After years of politely ignoring President Joe Biden’s mental decline, the New York Times suddenly puts Donald Trump under its metaphorical MRI a month before Election Day, while shrugging off concerns about the actual man supposedly in the White House and running the country, Democrat Joe Biden. The off-lead story in Monday’s paper was headlined:
TRUMP REIGNITES QUESTION OF AGE WITH RAMBLINGS
INCREASING STRIDENCY
Analysis and Observers Note Changes in His Speech Patterns
White House correspondent Peter Baker penned the 3,000-word hit piece alongside “Artificial Intelligence” journalist Dylan Freedman (yes this was a full-blown “scientific” study of the words Trump has used in speeches over the years):
Former President Donald J. Trump vividly recounted how the audience at his climactic debate with Vice President Kamala Harris was on his side. Except that there was no audience. The debate was held in an empty hall. No one “went crazy,” as Mr. Trump put it, because no one was there.
Anyone can misremember, of course. But the debate had been just a week earlier and a fairly memorable moment. And it was hardly the only time Mr. Trump has seemed confused, forgetful, incoherent or disconnected from reality lately. In fact, it happens so often these days that it no longer even generates much attention.
He rambles, he repeats himself, he roams from thought to thought -- some of them hard to understand, some of them unfinished, some of them factually fantastical. He voices outlandish claims that seem to be made up out of whole cloth. He digresses into bizarre tangents about golf, about sharks, about his own “beautiful” body….
The Times offered thin reeds to make its case for Trump’s cognitive decline.
According to a computer analysis by The New York Times, Mr. Trump’s rally speeches now last an average of 82 minutes, compared with 45 minutes in 2016. Proportionately, he uses 13 percent more all-or-nothing terms like “always” and “never” than he did eight years ago, which some experts consider a sign of advancing age.
Of course, the Times joined the rest of the media in hiding Biden’s clear decline in cognitive ability. The Times defended Biden a day before the infamous Biden-Trump debate in June, with a Baker story linking to a pathetic Times report that dismissed clear evidence of Biden’s emerging decrepitude as “cheap fakes” circulated by Republicans: “Biden Battles Age Doubts and a Trail of Misleading Videos.” Perhaps not so “misleading” after all.
Baker, like many liberals, has the nasty habit of psychoanalyzing Republicans for things that would be passed over as harmless or normal when done by Democrats.
How much his rambling discourse -- what some experts call tangentiality -- can be attributed to age is the subject of some debate. Mr. Trump has always had a distinctive speaking style that entertained and captivated supporters even as critics called him detached from reality. Indeed, questions have been raised about Mr. Trump’s mental fitness for years.
John F. Kelly, his second White House chief of staff, was so convinced that Mr. Trump was psychologically unbalanced that he bought a book called “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” written by 27 mental health professionals, to try to understand his boss better….
Baker has cited that wacky 2017 book (which surely violated the profession's "Goldwater Rule") before, one that his paper’s own left-wing editorial board found too much, although its contributors regularly pop up in the paper’s letters section, hurling repetitive anti-Trump rants under the guise of professional concern. Book editor Bandy X. Lee was fired from Yale in 2020 after a bizarre diagnosis of criminal defense lawyer and Trump defender Alan Dershowitz on Twitter. Lee was cited by Baker himself in a January 2018 news story: “Trump, Defending His Mental Fitness, Says He’s a ‘Very Stable Genius’.”
Baker continued:
Some of Mr. Trump’s cabinet secretaries had a running debate over whether the president was “crazy-crazy,” as one of them put it in an interview after leaving office, or merely someone who promoted “crazy ideas.” There were multiple conversations about whether the 25th Amendment disability clause should be invoked to remove him from office, although the idea never went far. His own estranged niece, Mary L. Trump, a clinical psychologist, wrote a book identifying disorders she believed he has. Mr. Trump bristled at such talk, insisting that he was “a very stable genius.”
The most credible sources to the Times are people who know Trump and hate him an unusual amount of ferocity.
