Drs and lawyers have in innate drive to loathe each other, it seems.
I'm not a maga-man. Not voting. In the clips I watched, I didn't see a decline in his mental grasp. He rambles and speaks in a choppy, staccato style. There are moments where he shifts abruptly from one thought to another. But he's always done that.
What are you seeing that's worse in comparison?
I have a bunch of friends and family who are doctors. They’re not conspiracy theorists who then try to get on their high horse about stuff like this. We all get along fine.
But to answer your question, I think you first have to adjust this forum’s echo chamber effect to start from reality.
Biden’s condition in 2020 was exaggerated by a bunch of malicious campaign video cuts of awkward pauses and phrasing. Once you got past the negative campaigning, he was slower, had less energy, and had to work harder than normal to find words, resulting in awkward pauses and slip ups where political operatives would clip videos to make it seem like he never finished his thought or corrected himself. In reality, he was more coherent and spry than that. Remember the campaign stunt where he blew past the reporter on his bicycle? He was able to keep the thread of a speech, even if he had to pause to find words or sometimes said the wrong word.
Trump 2024 is a lot of the same. He’s slower, and lower energy than his norm. A lot more little slip ups. He doesn’t have as many pauses because when he fails at word retrieval he usually just blasts off onto a totally different topic.
Biden gave a State of the Union just a few months ago that was over an hour in length with a structured message that he mostly kept to. The discussion on here criticized Katie Britt’s rebuttal performance more than Biden’s speech. Most of the criticism of Biden was over him mixing up a name.
Trump is misnaming people on a fairly regular basis. These range from similarly mild slip ups like calling Matt Gaetz “Rick Gaetz” or forgetting to name one of his many kids in an acceptance speech where he named all the others, to more concerning ones like calling Nikki Haley “Pelosi” and calling Biden “Obama” where it’s just sort of the negative association controlling his word retrieval.
There’s also a different quality to his rambling. From 2016-2020, Trump’s speech was frequently incoherent, but it was at least usually directed at the intended topic. There was frequent disagreement about what he meant (e.g. when he talked about bleach inside the body and the comments to Lester Holt about firing Comey). But those were instances of incoherence about a specific, relevant, intended topic. Inexplicable digressions were rare (but admittedly they did happen: Windmill cancer and low water pressure.) Now every time I’ve watched him speak it seems like there are multiple instances of his mind floating on the wind like an escaped, empty grocery bag, changing topics mid-sentence.
