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What are you talking about? Trump speaks in public regularly and gives frequent interviews. These interviews are more critical than anything Kamala Harris or Joe Biden are subjected to. Trump was literally just shot in the head at a rally and had the presence of mind to stand up and pump his fist yelling, "Fight! Fight! Fight!" Before that, he debated Joe Biden in conditions that lead to Biden having to resign from the race. He was just at Arlington and gave several appearances in public there. What decline? Trump isn't hiding.
I think "Trump's cognitive decline" is just a talking point from the DNC, though I thought it had petered out a couple of weeks ago.
I think Trump actually has gotten worse at getting a point out. When he wanted to cite Snopes fact checking Charlottesville at the Biden debate he couldn't quite land the point in a way where you knew what the hell he was talking about if you weren't already familiar with what he was trying to say.
He’s been living politics for so long now he assumes everyone else has a similar knowledge base.
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I mean, Trump has a pretty unique cadence to his speech. It's always been a bit rambly, a bit non sequitur. The usual hallmarks of senility, the inability to hold a conversation thread, are kind of difficult to apply to Trump.
That said, when I have bothered to watch long form Trump speeches or interviews, while he's not at Biden levels of word salad and starring slack jawed into space, he's definitely lost a step from 2020. And he's lost a lot of energy and force from his performances since 2016. I was watching that clip of him talking about his brother on Theo Vonn's podcast, and while he was human and sincere in a way you rarely see politicians, he also told the same part of the story what felt like a dozen times, got distracted, repeated it again, etc, for like 15 minutes.
And like I said, that's kind of always been part of Trump. But like Biden's stubbornness, it seems cranked up to 11 as he nears the cusp of "If this were Grandpa, we wouldn't be letting him drive anymore".
I'm still voting for him. I don't think applying "cognitive decline" to him the way it was applied to Biden is remotely fair or honest. But it's also impossible to ignore that he's lost a step or three since 2016.
It doesn’t really work as a political ploy the way it does with Joe. Trump still seems to have some vitality. See his golf outing with the PGA star.
I do think it is fair to ask “what about in three years”
I hate to be pedantic but Bryson DeChambeau is not a PGA star. He's a former PGA Tour star, and possibly a LIV Golf star, if you're of the opinion that LIV Golf actually has stars.
Something tells me you don’t hate to be pedantic.
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The bullet wasn't really a back and forth debate. Neither was Biden, speaking facetiously.
And if there's no decline, why does his team not want open mics for him?
Trump has been subjected to intense public scrutiny. He speaks in public over and over and over again. We know what it would look like if he were senile: his handlers would hide him from the public and run a front-porch campaign, as they did with Biden, as they're essentially doing with Kamala.
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