Your support helps us to tell the story
Support Now
As your White House correspondent, I ask the tough questions and seek the answers that matter.
Your support enables me to be in the room, pressing for transparency and accountability. Without your contributions, we wouldn't have the resources to challenge those in power.
Your donation makes it possible for us to keep doing this important work, keeping you informed every step of the way to the November election
Donald Trump, now the oldest candidate to run for president, is facing intense scrutiny over his age and mental sharpness — and his biographer thinks Trump is “hyper-aware” that he is cognitively slipping and trying to make up for it with “convoluted explanations,” according to a report.
President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race after a fumbled debate performance that had voters questioning his mental acuity. Now Trump is facing similar questions and is trying to provide explanations for his frequent mentions of Hannibal Lecter, garbled words, incomplete thoughts, conflating the names of prominent figures, and his penchant for rambling.
But the explanations caused one Trump biographer to believe the GOP nominee knows full well that he is losing his mental footing.
Timothy O’Brien, author of TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald, told The Guardian that he believes the former president, who once dubbed himself a “very stable genius,” fully understands that he is saying more ludicrous things than ever and is trying to make up for it.
“The reason he’s now offering these convoluted explanations of his speech patterns in his public appearances is because he’s hyper-aware that people have noted that he’s making even less sense than he used to,” O’Brien said. “What we’re seeing now is a reflection of someone who’s very troubled and very desperate.”
On Saturday afternoon, Trump also tried to explain his frequent, and apparently random, references to the “late great Hannibal Lecter,” a fictional cannibalistic serial killer from books and movies including Silence of the Lambs. As it turns out, he was making a statement about migrants, claiming the killer was “representative of people that are coming into our country.”
This type of explanation from Trump is not isolated.
Last week, the former president addressed his tendency to venture off topic. He bragged to a Johnstown, Pennsylvania crowd about the “weave,” or what he calls his tendency to wander in and out — often nonsensically — of multiple conversational threads before circling back to his original point.
“When I do the weave...I’ll talk about nine different things and they all come back brilliantly together,” Trump told the crowd before criticizing the “fake” media as having accused him of “rambling.”
He further defended himself: “Friends of mine that are English professors, they say: ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen,’” Trump said, referring to the “weave.”
Another biographer, Jennifer Mercieca who wrote Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump, offered another reason behind his explained rambling: “He’s very good at putting a marketing spin on anything that might be perceived as a negative.
She told The Guardian: “He’s had a lot of criticism lately for rambling, for being low energy during his rallies, for failing to read the teleprompter properly, mispronouncing words and so his response is to spin it. He says, ‘I have experts, these friends of mine, unnamed others, who are very impressed with my ability to weave.’”
While Trump claims the “weave” is strategic, many rally-goers could be confused by his rhetoric as he tends to leapfrog from topic to topic without any obvious connection.
Take a Wisconsin rally last month, when Trump jumped from bacon to wind turbines in a single minute.
“You take a look at bacon and some of these products and some people don’t eat bacon any more. We are going to get the energy prices down. When we get energy down, you know, this was caused by their horrible energy – wind. They want wind all over the place. But when it doesn’t blow we have a little problem,” he told the La Crosse, Wisconsin crowd.
In another infamous moment that raised eyebrows, Trump’s July rant about electric boats shifted gears to a potential shark attack. He ended the tangent with a series of unusual questions: “Do I get electrocuted if the boat is sinking? Water goes over the battery, the boat is sinking. Do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted, or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted?”
The incident prompted thriller novelist Stephen King to equate Trump’s speech with “listening to your senile uncle at the dinner table after he has that third drink.”
On top of the mental leaps, Trump also frequently mixes up elected officials. He has confused former president Barack Obama and Biden, former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown and California governor Jerry Brown, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and his former UN ambassador Nikki Haley. He also accidentally called Elon Musk “Leon” at Saturday’s Wisconsin rally.
He often tries to chalk up these mistakes to him “joking” or being “sarcastic.” After mixing up the two women, Trump tried to write off the gaffe as a purposeful move: “When I interpose – I’m not a Nikki fan and I’m not a Pelosi fan. When I purposely interpose names, they say ‘He didn’t know Pelosi from Nikki.’….They have something in common: they both stink.”
In the face of his recent slip-ups, Trump has pointed to his cognitive tests. In one memory evaluation, which he took when he was in office, he touted his ability to recall the phrase: “person, woman, man, camera, TV.” He claimed that the test was usually considered quite difficult for others — but not for him: “If you get it in order you get extra points. [The doctor] said nobody gets it in order, it’s actually not that easy, but for me, it was easy.”
More recently, after struggling to pronounce the word “climate” at a rally, the former president defended himself by saying that he had recently “aced” a cognitive test.
