Donald Trump, never one to take criticism lightly, seems to be especially unnerved by recent questions about his mental and physical fitness. And his attempts to defend himself against such questions, the Washington Post notes, are only exacerbating the issue. Per the Post, Trump recently derailed a meeting with his reelection campaign to discuss at length how well he performed on a cognitive screening test—part of the physical he took more than two years ago—and wonder aloud whether he ought to challenge Joe Biden to take it. “Some of the questions he said he’d aced,” Ashley Parker and Josh Dawsey write, including “being able to repeat five words in order.”
The meeting scenario comes on the heels of Trump’s seemingly stilted trip down a ramp at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and his apparent struggle to raise a glass of water to his mouth at the same appearance. Predictably, Trump contended that the ramp was “slippery” and performed a bit during his Tulsa rally over the weekend wherein he chugged from a glass and tossed it aside, much to the [delight] of his supporters.
At the same time, Trump’s primary argument against Biden has been Biden’s supposed senility. As the Post reports, Team Trump is so confident that Biden’s incompetence will be their selling point in the upcoming election that they recently made the case for having four presidential debates instead of three. Last week, Trump’s campaign lobbied for an additional debate, so as to give Biden ample space to make what they expect to be “more mistakes than Trump on the debate stage.”
Even as his campaign attempts to hammer home this message, Trump’s obvious sensitivity to the issue is giving his opponents ammunition. “What we’re seeing over the past few weeks is really the issue of what gets under his skin,” Republican strategist Doug Heye told the Post.
The Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump Republican group, has been doing just that, releasing an ad last week titled “#TrumpIsNotWell” that capitalized on his “trouble speaking, trouble walking” to illustrate him as “a weak, unfit, shaky president.” In another video released shortly after the Tulsa rally, the group capitalized on his inability to generate a sizable crowd, comparing the “sad, weak, low-energy” turnout to Trump himself. In an emailed statement to the Post, Trump’s campaign fired back: White House spokeswoman Sarah Matthews “[challenged] anyone who absurdly questions this president’s health to spend one day trying to keep up with his rigorous schedule.”
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