Donald Trump once again shot himself in the foot while trying to mock President Joe Biden’s cognitive abilities, this time making up a term for the selectively edited videos that conservatives have peddled to portray Biden as feeble.
During a campaign rally in Wisconsin on Tuesday, the former president brought up viral clips of Biden that have flooded right-wing media and Trump’s social media feed in recent weeks. The videos, which supposedly show the president “freezing up” or wandering off, have been blasted by the White House as “cheap fakes.” Independent fact-checkers, meanwhile, have shown that the clips crumble amid the slightest scrutiny once additional context or other angles are taken into account.
Trump first ridiculed his 81-year-old Democratic opponent for “humiliating our country on the world stage,” referencing a clip of Biden speaking to a skydiver who had just landed near a gathering of leaders at the G7 conference this month.
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“He’s actually humiliating us. You saw what happened this weekend. It’s turning the United States into a total joke all over the world,” the ex-president declared. “First, he wandered off the G7 in Europe on this stage. He looked like he didn’t know where the hell he was, but he didn’t know where he was. He’s blaming it now on AI. He’s saying– he doesn’t what [sic] AI is, but that’s OK.”
Then, for the second time in the past week, the 78-year-old ex-president completely flubbed his line when he started taking aim at Biden’s mental acuity.
“But Crooked Joe and his handlers are insisting he’s sharper than ever, and they say the videos of Crooked Joe shuffling around are clean fakes,” he continued. “You know what a clean fake is? They’re deceptively edited. They say they’re deceptively edited. All of the mistakes that he’s made. Every day. He can’t go anywhere without a mistake.”
It was just three days ago when Trump, accusing Biden of making a series of age-related blunders, boasted about his own cognitive test results—only to call the doctor who administered the test by the wrong name.
“Doc Ronny! Doc Ronny Johnson! Does everyone know Ronny Johnson?” Trump exclaimed, calling out former White House physician Ronny Jackson, who is now a Republican congressman and MAGA loyalist.
The ex-president went on to fume that the mainstream media won’t give him the benefit of the doubt even when he’s “perfect,” yet it is always running cover for the current occupant of the White House. He then screwed up the term “cheap fakes,” which refers to cheaply manipulated or distorted videos, once again.
“And I don’t say clean fakes, although they do,” Trump grumbled. “They do that. They do that. They’re the fake news!”
