It’s quite timely that after writing on article yesterday on media bias, the following headline popped up on my MSN homepage:
“Donald Trump’s cognitive decline worse than Joe Biden’s due to 2 signs, professor says.”
Notice what’s assumed (and what’s assumed is learned best) in the above headline:
We’re to take it as a given that Trump is declining cognitively. The only question is the severity. Of course, the message here is essentially, “Yeah, our guy Biden is senile. But the other guy is even more senile! Vote Incumbent Dementia!”
And that, citizens, is what you call gaslighting.
Joe Biden’s cognitive decline is obvious and severe. Just recently he claimed he’d spoken at 2021’s G7 meeting with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who’d died four years before; worse still, he claimed he’d had a meeting with French President François Mitterrand at the same 2021 affair.
Mitterrand died in 1996.
If, like little Haley Joel Osment in 1999’s The Sixth Sense, Biden could honestly say, “I see dead people,” it would be one thing. But as Special Counsel Robert Hur related in his recent report on Biden’s mishandling of classified documents, the 81-year-old couldn’t even remember when he was vice president.
Biden’s mental state is so bad that it has become the butt of jokes. “Devout Catholic Joe Biden Gives Up Cognitive Tests For Lent,” satirical site The Babylon Bee wrote just last week. “At publishing time, Biden had announced he was also considering giving up talking in coherent sentences, walking in a straight line, and taking live, unscripted questions from the press as part of Lent to show his deep love for the Catholic church,” the site added.
None of this is anything new, though. While campaigning in 2020 already, Biden appeared to forget the name of the man he worked under for eight years, Barack Obama, said he was running for the Senate (as opposed to the presidency), and couldn’t complete the Declaration of Independence’s well-known “all men are created equal” line (video below).
Yet the 2020 Biden seems downright vibrant compared to today’s version, who can barely make it through a prerecorded segment (video below).
Bear in mind, too, that this is all despite Biden’s receiving the best medical care. This includes, rumor has it, taking the drug Namenda, which “is used to treat moderate to severe dementia of the Alzheimer’s type,” informs Drugs.com.
Of course, the Democrats and their public-relations team, the U.S. media, know that this obvious dementia is Biden’s Achilles heel and a major reason he’s trailing Trump in the polls. So they’re seeking to neutralize the issue by putting Trump on the same cognitive plane.
In fact, for at least a few weeks now there have been stories about Trump’s alleged cognitive decline. The one I mentioned at my opening really jumps the shark, claiming Trump’s deterioration actually exceeds Biden’s.
“Prof Paul Quirk, a politics professor at the University of British Columbia, singled out Trump’s ‘slurred speech’ and ‘gross, repeated errors’ as two pieces of evidence of the billionaire’s ‘more apparent cognitive decline,’” writes The Mirror U.S.
The Mirror is quite short on examples, however, providing only one: that “Trump too has come under fire for deranged remarks — including inviting Vladimir Putin to attack America’s NATO allies.”
This is grossly dishonest. The context of the above is that Trump was, in his usual colorful, sometimes hyperbolic fashion, relating at a South Carolina rally a story about how he got NATO allies to pay their bills (short video below). The statement was in the nature of a joke.
You may or may not like the joke; you may call it bad judgment. But it had nothing to do with cognitive decline. In fact, Trump delivered the line perfectly.
I emailed Professor Quirk, by the way, and asked him where the examples of “slurred speech” or “gross errors” were; he answered “Google it.” (In fairness, I wasn’t exactly polite.)
This said, Trump has made a mistake or two, such as when he recently used GOP presidential contender Nikki Haley’s name when he apparently meant to reference Nancy Pelosi (video below).
Though some may say it’s not surprising that one could confuse Haley with a far-left Democrat, the reality is that we all make mistakes no matter our age. I still remember at age 10 mentioning one color (yellow?) when I meant a different one (and my cognitively impaired self still managed to become elementary school Valedictorian). Note, too, that Trump campaigns at a vigorous pace all while dealing with media and lawfare assaults that could wither even a young buck.
Nevertheless, being 77, Trump could’ve lost a step. So I showed due diligence and listened last night to the entirety of his Saturday rally in Waterford Township, Michigan (video below), an event where, as is his wont, he spoke extemporaneously for more than an hour straight. There were no slurred words or gross errors.
Could a cognitively impaired man pull the above off? In fact, as someone who has done professional speaking, I’ll say that I’ve never seen anyone work a crowd better.
This includes Biden’s ex boss, mind you. In fact, below is a video of “renowned speaker” Barack Obama (then 46) at a 2008 rally, sans teleprompter, repetitively stammering and misspeaking and laughing nervously. His excuse, he said, was that he hadn’t gotten “much sleep.” (Note: Trump reportedly sleeps only three or four hours a night.)
My, my, with cognitive decline everywhere, there just must be something in the water.
