentional than it was last time.
Trump’s deteriorating ability to clearly communicate is a consequential feature of his 2024 candidacy. That deterioration may not have been as salient when Trump, 78, had 81-year-old President Joe Biden as an opponent. But it’s all the more clear as he now faces off against 59-year-old Vice President Kamala Harris. Questions about Biden’s mental acuity were rightly raised in this election cycle. Questions about Trump’s mental acuity should be raised, too.
The incoherence of the Potterville speech is just one of countless examples. During a recent event in Wisconsin, Trump’s response to a question from the audience about reducing inflation entailed darting from his belief that Americans don’t eat bacon anymore to his assertion that wind energy doesn’t work. During remarks this spring, he stumbled from an attack on Biden’s age into a nonsensical reverie about the actor Cary Grant, which then spun off into an anecdote about a conversation he had with Michael Jackson. Compared even to his first term in office, Trump’s inability to focus on one train of thought appears to be growing significantly worse.
Trump’s supporters are noticing. A Guardian reporter pointed out that during a recent rally in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, many audience members left as Trump rambled for nearly two hours. “I voted for him in 2016 and had a Trump flag in the front yard,” a member of that audience told The Guardian. “But after listening to that, I’m actually afraid of Trump being president again. I don’t know what he was talking about half the time. Perhaps he was always like that but he seems worse, more unstable.” That tracks with reports from earlier in the campaign season of large numbers of audience members exiting Trump’s speeches and supporter complaints about him “babbling.”
Trump has managed to elude some questions about his cognitive functioning for a number of reasons. First, for a great deal of time he had as a foil Biden, who not only had shown a demonstrable decline in his ability to communicate, but also seemed to have less energy than Trump. During their debate, Trump was often rambling, but Biden was barely audible before saying things that undermined his own policies in baffling ways.
Also, as I have pointed out in the past, Trump’s qualities as an entertainer, as an agent of disinformation and as a proud policy illiterate have made it easier for him to mask his apparent decline and to identify its precise significance. Lastly, there was a tension between narratives on the left that Trump was an extremely dangerous autocrat and claims that Trump might lack mental competence to govern. Those two qualities can exist in the same leader, but pointing out both qualities requires distinct communications strategies that operate in sharply different, and sometimes clashing, emotional registers.
As my colleague Jim Downie has pointed out, Biden’s exit from the race not only sharpens public awareness of Trump’s age and communication struggles, it also shields Democrats from accusations of hypocrisy. Now, as Harris energetically lays out how she wants to improve the country, Trump’s bizarre speeches look even more concerning than they did before. After all, during his first term, Trump’s imprecise, impulsive way of communicating made him exceptionally dangerous when speaking about sensitive diplomatic and national security issues, such as in his policies toward North Korea. Those risks will only be greater if he becomes president again. And it’s genuinely chilling to imagine a less capable, less focused Trump handling another major public health crisis such as Covid. Trump's seeming decline isn't his worst quality — but it likely would make many of his vices worse.