Mental health experts were “deeply concerned” by Donald Trump’s performance in the presidential debate after he showed “striking cognitive decline,” a psychiatry professor said.
The 78-year-old rambled in his answers and had difficulty defending himself when confronted by Kamala Harris on Tuesday, according to Richard A. Friedman of Weill Cornell Medical College.
The former president has frequently boasted about successfully passing mental ability tests and has claimed he is now “cognitively better” than he was 20 years ago.
But Freidman said the 90 minutes against Harris left his declining powers starkly exposed.
“If a patient were to present to me with the verbal incoherence, tangential thinking and repetitive speech that Trump now regularly demonstrates, I would almost certainly refer him or her for a rigorous neuropsychiatric evaluation to rule out cognitive illness,” he added.
Donald Trump rambled in his responses and struggled to defend himself when confronted by Kamala Harris on Tuesday, according to Richard A. Friedman of Weill Cornell Medical College.
Harris also displayed stiffness and repetition, but her speech “stayed within the normal realm of politicians,” according to the psychiatry professor.
The former president watched Joe Biden drop out of the White House race after the 81-year-old Democrat slurred his answers during a car-crash performance at their debate in June.
But the focus has been on Trump himself, who, if he wins in November, will be the oldest US president ever elected.
Professor Richard A. Friedman
“While Kamala Harris certainly exhibited some stiffness and repetition, her speech remained within the normal realm of politicians, who have a reputation for harping on their favorite talking points,” Friedman wrote in the Atlantic.
‘On the contrary, Donald Trump’s expressions of these tendencies were alarming.
‘It showed some surprising, yet familiar, patterns commonly seen among people with cognitive decline.’
Friedman said he watched the debate in Philadelphia with an eye toward the candidates’ “vocabulary, verbal and logical coherence and ability to adapt to new issues.”
“Most of the time, following Trump’s line of thinking was difficult, if not impossible,” he wrote.
‘Avoiding the question is an old tactic for winning debates. But Trump’s response appears to go beyond evasion.
“It is both tangential, in the sense that it is completely irrelevant to the issue, and circumstantial, in the sense that it rambles on and never gets to the point.”
The Republican Party leader has made a virtue of his unconventional speech patterns, which he calls “the fabric.”
Former President Donald Trump has unequivocally declared that “there will not be a third debate,” after a new poll showed a majority believe he lost Tuesday’s contest.
“You know what the fabric is? I’ll talk about, like, nine different things that come together brilliantly,” he told an audience last month.
“And it’s like, and my friends who are, like, English teachers, they’re like, ‘That’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.'”
But Freidman said his “fabric” on Tuesday was alarmingly incoherent and “beginning to look less strategic and more uncontrollable.”
“Harris, for his part, also displayed some verbal tics and relied on tired formulations,” he noted. “For example, he invited viewers more than 15 times to ‘understand’ things.”
‘But Trump’s linguistic turns are so disjointed, so unusual and so frequently uttered that it’s hard to consider them normal speech.
‘Trump spoke at every opportunity about immigration, a weak topic for Harris. But many of the former president’s repetitions seemed compulsive, not strategic.
‘After praising Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán, Trump spoke spontaneously, at length and unclearly about gas pipelines in the United States and Europe, a topic unlikely to resonate with many voters.
‘A few minutes later, he started talking about the ducts again. The moderators interrupted him for a commercial break.’
Harris had worked intensively with her team in the days leading up to the debate on ways to rile up the former president, appearing to irritate him with jibes about the size of crowds at his rallies and being “fired” by 81 million people.
But it was his cognitive reactions rather than his emotional response that worried the professor.
“Even in cases where Trump could have reasonably defended himself, he was unable to articulate basic exculpatory evidence,” Friedman said.
‘When Harris made her infamous comment about ‘very fine people on both sides’ in relation to the 2017 white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump could have pointed out that even then he had specified: ‘I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be totally condemned. ‘
“But he didn’t.”
Tuesday’s debate was reportedly the first time the two candidates faced each other.
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Republican Rep. Ronny Jackson, a former White House physician, insisted last year that the former president remains “incredibly lucid.”
“He has a better memory than me and you. We all know that,” he told Fox News’ Sean Hannity.
But Friedman said the cognitive tests Trump claims to have passed are only designed to detect pronounced cognitive dysfunctions.
“That’s why they’re pretty easy to pass,” he wrote. “They ask simple questions like ‘What date is it?’ and challenge participants to spell the word backwards or write a complete sentence.
Tuesday’s presidential debate was, among other things, an excellent real-world test of the candidates’ cognitive abilities, and any impartial mental health expert would be very concerned about Donald Trump’s performance.
‘A disease like vascular dementia or Alzheimer’s disease would not be out of the ordinary for a 78-year-old.
‘Only a careful medical examination can establish whether someone actually has a diagnosable disease; simply observing Trump, or anyone else, from afar is not enough.
For those suffering from such diseases or conditions, there are a number of treatments and services to help them and their loved ones cope with their deterioration.
“But that doesn’t mean any of them are qualified to serve as commander in chief.”
