An increasingly incoherent and profane former president Donald Trump, 78, is rambling at his rallies at previously unheard-of lengths and showing signs of confusion that could indicate mental decline, according to a New York Times analysis.
An average rally speech by the elderly Republican nominee for president—who has promised to release his medical records and cognitive tests and then refused to do so—lasts 82 minutes this election cycle, nearly double the 45 minutes he averaged in 2016, a computer analysis by the newspaper found.
In addition to Trump’s well documented rambling, repetitive and winding addresses—punctuated with strange asides about things like his “beautiful” body—among the potential signs of cognitive change are that he curses 69 percent more in speeches than he did in 2016. That could be a sign of disinhibition, a kind of impulsivity that is sometimes attributed to mental decline in old age, the Times said.
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The newspaper also said its analysis found Trump used negative words 32 percent more than positive ones, up considerably from 21 percent in 2016, another potential indicator of cognitive change.
He also uses 13 percent more “all-or-nothing” terms such as “always” or “never” compared to 2016, another potential sign of advanced age.
Meanwhile, Trump’s seeming obsession with the past—his ramblings have been dotted with stale cultural references to Silence of the Lambs, Johnny Carson, Michael Jackson, Cary Grant, and Charles Lindburgh—have not only dated him, but earned a raised eyebrow from one expert in August.
James Pennebaker, a social psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, analyzed 35 Trump interviews from 2015 to 2024 for Stat News and found a 44% increase in sentences focused on the past, which surprised him since presidential candidates ought typically focus on the future.
On the other hand, Pennebaker said Trump has relied on unusually simple words and sentence structures going back to the days before he was president, suggesting he has simply always been an incredibly simplistic thinker.
One analytic metric he used—which tends to place presidential candidates in the 60 to 70 range—placed Trump speeches at 10 to 24.
“I can’t tell you how staggering this is,” he told Stat News. “He does not think in a complex way at all.”
The Times analysis similarly found that Trump speaks at a fourth-grade level, well below the eighth grade average for modern presidents.
Trump has attacked the notion that he is experiencing decline and blamed the media for distorting any seeming errors he makes to attack him: “I go for two hours without teleprompters, and if I say one word slightly out, they say, ‘He’s cognitively impaired.’”
Dr. Bradford Dickerson, a neurologist at Harvard Medical School, told the Times a person’s speaking style can simply “change with normal aging,” though added “if you see a change relative to a person’s base line in that type of speaking ability over the course of just a few years, I think it raises some real red flags.”
Two of Trump’s former allies—who have gone on to endorse his Democratic rival Vice President Kamala Harris—asserted to the newspaper that the former president has shown some form of precipitous decline since he first ran for office.
“He’s lost an ability to put powerful sentences together,” Anthony Scaramucci, the former White House Communications director under Trump, said. “You can like Trump or hate Trump, but he’s been a very effective communicator. The word salad buffet on the Trump campaign is [now] being offered at a discount. You can eat all you can eat, but it’s at a discount.”
“I don’t think anyone would ever say that Trump is the most polished speaker, but his more recent speeches do seem to be more incoherent, and he’s rambling even more so and he’s had some pretty noticeable moments of confusion,” Sarah Matthews, Trump’s former deputy press secretary who is now a Harris supporter, told the Times. “When he was running against Biden, maybe it didn’t stand out as much.”
