Cognitive Decline? Experts Find Evidence Trump’s Mind Is Slowing

Hints of Donald Trump’s cognitive decline have been seen for the past several months, perhaps even years, as he campaigns to return to the White House, and experts are noticing.

The health and science publication STAT spoke to several experts in memory, psychology, and linguistics about patterns in Trump’s speech, which seems to growing more incoherent. Comparing his speeches from this year to those from 2017, researchers discovered that Trump uses shorter sentences, confuses his word order more often, repeats words and topics, and frequently goes on tangents.  

These changes in Trump’s speech could be due to something as benign as mood changes or as serious as the beginnings of Alzheimer’s disease, the experts said. One academic, social psychologist James Pennebaker, performed a statistical analysis of transcripts from Trump speeches between 2015 and 2024, and found telling differences in how the former president and convicted felon speaks.  

Pennebaker, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, found that Trump has increased his “all-or-nothing thinking,” using words such as “always,” “never,” and “completely.” This, along with his decrease in the use of positive words and increased references to negative emotions, could be a sign of depression, Pennebaker said.

A sharp increase in all-or-nothing thinking is linked to cognitive decline, Pennebaker added. “Another person [whose] all-or–nothing thinking has gone up is Biden,” he said. 

Pennebaker also found that Trump has spoken more about the past since 2020, with less time speaking about the future, and uses simpler words and sentence structures now compared to before he was elected president. Pennebaker citied a metric for analytic thinking where Trump measures quite low on complexity of thought: Most presidents score in a 60 to 70 range in their speeches, but Trump’s speeches land him between 10 and 24.

“I can’t tell you how staggering this is,” Pennebaker told STAT. “He does not think in a complex way at all.”  

During the 2024 campaign, Trump has made many gaffes, including mixing up Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, seemingly forgetting events right after they happen, and fumbling during speeches. There have been so many incidents that his opponents have even made video supercuts of his missteps. Even while he was president, former White House staffers and people like Representative Nancy Pelosi say there were clear signs of cognitive decline. With President Biden withdrawing from the 2024 election in part due to concerns over his mental acuity, perhaps Trump ought to consider whether his own mental state makes him unfit for leadership.  

J.D. Vance is begging people to stop calling him and Donald Trump weird.

During a campaign stop in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, on Wednesday, Vance was asked to respond to the whole “weird thing,” which was popularized by Minnesota Governor Tim Walz before he was tapped to be Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate. 

The Republican vice presidential nominee attempted to dispel rumors of his weirdness. 

“I think that what makes Donald Trump and I good candidates and a good team is that we’re normal guys who wanna make this country great again, and we want Americans to be able to live the American dream,” he said.

Vance quickly pivoted into slinging some dirt of his own. He called Walz “pretty weird” for not kissing his wife onstage during his rally in Atlanta, which drew a crowd of more than 12,000 people. At Vance’s rally across town, the Ohio senator attracted a group of just over 200 people, according to local news outlet WHYY.  

Throughout Vance’s appearance Wednesday at Wollard International, an airplane part manufacturer, Vance made his best case for just how normal the Republican ticket is. But for Vance, even softball questions elicited strangely hostile, awkward answers. 

At one point, Vance was asked why people in Wisconsin would want to get a beer with him. 

“I guess, I guess they’d wanna have a beer with me because I actually do like to drink beer,” he said, signaling his apparent normalcy. “I probably like to drink beer a little bit too much, but that’s OK, I’m sure the media won’t give me too much crap over that.”

Vance proceeded to gush about his running mate, saying he’d never met someone “who likes normal people more than Trump.”

This week, Vance has been traveling solo, stopping in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, never far from the Harris-Walz campaign. On Friday, he will be rejoined in Montana by former President Donald Trump, who hasn’t campaigned all week. 

Donald Trump has spent weeks trying to disavow Project 2025 since it became clear just how deeply unpopular the christo-nationalist agenda is among American voters. He even went as far as to claim that he knew “nothing about Project 2025” after the leader of the group organizing it, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, called for a “bloodless” revolution. But new evidence shows that Trump did know about the plan—and Roberts—as early as April 2022, when the two were photographed on a private flight together, smiling.

“I personally have talked to President Trump about Project 2025,” Roberts told The Washington Post that month, “because my role in the project has been to make sure that all of the candidates who have responded to our offer for a briefing on Project 2025 get one from me.”

Trump and Roberts took that flight, which the Heritage Foundation had chartered, from Trump’s home in Palm Beach, Florida, to the annual Heritage Foundation conference on the state coast. Trump was the conference’s keynote speaker.

“They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do,” Trump said in his speech.

Project 2025 reflects Trump’s core political philosophy, and was designed to be a transition playbook to expedite the first 180 days of a potential second Trump presidency. But the 920-page Christian-nationalist manifesto boasts what would otherwise be considered outrageous policy positions, including dismantling staples of the executive branch such as the Department of Education.

It also proposes revisiting federal approval of the abortion pill, a national ban on pornography, placing the Justice Department under the control of the president, slashing federal funds for climate change research in an effort to sideline mitigation efforts, and repealing policies that help LGBTQ+ people and single mothers, on the basis that these laws threaten “Americans’ fundamental liberties.”

Trump’s campaign has grown increasingly frustrated by reporting on the affiliation between the campaign and Project 2025’s agenda, despite their apparent linkage and the program’s intention of enacting the former president’s wish list.

The two share political philosophies and key allies, including former Trump advisers Stephen Miller and John McEntee. In fact, at least 140 Trump staffers currently work for Project 2025. And as much as Trump wants to distance himself from the apparatus, Project 2025 has been thoroughly involved in staffing a future Trump presidency: Roberts has claimed the project has already “trained and vetted” more than 10,000 people to replace executive branch employees should the presumptive GOP presidential candidate win in November. But they may have more on the way—in November, Trump allies claimed they were looking to install as many as 54,000 pre-vetted Trump loyalists to the executive branch via a “Schedule F” executive order.

“Never before has the entire movement … banded together to construct a comprehensive plan to deconstruct the out-of-touch and weaponized administrative state,” Project 2025’s former director, Paul Dans, told Axios at the time.

Another architect of Project 2025, Russel Vought—whose simmering extremism has been fueled by year-long partnerships with renowned Christian nationalists—“is likely” to be appointed to a high-ranking position in a second Trump administration, the Associated Press reported Monday.

Regardless, senior Trump advisers have warned news outlets against reporting on the connections, repeatedly insisting that Project 2025 has no affiliation or involvement with the Trump campaign, and have instead pointed to Agenda47 as Trump’s official platform. They do not offer an explanation as to why Agenda47 is almost identical to Project 2025.

It turns out that Donald Trump had something nice to say about Minnesota Governor Tim Walz during the protests over George Floyd’s death in 2020.

At the time, ABC News reported Wednesday, Trump praised the now-Democratic vice presidential nominee, telling a group of state governors that Walz “dominated” and saying he was an example for other governors to follow.

“I know Governor Walz is on the phone, and we spoke, and I fully agree with the way he handled it the last couple of days,” Trump said on the June 1, 2020, phone call, a recording of which was obtained by ABC.

“I was very happy with the last couple of days, Tim,” Trump added. “You called up big numbers, and the big numbers knocked them out so fast it was like bowling pins.”

Trump also claimed on the call that it was his suggestion that Walz call in the National Guard to help manage the protests, which the Harris campaign categorically denied. The Trump campaign said Wednesday that Trump only praised Walz for listening to him.

“Governor Walz allowed Minneapolis to burn for days, despite President Trump’s offer to deploy soldiers and cries for help from the liberal Mayor of Minneapolis,” Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to ABC News.

“In this daily briefing phone call with Governors on June 1, days after the riots began, President Trump acknowledged Governor Walz for FINALLY taking action to deploy the National Guard to end the violence in the city,” Leavitt added.

The audio puts a serious damper on the Trump campaign’s claim that Walz was supposedly soft on crime and mishandled the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.

Since Harris announced Walz as her running mate, both Trump and J.D. Vance have accused Democrats of antisemitism, Sarah Huckabee Sanders called Walz far left and was trolled for her efforts, and Vance has taken hollow shots at Walz’s two decades of military service. While it’s too early to tell if any of those attacks will stick, right now it seems like Trump, Vance, and the rest of the GOP are struggling for a rhetorical win, and Democrats hope that will translate to an electoral win for Harris and Walz.

J.D. Vance was not seen as the popular choice when Donald Trump selected him as his number two—and the Ohio senator has proven even less popular since joining the ticket.

Several polls have indicated that Vance has overwhelmingly underperformed among American voters, making him the least popular nonincumbent veep candidate since 1980. Vance’s popularity has sunk by 8.8 percentage points since his vice presidential candidacy was announced at the Republican National Convention, according to a polling average aggregated by FiveThirtyEight.

One poll conducted by Public Policy Polling on July 31 found that 47 percent of polled Americans found Vance to be unfavorable, while just 30 percent considered him favorable. An ABC News-Ipsos poll conducted between July 20 and July 27 found that Vance’s favorability had dropped by nine points, and an AP-NORC poll conducted between July 15 and July 29 saw Vance’s favorably drop by eight points.

That’s in stark contrast to other recent vice presidential nominees, who all managed to keep their heads above water in the weeks following their nominations.

Voting blocs that have turned away en masse from Vance include women, independents, and Black voters. His favorability with those groups has tanked by double digits, according to The Washington Post. Vance’s reputation has also collapsed with college-educated voters, with whom his image has declined by 28 percent, according to an August Marist poll.

But confusingly, Trump has continued to send Vance out to campaign events all week, while the Republican presidential nominee has remained largely out of the public eye. Given Vance’s low appeal, it’s unclear how this strategy helps the campaign.