“We need to acknowledge he let us down. He went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him. And we can’t let that ever happen again.”

– Nikki Haley, February 2021

The look on Biden’s face during the presidential debate was one that I was very familiar with…

My Dad was a workaholic who usually came home from work hours after the rest of the family had finished dinner. On nights when I saw his car pull into the driveway, I would head for the front door and wait for his key to open the first lock. Then as he put it into the second one I would quietly relock the first one. He nudged the door but it would not open.

“Damn,” I would hear my Dad exclaim just as he once again put the key into the deadbolt and turned it. The knob would turn but the door would not budge. I had already relocked its companion.

“CARL!”

With the jig up, I unlocked the door and opened it. My tired, exasperated father had the same look on his face that Biden had on his during last month’s debate. My Dad was dealing with a teenager who craved his attention; the President was dealing with his 78-year-old predecessor who s any attention at all and who responded to the questions being asked with answers that grew further detached from reality as the night went on.

Trump and his advocates had been setting the stage for months with a narrative that Biden was cognitively impaired; a fiction made easier by his lifelong stutter and his propensity for gaffes. When Biden clearly showed that this narrative was unfounded, like during his strong State of the Union speech, Trump’s forces would explain it away with the preposterous claim that Biden had used “performance-enhancing drugs.” However, Biden’s disastrous performance at last month’s debate gave the narrative the whiff of truth it needed to allow it to spread. His departure from the race became inevitable.

Since he first descended the escalator to announce his candidacy in 2015, Trump’s record of lies and outlandishness has been well documented. Biden and his team should have been well-prepared for the debate. Clearly, they were not. As the lies became more and more outlandish, Biden became increasingly flustered and let himself look like the stumbling old man that Trump had portrayed him as. In the aftermath, the mainstream press ignored the insanity of Trump’s debate performance and focused exclusively on Biden’s responses.

With Biden now out of the race, Trump will become the oldest man to seek the presidency but is this Septuagenarian up to another four years in the White House? The evidence seems to suggest otherwise:

• Are these signs of cognitive decline?

During the 2024 campaign, Trump has confused Barack Obama with Biden on numerous occasions. This includes one speech where he not only said he was leading Obama in the current polls but he beat him in 2016 when he ran against Hilary Clinton). Four times in one speech he confused Nancy Pelosi with Nikki Haley, inserting his former UN ambassador into the lie that Pelosi was responsible for his mob’s attack on the Capitol. He warned that Biden’s actions were leading us on the path to World War 2. Trump tried to excuse his not paying attention to a statement of financial condition he had certified by claiming his focus was on China and Russia and “keeping our country safe.” He was already out of office by the time he signed the document.

Also concerning are the numerous times that Trump has slurred words in the middle of his speeches without any explanation. There are examples of this happening at rallies in New Jersey, Wisconsin, and New Hampshire.

• Sleepy Don?

While Trump had a good laugh labeling Biden as “Sleepy Joe,” he has been the one who has been having trouble keeping his eyes open. He fell asleep numerous times during his trial in New York as the jury heard the evidence they used to convict him of 34 felonies. Is there an underlying health reason for this inability to stay awake or was the court schedule just interfering with the ability to snort Adderall according to his normal schedule?

• Are they lies or has he lost touch with reality?

The evidence suggests that even though Trump has always lied as easily as others breathe, he at least knew what the truth was. For example, witnesses told the committee investigating the insurrection on January 6, 2021, that even as he was publicly preaching the “Big Lie” to his followers, in private he was acknowledging his humiliating loss.

One of the reasons Trump is so successful as a liar is that he is very good at operating in a grey zone, carefully choosing his words so that there is plausible deniability. For instance, in trying to take credit for killing Roe Vs. Wade while trying not to aliene the majority of the electorate who support the right to an abortion, Trump claims that “everybody wanted to get it back to the states, everybody, without exception. Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, everybody wanted it back. Religious leaders.” This blurs the opinion of those, like Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who thought that the right to abortion services should have been based on gender equality, not the right to privacy. However, RBG and all the justices currently sitting on the court agreed during their confrimation hearings that Roe was settled law and that, under the doctrine of stare decisis, should have been respected, not sent back to the states.  

The skill of taking advantage of grey lines seems to be slipping as Trump gets older. For example, his claim during the debate that there was “no terror at all during my administration” is a black and white statement that is easily disproven. As one example, his own Justice Department labeled a 2017 mass murder in New York that killed eight people as a terrorist attack carried out in support of ISIS.

Even more inconvenient for Trump were instances of right-wing domestic terrorism that occured during his presidency including the killing of a Black man in New York in an attempt to start a race war. There was also a 2019 shooting at a Walmart in Texas that targeted Latinos. In 2018 a Trump supporter mailed improvised explosive devices to Democratic officials.

• What is he talking about?

Despite self-identifying as a “stable genius,” Trump has never shown great intellect, especially concerning science. During his presidency, he declared that the Moon is part of Mars, injecting disinfectant into the body could cure COVID, and windmills cause cancer. Relieved by the voters of his duties in the White House, his theories have only grown stranger.

In a rant at a recent rally, Trump stated that not enough water comes out of faucets to wash your hands. He also complained that there was not enough pressure to wash his “beautiful, luxurient [SIC] hair.” According to the former president, there is a problem with “washing machines to wash your dishes” because they “don’t want you to  have any water.”

One of his strangest tangents was repeated during his convention speech when he spoke about “the late, great Hannibal Lecter.” Somehow this fictional character has something to do with his lie about our borders being open and how the migrants are all either convicts or insane, but they also stealing our jobs, especially the “black ones.”

Are Trump’s doctors concerned with these signs of possible cognitive decline? Given the frequency with which Trump states he is taking cognitive tests, it appears someone might thinkthere is a potential problem. Unfortunately, the only medical evaluations the public has seen were written by a doctor who was running a prescription mill out of the White House. However, Trump’s assertion that these routine tests were difficult should concern all of us. Will the press spend the same amount of energy as they did on Biden to investigate if Trump is mentally capable of assuming the highest office in the land?

Carl Petersen is a parent advocate for public education, particularly for students with special education needs, who serves as the Education Chair for the Northridge East Neighborhood Council. As a Green Party candidate in LAUSD’s District 2 School Board race, he was endorsed by Network for Public Education (NPE) Action. Dr. Diane Ravitch has called him “a valiant fighter for public schools in Los Angeles.” For links to his blogs, please visit www.ChangeTheLAUSD.com. Opinions are his own.