Now Trump Is the One With the Age Problem
The former president’s health and mental acuity haven’t received nearly enough scrutiny.
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It was billed as an early showcase event in the United States’ 2024 presidential election season. How the aging politician held up promised to go a long way toward determining his viability as a candidate.
He had more than ample time with the microphone. After a coherent beginning, the presidential aspirant repeatedly launched into sentences that trailed off into incoherence. He seemed to lose energy, droning on in near whispers, almost as if talking to himself. The more he spoke, the more he disgorged what sounded like sheer nonsense.
A performance like this would surely be enough to doom most presidential candidates, especially with this year’s focus on age, cognitive ability, and overall vitality. A candidate unable to dispel concerns such as these would have to drop out of the race. Right?
Not in this case. I’m not referring to the debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump but rather the latter’s keynote address at the Republican National Convention last week—a speech that even now has not received nearly enough scrutiny.
For the past three weeks, Biden’s aging has so utterly consumed the attention of U.S. media and much of the public that Trump’s competence and cognition have largely escaped serious attention. Now that Biden has abandoned his candidacy in favor of his vice president, Kamala Harris, the 78-year-old Trump has become the oldest presidential nominee of a major political party in U.S. history. It is his health and mental acuity that should be under the spotlight.
Hopefully, impartial medical experts will weigh in with their own assessments. But in what follows, I will draw on Trump’s best recent demonstration of his fitness for the job, using nothing but his own words delivered at the convention under circumstances thoroughly under his control. This is not meant as a partisan exercise but rather a textual analysis of his speech on July 18. Readers, of course, can and should judge for themselves.
The opening sections of Trump’s speech were fairly unremarkable, by the standards of U.S. political campaigns. “To every citizen, whether you’re a young or old man or woman, Democrat, Republican, or independent, Black or white, Asian or Hispanic, I extend to you a hand of loyalty and of friendship,” he said.
But from there, his address moved almost without segue into a series of claims, some of which he repeated multiple times, making them more grandiose as he went along. Many of these concerned the U.S. economy. “Nobody’s ever seen an economy pre-COVID, and then we handed over a stock market that was substantially higher than just prior to COVID,” Trump said, already appearing to drop words here and there and mangle his sentences.
A few minutes later, Trump claimed that “we had an economy the likes of which nobody, no nation had ever seen. China, we were beating them at levels that were incredible. And they know it. They know it. We’ll do it again, but we’ll do it even better.”
These claims are not borne out by the facts. Trump was the first U.S. president since Herbert Hoover to leave office with fewer U.S. jobs than at the start of his mandate. By the end of his term, the trade deficit with China was larger in absolute terms than when he entered office. According to the World Bank, in 2021—after Trump’s four years in office—U.S. economic growth did not surpass 6 percent; that year, China’s exceeded 8 percent.
Pivoting to attack the Biden administration in an area where it appeared most vulnerable, Trump denounced inflation, which he said was “simply crushing our people like never before.” Yet according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, domestic inflation has cooled from a high under Biden of more than 9 percent in June 2022 to about 3 percent. Whether he has forgotten or was merely cherry-picking his numbers, Trump also failed to note what people my age and older experienced and usually remember from the 1970s and ’80s: that inflation rates in the United States were often in the double digits, peaking at around 13.6 percent in 1980.
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Trump moved on to claim that he would “immediately” end the inflation crisis, repeating what has become a stock slogan for him: “We will drill, baby, drill”—in other words, produce oil and gas “at levels that nobody’s ever seen before.” But as he promised to restore energy independence, he failed to acknowledge some basic facts: The country is already producing record amounts of hydrocarbons and doing so well in excess of what the U.S. economy consumes.
And so it went with other promises.
For instance, the former president claimed without proof that China and Mexico had stolen more than two-thirds of the United States’ auto industry. But not to worry. “Manufacturing jobs, we’re going to get them all back. We’re going to get them all back, every single one of them,” he said.
Trump also said he gave Americans the “largest tax cut”—which is untrue—and pledged, “We’ll do it more.” This led to other promises that seem untenable. Returning to energy, he said, “We will … supply not only ourselves, but we will supply the rest of the world, with numbers that nobody has ever seen. And we will reduce our debt, $36 trillion. We will start reducing that. And we will also reduce your taxes still further.” At the same time, he pledged “to protect Social Security and Medicare.” How to achieve such apparently contradictory goals went unaddressed.
Comments on foreign policy were littered throughout the speech, but these did not hew any closer to the facts. Trump spoke often of what he called the “illegal immigration crisis,” claiming falsely that “the invasion into our country [is] killing hundreds of thousands of people a year.”
At a time when unemployment rates are not far from historical lows, Trump said that “Americans are being squeezed out of the labor force, and their jobs are taken.” He followed this with a claim that mathematicians would probably take issue with: “By the way, you know who’s taking the jobs, the jobs that are created? One hundred and seven percent of those jobs are taken by illegal aliens.” (These immigrants, he said later, were coming from prisons, jails, mental institutions, and “insane asylums.”)
Elsewhere, Trump pronounced that “the world was at peace” when he was president—a statement that was not even true within the United States, where the murder rate soared during his tenure. Peace was another subject that he kept returning to. “I will end every single international crisis that the current administration has created,” he said. He also twice boasted that he “could stop wars with just a telephone call”—followed by a phrase that defies ready comprehension: “It properly stated it would never start.”
On security, he took credit for design changes to Washington’s naval destroyers. “These are now the most beautiful,” he said. “They look like yachts.”
He also vowed to build an “Iron Dome missile defense system to ensure that no enemy can strike our homeland,” adding that Israel’s system prevented all but one missile fired at it by Iran from doing any damage. That single missile, he said, “was badly wounded.” Trump did not appear to realize that the Iron Dome was designed to intercept and destroy short-range weapons such as rockets and artillery, not missiles. (Israel has a separate defense system for long-range missiles.) Nor did he acknowledge that the Iron Dome can only defend a modest area. Never mind that the United States has no nearby enemies that are likely to fire short-range weapons against it or that its territory is hundreds of times larger than Israel’s.
Meanwhile, Trump had fond words for Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Of the latter, he said, “He’d like to see me back, too. I think he misses me, if you want to know the truth.” (At a rally following the speech, Trump also praised Chinese President Xi Jinping as a “fierce” and “brilliant” man who “controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist.”)
People who have followed Trump closely over the years may find much of this deeply familiar. Many are also apparently untroubled. But in this season of cognitive concerns, what preoccupied me even more than his unfounded or ill-advised pronouncements were the many hints of irrationality or incoherence. There were sentences bereft of logic or ordinary conclusions, and there were complete flights of fancy.
“I, you know, the press is always on because I say this,” the former president said at one point. “Has anyone seen The Silence of the Lambs? The late great Hannibal Lecter. He’d love to have you for dinner.”
It can’t be true that the press is “always on,” whatever that means, because if it were paying as much attention to Trump’s rich mixture of incoherent statements and blatant falsehoods as it devoted to Biden’s verbal stumbles, it would not let up its drumbeat until a second major candidate is forced to address his mental fitness for the job.
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Howard W. French is a columnist at Foreign Policy, a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and a longtime foreign correspondent. His latest book is Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War. Twitter: @hofrench