A growing number of medical professionals, political commentators and even former allies claim Donald Trump is showing signs of cognitive decline, calling into question his mental fitness for a possible second term as president.
A Trump town hall event in Pennsylvania on Monday took a "bizarre turn", said NBC News, after instead of taking questions as scheduled, the Republican nominee instructed staff to play music and then spent 40 minutes "swaying on stage". "Hope he's okay," Kamala Harris said in a subsequent post on X.
What did the commentators say? "What's alarming is how the rate of Trump's bizarre speech and political decisions have been increasing," said Harry Segal, senior lecturer in psychology at Cornell University. Trump is now "avoiding events where he has to respond coherently and spontaneously" and has refused a second presidential debate. His "abrupt decision to play DJ is yet another sign of his accelerating cognitive decline".
Trump is starting to make Joe Biden "look like Oscar Wilde", said Lee Siegel in The New Statesman, but there is a "tacit prohibition against discussing Trump's obvious mental incapacity in public". That's beginning to change, said The New York Times: analysis of Trump's rallies, interviews, statements and social media posts since 2015 shows that his speeches have grown "darker, harsher, longer, angrier, less focused, more profane and increasingly fixated on the past".
Yet Trump "dismisses any concerns and insists that he has passed cognitive tests", characterising his digressions as a rhetorical device that he terms "the weave". His campaign team has cited Trump's "extremely busy and active campaign schedule" as evidence of his "stamina".
What next? Trump said in August that he would "gladly" publish his medical records. But with less than three weeks to go until the election, his campaign team has yet to release "any basic health data", said Axios.
Harris shared her medical reports on Saturday in "a thinly veiled challenge to Trump to do the same", said The Independent. "It makes you wonder, why does his staff want him to hide away?" Harris said.
Trump retorted on his Truth Social platform that his Democrat rival should be the one to take a cognitive test. Her actions "have led many to believe that there could be something very wrong with her", he wrote. |