Cognitive Decline? Experts Find Evidence Trump’s Mind Is Slowing (2024)

Hints of Donald Trump’s cognitive decline have been seen for the past several months, perhaps even years, as he campaigns to return to the White House, and experts are noticing.

The health and science publication STAT spoke to several experts in memory, psychology, and linguistics about patterns in Trump’s speech, which seems to growing more incoherent. Comparing his speeches from this year to those from 2017, researchers discovered that Trump uses shorter sentences, confuses his word order more often, repeats words and topics, and frequently goes on tangents.

These changes in Trump’s speech could be due to something as benign as mood changes or as serious as the beginnings of Alzheimer’s disease, the experts said. One academic, social psychologist James Pennebaker, performed a statistical analysis of transcripts from Trump speeches between 2015 and 2024, and found telling differences in how the former president and convicted felon speaks.

Pennebaker, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, found that Trump has increased his “all-or-nothing thinking,” using words such as “always,” “never,” and “completely.” This, along with his decrease in the use of positive words and increased references to negative emotions, could be a sign of depression, Pennebaker said.

A sharp increase in all-or-nothing thinking is linked to cognitive decline, Pennebaker added. “Another person [whose] all-or–nothing thinking has gone up is Biden,” he said.

Pennebaker also found that Trump has spoken more about the past since 2020, with less time speaking about the future, and uses simpler words and sentence structures now compared to before he was elected president. Pennebaker citied a metric for analytic thinking where Trump measures quite low on complexity of thought: Most presidents score in a 60 to 70 range in their speeches, but Trump’s speeches land him between 10 and 24.

“I can’t tell you how staggering this is,” Pennebaker told STAT. “He does not think in a complex way at all.”

During the 2024 campaign, Trump has made many gaffes, including mixing upCongresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, seemingly forgetting events right after they happen, and fumbling during speeches. There have been so many incidents that his opponents have even made video supercuts of his missteps. Even while he was president, former White House staffers and people like Representative Nancy Pelosi say there were clear signs of cognitive decline. With President Biden withdrawing from the 2024 election in part due to concerns over his mental acuity, perhaps Trump ought to consider whether his own mental state makes him unfit for leadership.

It turns out that Donald Trump had something nice to say about Minnesota Governor Tim Walz during the protests over George Floyd’s death in 2020.

At the time, ABC News reported Wednesday, Trump praised the now-Democratic vice presidential nominee, telling a group of state governors that Walz “dominated” and saying he was an example for other governors to follow.

“I know Governor Walz is on the phone, and we spoke, and I fully agree with the way he handled it the last couple of days,” Trump said on the June 1, 2020, phone call, a recording of which was obtained by ABC.

“I was very happy with the last couple of days, Tim,” Trump added. “You called up big numbers, and the big numbers knocked them out so fast it was like bowling pins.”

Trump also claimed on the call that it was his suggestion that Walz call in the National Guard to help manage the protests, which the Harris campaign categorically denied. The Trump campaign said Wednesday that Trump only praised Walz for listening to him.

“Governor Walz allowed Minneapolis to burn for days, despite President Trump’s offer to deploy soldiers and cries for help from the liberal Mayor of Minneapolis,” Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to ABC News.

“In this daily briefing phone call with Governors on June 1, days after the riots began, President Trump acknowledged Governor Walz for FINALLY taking action to deploy the National Guard to end the violence in the city,” Leavitt added.

The audio puts a serious damper on the Trump campaign’s claim that Walz was supposedly soft on crime and mishandled the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.

J.D. Vance was not seen as the popular choice when Donald Trump selected him as his number two—and the Ohio senator has proven even less popular since joining the ticket.

Several polls have indicated that Vance has overwhelmingly underperformed among American voters, making him the least popular nonincumbent veep candidate since 1980. Vance’s popularity has sunk by 8.8 percentage points since his vice presidential candidacy was announced at the Republican National Convention, according to a polling average aggregated by FiveThirtyEight.

One poll conducted by Public Policy Polling on July 31 found that 47 percent of polled Americans found Vance to be unfavorable, while just 30 percent considered him favorable. An ABC News-Ipsos poll conducted between July 20 and July 27 found that Vance’s favorability had dropped by nine points, and an AP-NORC poll conducted between July 15 and July 29 saw Vance’s favorably drop by eight points.

That’s in stark contrast to other recent vice presidential nominees, who all managed to keep their heads above water in the weeks following their nominations.

Voting blocs that have turned away en masse from Vance include women, independents, and Black voters. His favorability with those groups has tanked by double digits, according to The Washington Post. Vance’s reputation has also collapsed with college-educated voters, with whom his image has declined by 28 percent, according to an August Marist poll.

Donald Trump has tried desperately to back out of his presidential debate with Kamala Harris, which was previously scheduled for September 10—so now, J.D. Vance has offered to take it off his plate.

During Vance’s rally in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, Wednesday, the Republican vice presidential nominee inexplicably invited Harris to debate next week.

“So here’s my offer to Kamala Harris: If she’d like to do a debate with me on August 13, I’ll do it,” Vance said.

Before President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, Harris had agreed to debate Vance on CBS News on either July 23 or August 13. But Trump declined to commit his running mate to a debate.

In the weeks since, Harris has been elevated to the Democratic presidential nominee (she was officially certified as the nominee on Tuesday), challenging Trump to a debate. While Harris’s circ*mstances have obviously changed, Vance voiced his skepticism that anything was certain.

“I don’t think she wants to anymore, because one, she probably doesn’t even know that she’s going to be the Democratic nominee, and two we don’t know who the vice presidential nominee is going to be, either,” he said.

Vance claimed that it was still unclear whether Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, whom Harris tapped on Tuesday, would be the nominee because “he’s got a lot of skeletons that are coming out of the closet.”

“We’ll see if the Democrats pull a bait and switch on Tim Walz, or on Kamala Harris, just like they did with Joe Biden,” Vance warned.

Just as Vance can’t seem to come to terms with the fact that he’s not debating Harris anymore, Trump can’t seem to cope without Biden.

On Tuesday night, Trump wrote a surreal post on Truth Social in which he imagined Biden crashing the Democratic National Convention to seize the nomination back from Harris.

Fanfiction aside, Trump and Vance just can’t seem to face the reality that this is a fundamentally different race from the one they signed on for. Their slate of bad excuses for not debating Harris and Walz respectively has betrayed the depths of their obstinate, delusional approach to campaigning, as well as something much more troubling: that the two are plainly incapable of adapting to their new opponents.

Kamala Harris has officially pulled ahead of Donald Trump, according to two key national polling averages.

Harris and Trump were neck and neck toward the end of July, with Harris leading by a narrow 0.2 percent on July 28, according to FiveThirtyEight.

Over the course of little more than a week, the gap between Harris and her Republican opponent widened to 1.8 percent, after several recent polls found that she was polling between one and four points ahead of Trump.

As of Wednesday, the vice president was leading Trump 45.2 percent to 43.3 percent, according to Project 538.

Real Clear Politics, another poll aggregator, had Harris trailing Trump by 1.8 to 2 percent at the end of July. Over the course of the last week, Harris officially surpassed Trump, leading 47.4 percent to 46.9 percent.

While that polling average reported a smaller lead for Harris, only 0.5 percent, it represents a major change in momentum for the Democratic Party, which has uniformly trailed Trump over the last six months, according to RCP.

Several other polls have also found Harris seizing the lead. VoteHub’s national poll aggregation found that Harris was leading by 0.3 percent. A poll The Economist published Tuesday had Harris in the lead, as well, beating the former president 47 percent to 46 percent. An NPR/Marist poll published Tuesday found that Harris had secured a lead, at 51 percent to Trump’s 48 percent.

Across the board, Harris has seen a significant uptick in positive polling in early August, which should cause Trump some concern.