Cognitive Decline? Trump Stutters, Stumbles During New York Rally

Speaking in Long Island on Wednesday, Donald Trump was as bombastic and boastful as ever—but also slurred his words on several occasions.

Trump stumbled over words like “migrants” and “Russia” and had trouble stringing sentences together. In another instance, Trump said he was “greater even than Elvis” because unlike the King, he doesn’t have a guitar—a riff that has increasingly featured in his speeches. 

Trump also promoted his wife Melania Trump’s new memoir—but admitted that he hadn’t read it and that he doesn’t know what she wrote about him, telling the crowd, “If she says bad things about me, I’ll call you all up and I’ll say, don’t buy it, get rid of it.” 

Trump’s erratic mental state has been on full display as his presidential campaign enters its final months before November. During last week’s debate with Kamala Harris, he went on long-winded rants unrelated to the questions asked. His speech patterns and alertness looked vastly different from 2016, as CNN demonstrated in a video comparing last week’s debate to one from eight years ago. Cognitive experts have also compared his recent speeches to ones from years ago, and see worrying signs.  

Trump even seems to have his own, false recollection of the debate, telling Fox News’s Greg Gutfeld about a nonexistent audience going “crazy” for him. Somehow, though, Trump remains neck and neck with Kamala Harris in the polls despite these stumbles. With the election less than two months away, will the Harris campaign be able to capitalize? 

Congress has until September 30 to pass a bill that continues to fund the government, but that doesn’t mean that Republicans are all in on a solution.

Fourteen Republicans voted against an iteration of the bill on Wednesday, upending a floundering effort led by House Speaker Mike Johnson to include the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE, Act, a piece of legislation that would require proof of citizenship in order to vote, in the continuing resolution at the behest of Donald Trump. Five House Democrats voted for the SAVE Act in July before it was rolled into the continuing resolution, but just three remained after Wednesday.

“I’m very disappointed it didn’t pass,” Johnson told Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Wednesday. “We ran the right play, we came a little bit short of the goal line, so now we’ll go back to the playbook, we’ll draw it up. We’re already hearing good ideas from our members. And we got time to fix this, and we’ll get it done.”

But despite Johnson’s efforts, he’s still catching flack for the political theater.

“Let me ask you, you keep saying it’s the right play, and you can’t get every Republican to vote for it,” prompted Hannity. “That’s your own party. What are their objections, and how do you get them on board?”

“Well look, there’s a range of objections. Some people look for the perfect piece of legislation. Some people are philosophically opposed to continuing resolutions. Look, I’m one of those. I don’t like this,” Johnson said, before deflecting the blame of months of House chaos onto Democrats in the Senate, claiming Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is the reason why Congress hasn’t passed a dozen appropriations bills that continue to fund the government the traditional way.

Johnson has cryptically alluded to a “plan B” for finding a funding solution but has refused to share the details, further frustrating members of his own party. That could include a six-month continuing resolution, which defense leaders have warned against. That measure would also be stripped of the SAVE Act, which could translate into lost votes from Trumpian loyalists and force Johnson to turn to Democrats for a funding solution.

One unidentified GOP lawmaker told Axios Wednesday that Johnson is “not where the conference is.”

Even if the stopgap bill does manage to scrape by the House, its chances of passing through the Senate are slim to none, setting the stage for an ominously familiar experience to that which preceded former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s exit.

“We now have only a few days left for House Republicans to come to their senses, come to the table, and come together with Democrats to craft a bipartisan agreement,” Schumer said after Wednesday’s House vote.

Does Donald Trump remember that there was no audience at the presidential debate?

During an appearance Wednesday night on Fox News’s Gutfeld! the former president took his obsession with gushing about his inflated crowd sizes a step further. He seemed to invent a crowd where there wasn’t one at all: at his presidential debate with Kamala Harris.

“And they didn’t correct her once, and they corrected me, everything I said, practically. I think nine times or 11 times,” said Trump. “And the audience was absolutely, they went crazy.”

For a moment, the Republican nominee seemed to suggest that there was an actual live audience. He then attempted to correct course.

“I walked off, I said that was a great debate, I loved it. You know you got a lot of people watching, I guess we had 75 million people watching, something like that,” Trump said.

Trump underestimates how easy it is to fact-check him. CNN’s Daniel Dale spotted at least 33 false claims Trump made during the audience-less debate.

Another burgeoning conservative outlet has been tied to Russia, with former advisers to Donald Trump coordinating directly with contributors for Kremlin state media.

Former Trump policy aide George Papadopoulos and his wife, Simona Mangiante, have become involved with Intelligencer, a growing conservative site heavily critical of the war in Ukraine (the right-wing site has no apparent connection with New York magazine’s Intelligencer). Nearly half of the company’s board members are former aides, surrogates, or fake electors for Trump’s previous campaigns, The Guardian reported Thursday.

The site’s financial backing did not indicate that it had received funds directly from the Kremlin. Instead, Intelligencer began as a subsidiary of a right-wing radio station in Australia that covers a host of conservative U.S. issues, including climate change denial and Covid-19 conspiracies, until George Eliason, an American journalist with experience in Ukraine, took over the website. In recent months, Intelligencer’s conspiracy-laden articles have been shared by the likes of Alex Jones and former Trump aide Roger Stone.

“Intelligencer appears to be one of several [Russia-friendly] operations targeting the upcoming U.S. elections, leveraging a network of far-right figures and disinformation tactics,” Olga Lautman, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, told The Guardian.

Intelligencer is far from the only conservative site that’s been busted in a recent government crackdown ahead of the November election. Earlier this month, another pro-Trump media group—Tenet Media—folded under the pressure of a Justice Department investigation that found the company had been backed to the tune of millions of dollars from Russian state-controlled media.

The DOJ indictment accused Tenet and its founders of receiving nearly $10 million from employees of Russia Today as part of “a scheme to create and distribute content to U.S. audiences with hidden Russian government messaging,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in a statement.

The Russian funds paid for videos by popular far-right personalities, including podcaster Tim Pool and Lauren Southern. Pool described himself as a “victim” in the Tenet scandal.

The switch to utilizing more overt methods to sway American voters, including relying on conservative influencers, is a decidedly new strategy for Russian propaganda outfits.

“Since the invasion of Ukraine, Russia has increasingly been forced to rely on networks of proxies and influencers whose conspiracist ‘brand’ generates income and audiences through social media monetization and some of whom Russia has now been caught covertly subsidizing,” Emma Briant, an associate professor of news and political communication at Monash University in Australia, told The Guardian.

But while conservative media tried to wash its hands of the Tenet scandal, the Trump campaign did not, with Trump campaign senior adviser Alina Habba chalking the indictment up to another “hoax.”

“A $10 million payment to some podcasters who had no idea from some ties allegedly to Russia is now going to make a spin on Russia backing Trump,” Habba told Fox News last week.

Speaking to the press Wednesday in front of a crowd of his supporters in North Carolina, J.D. Vance escalated his attacks on immigrants, claiming that even those here legally are in fact “illegal” and subject to deportation.

A reporter asked Vance about the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, whom he falsely accused of killing and eating pets. As the reporter noted, the majority of those immigrants are legally in the United States under Temporary Protected Status, so they wouldn’t be subject to a future Trump administration’s plans to deport all undocumented immigrants. 

Vance’s response was that he still considered them “illegal,” calling the question “a media and Kamala Harris fact-check.”

“Now the media loves to say that the Haitian migrants … they are here legally. And what they mean is that Kamala Harris used two separate programs: mass parole and temporary protective status. She used two programs to wave a wand and to say, ‘We’re not going to deport those people here,’” Vance said. 

“Well, if Kamala Harris waves the wand illegally, and says these people are now here legally, I’m still going to call them an illegal alien. An illegal action from Kamala Harris does not make an alien legal. That is not how this works,” Vance added as his supporters cheered. 

Vance’s remarks Wednesday are in line with his attacks on legal immigration on CNBC last week, claiming that “if the path to prosperity was flooding your nation with low-wage immigrants, then Springfield, Ohio, would be the most prosperous city in the world.” 

This stance flies in the face of what Vance was saying years before he entered politics. In 2012, Vance attacked the Republican Party’s immigration policies at the time, saying that a plan to mass deport “millions of unregistered aliens … fails to pass the laugh test.”  It also flies in the face of the fact that his wife, Usha, is the daughter of Indian immigrants. 

Vance’s North Carolina remarks are disturbing, as he is now calling legal immigrants illegal without knowing anything about how they entered the country, claiming that they were magically made legal by the Biden administration in an illegal action. If Trump or another Republican “waved a magic wand,” it’s doubtful that Vance would be making the same claim. It also sends the message that the chaotic and inhumane immigration policies from Trump’s first administration would be even worse if he is elected again.