Trump fuels cognitive concerns with garbled ‘death penalty’ remark
‘We are an institute in a powerful death penalty. We will put this on,’ the 77-year-old former president said
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Your support makes all the difference.President Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign rolled out a series of videos featuring gaffes and nonsensical phrases from his Republican rival Donald Trump, adding fuel to the fire over concerns about the former president’s cognitive ability.
One clip started mid-sentence, showing Mr Trump speaking in New Hampshire: “Which is incapable of solvin’ even the sollest… smallest problem. The simplest of problems we can no longer solve.”
“We are an institute in a powerful death penalty. We will put this on,” the 77-year-old Mr Trump blundered.
In a separate clip, the 2024 Republican frontrunner seems to be taking the role as narrator, saying, “Yes, oh yes, and quickly says President Trump. We will be there very quickly.”
At a campaign rally in New Hampshire on Saturday, the former president seemed unable to pronounce the word “climate” and instead uttered “clime.”
Mr Trump, at the same event, reassured voters that he recently aced a mental fitness test. “I don’t know if you saw, but a few months ago, I took a cognitive test my doctor gave me,” he told supporters at the rally.
The former president suggested that he had requested to take the test: “I said, ‘give me a cognitive test, just so we can you know,’ because you know what the standards were, and I aced it.”
On Monday, Mr Trump went so far as to claim that he would outperform his GOP rival Nikki Haley in a cognitive test. Speaking on Fox News, he said, “Well, I think I’m a lot sharper than her. I would do this: I would sit down right now and take an aptitude test and it would be my result against her result, and she’s not going to win, not gonna even come close to winning.”
Ms Haley questioned Mr Trump’s cognition after he appeared to confuse her with speaker Nancy Pelosi in a campaign speech, claiming she was in charge of “security” during the January 6th attack on the Capitol.
While serving as president, Mr Trump also boasted about his performance on a cognition test. He bragged about his memory.
He said in 2020: “It’s like you’ll go ‘person, woman, man, camera, TV’. So they’ll say ‘could you repeat that?’ So I said ‘yeah’. So it’s person, woman, man, camera, TV. OK, that’s very good…”
Mr Trump added: “If you get it in order you get extra points. [The doctor] said nobody gets it in order, it’s actually not that easy, but for me, it was easy.”
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