'Could not keep a straight thought': Trump turns 78 amid concerns about mental fitness

Donald Trump turned 78 on Friday, a birthday that puts the spotlight on his own age amid a presidential contest in which either of the two major-party candidates would enter office as the oldest president in the nation's history.

President Joe Biden's age and mental fitness have been longstanding worries among voters and the topic of persistent media coverage. Trump's campaign and its allies have also played up his 81-year-old rival's apparent gaffes, even sharing manipulated clips that have been edited to remove context.

Yet Trump's own mental state is getting renewed attention — and some apprehension. According to CNBC anchor Andrew Ross Sorkin, several CEOs who met with Trump at a business roundtable on Thursday left the meeting with concerns about his cognitive state.

"I spoke to a number of CEOs — who I would say walked into the meeting being Trump supporter-ish or thinking that they might be leaning that direction — who said that he was remarkably meandering, could not keep a straight thought, was all over the map," Sorkin said on Friday morning.

The people he spoke to "actually walked out of the room less predisposed to him," Sorkin said, adding that one person told him it may "not be any different or better than Biden," suggesting a lack of contrast between the two men's mental fitness for the highest office. (The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake has argued that the real comparison to Biden’s age and mental fitness should be Trump’s judgment and stability.)

For his birthday, Trump entertained a celebration during a meeting with Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill the day before, and he is scheduled to host an event with supporters in Florida on Friday night.

The former president — who believes that a person is like a battery with a finite amount of energy — has said in the past that 78 "is not old."

flux_of_grey_kittens on June 14th, 2024 at 22:07 UTC »

Dude was never sharp to begin with ..

RuncibleSpork on June 14th, 2024 at 21:37 UTC »

Recent? He was spouting this in 2015, and it's been accelerating downhill since then:

"Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I'm one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! — but when you're a conservative Republican they try — oh, do they do a number — that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune — you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged — but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me — it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are — nuclear is so powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what's going to happen and he was right, who would have thought? — but when you look at what's going on with the four prisoners — now it used to be three, now it’s four — but when it was three and even now, I would have said it's all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don't, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years — but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us, this is horrible."

La-Boheme-1896 on June 14th, 2024 at 21:28 UTC »

Recent appearances? Is the entire country having memory lapses? There have been questions about his mental faculties and the obvious declne in his vocabulary and ability to construct words into intelligible sentences since at least 2016.

And he's clearly getting worse.