Medical expert explains what presidential debate revealed about Trump’s cognitive fitness

Mental health experts are “very concerned” about Donald Trump’s performance during the presidential debate, with a psychiatry professor saying he showed “marked cognitive decline.”

According to Richard A. Friedman of Weill Cornell Medical College, the 78-year-old man struggled to answer questions and defend himself when he faced Kamala Harris on Tuesday.

The former president has often boasted that he passes mental skills tests with flying colors and is “better cognitively” now than he was 20 years ago.

But Friedman said the 90 minutes against Harris painfully exposed his waning powers.

“If a patient came to me with the verbal incoherence, tangential thinking, and repetitive speech that Trump now regularly exhibits, I would almost certainly refer him or her for a thorough neuropsychiatric evaluation to rule out cognitive illness,” he added.

The former president watched Joe Biden withdraw from the White House race after the 81-year-old Democrat botched his answers during a performance that resulted in a car crash during their June debate.

But attention is now focused on Trump himself, who will be the oldest US president ever if he wins in November.

“While Kamala Harris certainly showed some stiffness and repetition, her speech remained within the normal range of politicians, who have a reputation for harping on their favorite talking points over and over again,” Friedman wrote in the Atlantic Ocean.

‘In contrast, Donald Trump’s expressions of those trends were alarming.

“He showed some striking, yet familiar, patterns that are often seen in people with cognitive decline.”

Friedman said he watched the debate in Philadelphia with an eye for the candidates’ “vocabulary, verbal and logical coherence, and ability to adapt to new topics.”

“It was often difficult, if not impossible, to follow Trump’s train of thought,” he wrote.

‘Dodging the question is an age-old tactic for winning debates. But Trump’s response appears to go beyond dodging.

‘It is both oblique, in the sense that it is completely irrelevant to the question, and indirect, in the sense that it is confused and never gets to the heart of the matter.’

The GOP leader has made a virtue of his unconventional way of speaking, calling it “the weave.”

“You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about, like, nine different things that all come together brilliantly,” he told an audience last month.

“And then my friends who are English professors say, ‘This is the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.’”

But Freidman said his “strategy” on Tuesday was disturbingly incoherent and “beginning to look increasingly less strategic and more uncontrollable.”

“Harris, for her part, also displayed some verbal tics and relied on hackneyed phrasing,” he noted. “For example, she invited viewers to ‘get it’ more than 15 times.

But Trump’s phrases are so disjointed, so unusual, and so overused that they can hardly be considered normal language.

‘Trump has harped on immigration at every opportunity, a weak point for Harris. But many of the former president’s repetitions seemed compulsive, not strategic.

‘After praising Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán, Trump spoke unprompted, at length and without any clarity about gas pipelines in the United States and Europe, an issue unlikely to appeal to many voters.

‘A few minutes later he brought up the pipelines again. The moderators interrupted him for a commercial break.’

Harris had worked closely with her team in the days leading up to the debate to rile up the former president, appearing to irritate him with comments about the size of his rallies and the fact that he had been “fired” by 81 million people.

But it was his cognitive responses, rather than his emotional responses, that concerned the professor.

“Even in cases where Trump could reasonably have defended himself, he was unable to produce basic evidence that would exonerate him,” Friedman alleged.

‘When Harris made her infamous comment about ‘very good people on both sides’ in reference to the white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, Trump could have indicated that he had already indicated, ‘I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be totally condemned.’

“But he didn’t.”

Republican Rep. Ronny Jackson, a former White House physician, insisted last year that the former president remains “incredibly sharp.”

“He has a better memory than I do, than you do. We all know that,” he told Fox News’ Sean Hannity.

However, Friedman said the cognitive tests Trump said he passed were designed only to detect pronounced cognitive dysfunction.

“That’s why they’re fairly easy to pass,” he wrote. “They ask simple questions like ‘What’s the date?’ and challenge participants to spell the world backwards or write a whole sentence.

Tuesday’s presidential debate was, among other things, an excellent real-world test of the candidates’ cognitive fitness. Any reasonable mental health expert would be deeply concerned about Donald Trump’s performance.

‘A condition such as vascular dementia or Alzheimer’s disease is not uncommon for a 78-year-old.

‘Only a careful medical examination can determine whether someone actually has a diagnosable disease. It is not enough to observe Trump, or anyone else, from a distance.

For people suffering from such an illness or condition, there are a variety of treatments and services available to help them and their loved ones cope with the decline.

“But that doesn’t mean they’re all fit to serve as commander in chief.”