Trump acts erratically. Is this age-related decline?

By Nicholas Kristof

What should we think as Donald Trump urges people to vote in January, confuses places and names, fumbles for words, simplifies his speech patterns, describes recent experiences that did not happen and in public seems increasingly vulgar, menacing and unfiltered?

When President Joe Biden showed his age and stumbled through the June presidential debate, I was among the first commentators to call on him to withdraw from the race. So what about the 78-year-old Republican nominee? Frankly, I wavered about writing this column, for there is an unfortunate history — notably, during Barry Goldwater’s run for president in 1964 — of using quasi-medical language to undermine candidates one disapproves of. That is grounds for great caution. But if we’re trying to gauge a nominee’s fitness for office over the next four years, we also should acknowledge questions of Trump’s aging and capacity to do the job, as we did with Biden.

It’s unarguable that Trump is acting even more erratically than he has in the past. It’s also indisputable that Trump is at an age when many people see a physical or mental decline over the following four years. Perhaps one lesson from the Biden agonistes of this summer is that just as companies move CEOs out before they struggle, we should be wary of electing elderly presidents from either party.

Let’s acknowledge the risks of armchair analysis at a distance and note that Trump still has physical vigor and a defense against suggestions of cognitive decline: For decades, he has behaved outrageously and sometimes been rewarded for it. And some people do not think Trump’s behavior is related to aging. Mark Esper, an honorable man who was Trump’s defense secretary and has criticized him as a “threat to democracy,” said that Trump looks older to him but not obviously changed beyond that.

Others do see significant change.

“It’s hard to see how anybody thinks my uncle is still tethered to reality,” wrote Mary Trump, the former president’s niece and a clinical psychologist.

All of us misspeak at times or can’t find the car keys. For sleep-deprived presidential candidates on whom a camera is always trained, slip-ups are to be expected — and critics aren’t always fair. In February, it was widely reported that Trump had called his wife, Melania, “Mercedes”; even Biden mocked him for that. Fact-checking website PolitiFact reported, however, that Trump did not err: His references were to Mercedes Schlapp, his former aide sitting in the front row.

That said, Trump’s innumerable blunders are well documented. Some may be phonemic paraphasia, the muddling of different sounds common in the elderly, such as referring to “Leon” Musk or to the city of “Minnianapolis.” Trump described the “MK-47” assault rifle, a weapon he said he knew “very well” — even though he meant the AK-47.

One startling lapse came two years ago during a deposition in a legal case. Trump was shown a photo of E. Jean Carroll, who had accused him of rape. After examining the photo, Trump said it was of Marla Maples, his second wife.

An examination this month by my New York Times colleagues Peter Baker and Dylan Freedman found that Trump’s speeches had grown increasingly dark, profane, angry, unfocused and fixated on the past; they said he sometimes seems “confused, forgetful, incoherent or disconnected from reality.”

A computer analysis for that article found that Trump uses swearwords 69 per cent more often now than he did eight years ago, and more all-or-nothing words like “always” or “never.” Some experts see that as a possible marker for declining complexity, subtlety and filtering.

STAT News, which covers health issues, compared Trump’s speeches this year to those of 2017 and found that the recent ones were marked by increased short sentences, confused word order, repetition and digressions. Since 2020, there has also been a 44% increase in Trump sentences focused on the past.

What does all this mean? It’s possible that Trump decided that he can communicate better with angrier, shorter, blunter sentences focused on the past. Some statements perceived as gaffes — such as assertions that immigrants are eating pets — may be a calculated effort to get everyone talking about immigration. But that doesn’t explain his telling people this month that they had another couple of months to cast ballots. Or his mixing up of Biden and Barack Obama, or his apparent confusion of Nikki Haley and Kamala Harris.

There are, I think, many other reasons to be wary of Trump. His record. His policies. His immorality. His reported admiration for Adolf Hitler. We should layer onto that concerns about aging, for Trump by the end of a new term would be the oldest president in history. In that context, his erratic behavior should be disqualifying.

If any of us had an aging parent like Trump, we would gently remove the car keys. As a nation, we should keep him from the nuclear launch codes.