Donald Trump's cognitive decline 'is much more apparent than Biden's'

donald trump's cognitive decline 'is much more apparent than biden's'

Donald Trump’s age and memory have been heavily scrutinised in recent months as the 2024 presidential election looms (Picture: Getty Images North America)

Donald Trump’s ‘slurred speech’ and ‘repeated errors’ shows he has cognitive decline ‘more apparent’ than Joe Biden’s, according to a professor.

For months, campaigners, pundits and uhm-and-erring voters have been grappling with the idea that either of the leading 2024 presidential candidates would be the oldest president in history by the end of their term.

This would break the current record held by Joe Biden – the 81-one-year-old dubbed a ‘well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory’ in a report by Special Counsel Robert Hur last week.

Trump, meanwhile, is a not exactly spritely 77.

As both men face questions over whether they’re simply too old to be president again, one political professor has said Trump’s cognitive decline is ‘more apparent’ than Biden’s.

Paul Quirk, a political science professor at the University of British Columbia in Canada, told Newsweek how Biden’s grey hair and wrinkles have been the go-to targets for Republican attacks.

donald trump's cognitive decline 'is much more apparent than biden's'

How old Joe Biden is has been a key concern for some voters (Picture: Reuters)

Yet, he says: ‘From the standpoint of the campaign, Biden’s age should be less of an issue than Trump’s more apparent cognitive decline – displayed in slurred speech and gross, repeated errors in one campaign rally after another.’

Quirk feels that Biden will be just fine if he’s re-elected later this year and his age won’t ‘compromise his performance as president’.

‘He has been, if anything, surprisingly effective in policy terms,’ Quirk said, adding that the special counsel’s report that called attention to Biden’s ‘memory problems’ has been ‘widely disparaged as a partisan hit job’.

Biden ‘willfully retained and disclosed’ classified documents as a private citizen after stepping down as vice president, a report released last Thursday found.

In a 345-page report to the Justice Department, Hur found there wasn’t enough evidence ‘to establish Mr Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt’.

Investigators did, however, find instances of the Democratic leader muddling dates and even forgetting when he was vice president.

An often tongue-twisted Trump has a track record for this too, however. Among his many, many gaffes, Trump confused Biden with Barack Obama, his Republican opponent Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi and the presidents of Hungary and Turkey.

He also garbled a speech last month at a rally in Laconia, New Hampshire, with some of his words being incoherent according to listeners.

Both Biden and Trump have released doctor’s notes fawning over how fit they are for their age but have otherwise been vague about their health.

Voters remain unconvinced. An ABC News/Ipsos poll found that 59% of Americans feel Biden and Trump are too old to once again be president.

Ageing experts have stressed that the candidates’ advanced age shouldn’t be a deciding factor in who people vote. Nor should it define how suited someone is to sitting in the Oval Office.

Any gaffes could be chalked up to a lack of sleep from flying across multiple time zones and the pressures of campaigning, S Olshansky, a professor of public health at the University of Illinois at Chicago and research associate at the Center on Aging at the University of Chicago, said at a webinar on Thursday.

donald trump's cognitive decline 'is much more apparent than biden's'

Trump has, in recent months, mixed names up during campaign speeches (Picture: EPA)

Biden and Trump have about a 75% chance of living to the end of their second presidencies, Olshansky added, which is slightly higher than the national average for men their age of 70%,

‘I get a phone call every time either one of them stumbles or says something that’s off-kilter,’ Olsahnsky said at the panel organised by the American Federation for Aging Research.

‘They’re going, “What’s wrong?”

‘I’m going, “Seriously, this happens to virtually all of us.”‘

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