BROKEN RECORD

CNN Anchor Exposes Trump, 80, Over Bizarre Rally Glitch

The weird occurrence comes amid swirling questions about the president’s mental acuity.

Jake Tapper has exposed President Donald Trump for telling the same story twice just minutes apart at a rally.

On Monday’s edition of The Lead, Tapper zeroed in on a Sunday New York Times report by Peter Baker and Dylan Freedman, who wrote that Trump has become “more profane, more absolutist, longer-winded, and less coherent than he was in 2016.”

GREAT START

Trump, 80, Explodes in All-Caps Election Day Meltdown

Ewan Palmer

Freedman joined Tapper to discuss an Oct. 20 rally in Greenville, North Carolina, where Trump told the same tale twice in less than half an hour.

“It was the story of Willie Horton and an infamous ad from the 1988 presidential election,” Tapper explained. “It started about one minute into the speech.”

“Michael Dukakis, years ago, let out one murderer—Willie Horton—and he went out to kill three women, rape and kill three women,” Trump said in the first clip.

“I mean, he got his facts wrong, but even more bizarre than getting the facts wrong is that fewer than 30 minutes later, he told the exact same crowd the exact same story,” Tapper remarked.

CNN then played a second clip of Trump declaring, “There was a governor of Massachusetts, years ago, not that long ago, but years ago, and he was running, and he released a man named Willie Horton.”

“Look, I get it. He’s 80, and campaigning is hard and all that, but how much in your analyses did you find the president repeating himself?” Tapper asked.

Freedman explained that the Times used AI-assisted analysis to examine Trump’s remarks dating back to 2015 and found that “President Trump is going into these rambling, digressive passages about two and a half times more often than he used to.”

“We found that he’s using swear words almost three times as much as he was then,” he added, referring to 2016. “We’re not doctors, but some medical experts point to that as a sign of age-related disinhibition.”

The Times report found Trump averages nearly 15 swear words per 10,000 words at rallies, up from six per 10,000 a decade ago, and that his rally speeches now run 85 minutes, double the 42 minutes they lasted in 2016.

The report flagged a rally in Pendleton, South Carolina, where Trump struggled to recall the Nobel Peace Prize and initially called it the “Pulitzer Prize.” It said he mispronounced the Strait of Hormuz as the “Hormone Strait” and told supporters to “cheat like hell” on Nov. 3.

Trump has brought up passing a cognitive test at rallies, bragging, “I’m the only president to pass without exception... because I’m a freaking genius!”

White House spokesman Davis Ingle rejected claims that Trump has lost a step, citing his “sharpness, unmatched energy, relentless work ethic and historic accessibility.”

White House physician Dr. Sean P. Barbabella noted a perfect 30/30 score on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment and described his performance as “excellent.”

See more of our coverage in your search results.

ADD THE DAILY BEAST ON GOOGLE

Leigh KimminsReporter

Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast here.