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| From: zax | 9/9/2024 10:12:21 PM | | 2 Recommendations of 1504280 | | | As Debate Looms, Trump Is Now the One Facing Questions About Age and Capacity
With President Biden no longer in the race, former President Donald J. Trump would be the oldest person ever to serve in the Oval Office. But his rambling, sometimes incoherent public statements have stirred concern among voters.
nytimes.com
The last time the nation held a debate with the presidency on the line, a candidate with about eight decades of life behind him faced the challenge of proving that he was still up to the job of running the country. He failed.
Two and a half months later, the cast of characters has shifted and another candidate heading toward the octogenarian club confronts his own test to demonstrate that he has not diminished with age. Whether he passes that test may influence who will be the next occupant of the Oval Office.
At 78, former President Donald J. Trump exhibits more energy and speaks with more volume than President Biden does at 81, but he, too, has mixed up names, confused facts and stumbled over his points. Mr. Trump’s rambling speeches, sometimes incoherent statements and extreme outbursts have raised questions about his own cognitive health and, according to polls, stimulated doubts among a majority of voters.
With Mr. Biden now out of the race, the politics of age have been turned on their head. Mr. Trump is now the oldest person ever to run for president on a major party ticket and, if he wins, would become the oldest president in history by the end of his term, when he would be 82. While he managed to sidestep questions about his own capacity while Mr. Biden was his opponent, the rival he will square off against at Tuesday’s prime-time debate in Philadelphia will be Vice President Kamala Harris, who at 59 is nearly two decades younger.
The issue has been propelled back into the campaign by some of Mr. Trump’s recent public performances, most notably a meandering, hard-to-follow answer to a question on child care at the Economic Club of New York last week. Asked how he would help American working families stressed by the cost of taking care of children, Mr. Trump wandered through a thicket of unfinished sentences, non sequitur clauses and confusing logic that tied the answer to tariffs on imports.
A clip of the exchange went viral and prompted headlines with words like “incomprehensible,” “incoherence” and “gibberish.” The White House and Ms. Harris’s allies pounced, mocking the “word salad,” as multiple Democrats put it. “He couldn’t string together a coherent sentence,” Representative Katherine M. Clark of Massachusetts, the No. 2 House Democrat, wrote on social media.
As a result, analysts said, Mr. Trump will face renewed scrutiny at the debate. “Because the Harris campaign and press drew attention to the incoherence of Trump’s answer to the question about child care, he is now subject to the same ‘coherence’ test as was Biden,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a scholar of presidential communication at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication.
</snip> Rest here: nytimes.com |
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