It has been noted that in a speech earlier this year, former President Trump was mocking President Biden’s ability to walk through the sand when he suddenly switched to talking about the old Hollywood icon Cary Grant via Stat News.
“Somebody said he [Biden] looks great in a bathing suit, right? When he was in the sand and he was having a hard time lifting his feet through the sand, because you know, sand is heavy. They figure three solid ounces per foot. But sand is a little heavy. And he’s sitting in a bathing suit. Look, at 81, do you remember Cary Grant? How good was Cary Grant, right? I don’t think Cary Grant — he was good. I don’t know what happened to movie stars today,” he said at a March rally in Georgia.
Trump went on to talk about contemporary actors, Michael Jackson, and border policies before returning to the theme of how Biden looks on the beach.
Shifting from topic to topic, with few connections is a pattern of speech called tangentiality — is one of several disjointed and occasionally incoherent verbal habits that seem to have increased in Trump’s speech in recent years, according to interviews with experts in memory, psychology, and linguistics.
Back in 2017, Trump’s first year in the White House, an analysis showed Trump’s speaking style had deteriorated since the 1980s. Seven years on, now that Trump has the GOP presidential nomination, STAT has repeated the analysis.
The experts noted a further reduction in Trump’s linguistic complexity and, while none said they could give a diagnosis without an examination, some said certain shifts in his speaking style are potential indications of cognitive decline.
Both Trump’s and Biden’s cognitive abilities have received extensive public scrutiny in an election initially involving two men of retirement age, though concerns about Biden’s mental competence have faded since he announced he wouldn’t be seeking re-election.
Trump has often stated that he’s taken and passed an unspecified cognitive test. Last week, speaking to the National Association of Black Journalists, he said, “I want anybody running for president to take an aptitude test, to take a cognitive test. I think it’s a great idea. And I took two of them, and I aced them.” The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
Questions about Trump’s memory are typically raised when he makes a glaring verbal slip, such as mistaking names. Among the most publicized examples in recent months were when the 78-year-old confused former president Obama and Biden, and spoke about Nikki Haley when he meant to refer to Nancy Pelosi. Yet for all the attention they drew, experts in aging and cognition said those errors were relatively insignificant.
“Everyone to some degree has some level of mixing up of names,” said Ben Michaelis, a clinical psychologist who has carried out cognitive assessments for the New York Supreme Court. “It’s a bit of a red herring.” Zenzi Griffin, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin agreed, noting the phonetic similarities between “Nikki Haley” and “Nancy Pelosi” (both names start with “N” and both their first and last names end with an “ee” sound.) “That level of similarity really makes it an easy error to make,” she said.
