Donald Trump, gaffe machine, tries to skate old age, cognitive decline issues

Donald Trump wants you to focus on Joe Biden’s issues with old age, and not Trump’s own.

“How foolish, are we? How stupid are our leaders? We can be energy independent and even energy dominant. Yes. Oh, yes. And quickly, says President Trump. We will be there very quickly,” Trump said, in one of two confusing gaffes from a speech in Laconia, N.H., on the eve of the New Hampshire primary, which he will no doubt win, despite the obvious.

I mean, come on, he referred to himself in the third person there; are we sure that he’s even aware that he’s the former President Trump?

Here’s the other gaffe:

“We have become a drug-infested, crime-ridden nation which is incapable of solvin’ even the swollest, smallest problem, the simplest of problems we can no longer solve. We can’t do anything. We are an institute in a powerful death penalty! We will put this on!”

The “swollest” problems that we face as a nation aside, it’s laughable that Trump and his campaign – and the conservative media ecosystem – want to make the age factor one that somehow only is an issue for Biden, who at the least knows that Nikki Haley isn’t the former Speaker of the House.

“You know, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, you know they, do you know they destroyed all of the information and all of the evidence? Everything. Deleted and destroyed all of it. All of it because of, lots of things. Like, Nikki Haley is in charge of security. We offered her 10,000 people.”

This is what Trump said in a speech in Concord, N.H., over the weekend, obviously meaning to refer to Nancy Pelosi, the former House Speaker, with his lie about Pelosi and House Democrats destroying evidence related to the investigation into his attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021.

Haley, for now playing the role of loyal opposition, is playing a little “both sides”-ism with the gaffes.

In an interview on Monday with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, who asked Haley if she wanted to make the case that “the former president is mentally incompetent,” she demurred.

“No, I’m not saying that. What I’m saying is that this is just common sense,” Haley said. “If you have two men running for president that are in their 80s, you are going to get what you get when you’ve got two men running in their 80s. Look at Joe Biden two years ago, he is very much diminished from when he started because this job is hard. There’s a lot of pressure, there’s a lot of late nights, you’ve got to make some tough decisions, and it wears on you. And so, you know, this is tough if you’re 50 years old, it’s even tougher if you’re 80 years old, because you can’t do as much as you could when you were younger. That’s a fact. Any doctor will tell you that.”

This is Haley pumping the brakes for the inevitable – when she has to drop out of the campaign, endorse Trump, and pretend that everything she did and said as a candidate running against him didn’t happen.

What’s hilarious and at the same time profoundly sad about how Republicans defer to Trump is how he never returns the favor.

While Haley won’t use Trump’s repeated gaffes against him, Trump, as he is wont to do, raised issue with Haley’s cognitive abilities, in an interview on Fox News on Monday.

“I think I’m a lot sharper than her,” Trump said, challenging Haley to an “aptitude test,” “and it would be my result against her result, and she’s not gonna win, she’s not gonna even come to close to winning.”

The word salad that came next might make you question him on that boast.

“In fact, when I heard the word ‘cognitive,’ you know, I’ve taken two of them now,” Trump said. “I took one with Doc Ronnie, who’s now a fantastic, you know, White House doctor and a fantastic congressman from Texas. Admiral. The White House doctor. Jackson. Ronny Jackson. And he’s now a great congressman from Texas. I took one then, and I took one recently. I think the result was announced, and it was, I aced it twice. I aced it. But I would say that, you know, I’ve actually called for a cognitive test for anybody running for president because I actually think that’s a good idea. It’d be nice to have an intelligent person be president.”

He might want to rethink that.