Is he rambling on? Is he disengaged from his audience? Is he showing signs of cognitive decline? Or do former President Trump's long-winded speeches demonstrate his genius, his ability to, as he puts it, “weave” disparate stories into a beautiful tapestry?

The 78-year-old Republican candidate's rambling mannerisms, and what they say about his mental state, have become the latest fixture in a race already in turmoil after President Biden, 81, withdrew this summer amid questions about his age and mental health.

Trump, who has said in recent weeks that he would “deport” Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, to Venezuela, said he has support from “the vice president's family” — that is, the family of Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor who is not vice president but is running for president.

He falsely claimed he was in a helicopter crash with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. Trump has repeatedly criticized former President Barack Obama, but his actual target appears to have been President Biden, claiming the false statement was “sarcastic.”

In August, science and health focused website Stat News reported: Trump's way of speaking Comparing speeches from recent months to those from 2017, several researchers noted “an increase in short sentences, disorganized word order, repetition, and lengthy digressions.”

These changes “can have a variety of causes,” experts told Stat, “some benign, some more worrying, including mood changes, a desire to appeal to a particular audience, natural aging, or the onset of cognitive disorders like Alzheimer's disease.”

James Pennebaker, a social psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, conducted a more formal analysis for Stat, based on the full transcripts of 35 of Trump's interviews conducted between 2015 and this year. Using statistical software, he found that the use of absolute words like “always,” “never” and “completely” had increased by about 60 percent.

“Trump's recent conversations have also shown a decline in positive language. The increase in 'black-and-white' thinking may also be linked to changes in cognitive abilities,” Pennebaker said, adding that Biden is another individual who has seen an increase in 'black-and-white' thinking.

Last week, critics on the left They picketed the New York Times headquarters. He called on the media to stop “pretending sanity” to Trump's incoherent rhetoric.

Kathleen Hall Jamison, Fact Check “There has always been a question about whether Donald Trump is in touch with any recognizable reality,” John F. Kennedy, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, said in an interview.

She said Trump's style has always been marked by boasting and hyperbole, but that he has recently been making some decidedly odder statements. “He's making more of that than he used to,” she said. “He's making more off-topic statements.”

Jamieson said Americans need to ask two questions about Trump's communication skills: “Does this say anything significant about his ability to be president? And should it factor into our vote or not?”

Trump has made it clear he is aware of the criticism, and has repeatedly defended his speaking style in recent weeks. At a rally in Pennsylvania, he asserted that even English professors are astonished by the intricate “weave” of his delivery. He has accused the “fake news media” of deliberately misrepresenting his sarcastic style and claiming that he suffers from a cognitive disorder.

Busy In Savannah, Georgia.Trump on Tuesday criticized Biden's mental state and questioned Vice President Kamala Harris' competency.

“You're talking about cognitive impairment? She's much more cognitively impaired. [Biden] “Yes,” he said.

Caroline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, told the Times that reports about his mental ability would lead to “a bunch of rubbish stories based on a bunch of 'sources' who have no idea what they're talking about” that were “trying to distract from the fact that Joe Biden, the sitting president, has been eliminated as a candidate for the Democratic nomination due to his apparent cognitive decline.”

“President Trump is an incredibly smart man,” Leavitt added, “and he keeps a rigorous campaign schedule every day.”

At a rally in Tucson this month, Trump suggested that it's not just his opponents who have doubts about his onstage behavior. He reportedly called former first lady Melania Trump, who had watched a recent speech on television, and asked her, “Did you see how great my speech was tonight?” The president reportedly told her that people loved it.

“Yeah, maybe, but you look awful,” she replied, Trump said. “I couldn't even find the stairs to get off the stage.”

He pretended to be indignant and said he had to explain to his wife that he had been joking, that he was imitating Biden but that the “fake news” had distorted his sarcasm.

Trump supporters appeal for a more lenient interpretation of his campaign, saying they go to the former reality TV star's rallies because they know he will entertain with unconventional or fantastical comments, like when he wondered whether he would rather be attacked by a shark or electrocuted. (“I'd take electrocution any day.”)

For MAGA followers, moments like this are further evidence that their hero is forthright and authentic, unlike Harris and other politicians who remain glued to a teleprompter.

As questions grow over Trump's tone, media analyst Jamieson urged reporters to treat Trump like Trump, but in a different way. Reporters should abandon traditional reporting principles of brevity and conciseness and quote Trump in full to make clear how he actually expresses himself, Jamieson said.

On that point, it might be best to start by defending Trump's foul-mouthed behavior at a town hall meeting he held in Michigan last week with Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

“I have to say, so I write long, sometimes very complicated sentences and paragraphs that all tie together, and I do that a lot. Raging CainThat's the story. I do that with the aircraft carrier catapult story. I do that with a lot of different stories. Dr. Hannibal LecterI use this as an example of people coming out of Silence of the Lambs. They say, 'That's terrible.' So they say, for example, in this long, complicated area that I just talked about, there are many different areas.”

He continued to talk about cars.

“The bottom line, like I said, is the most important thing: We're going to attract more factories to your state and this country to make cars. We're going to be bigger than we were before. But the fake news, you know, there's a lot of people in the town hall. This is a lot of people. But the fake news wants to say, 'Oh, he was rambling.' No, it's not rambling. That's the genius part. It's when you can connect the dots.

“Now, Sarah, if you can't connect the dots, you've got a problem. But all the dots are connected, and there's a whole lot of story being told in that little sentence.”

The Harris campaign said about X: Citation There was no comment on Trump's remarks.

Concerns about mental health and age have long dogged presidential campaigns, with media outlets questioning whether Bob Dole and Ronald Reagan were too old to serve as chief executive officers.

This topic gained the most attention in 2020, when Trump and Biden ran as the oldest candidates in history for the presidency. Trump famously challenged Biden to take a cognitive ability test, bragging that he passed it by memorizing the words “person. woman. man. camera. TV.”

(Experts say the test is similar to the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), which is used to detect early signs of mild cognitive impairment.)

In 2024, Biden's awkward gait and sometimes distracted facial expression again raised the issue of his cognitive function in later life. The topic inevitably came up when Biden and Trump debated in June, when Biden's vacant stare raised alarm bells among Democrats. Biden quickly abandoned his reelection campaign.

Democrats have since questioned why Trump's public actions have received less scrutiny, noting that he will be 82 by the end of his next term in the White House. Critics have pointed to his harsh “wordplay” denunciations and misidentification of key figures, such as when he said it was former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley who did not do enough to defend the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, when in fact he was referring to then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

The Trump campaign has made clear that it does not exempt its current opponent, Harris, 59, from cognitive criticism.

Videos of Harris's sometimes rambling remarks have become a staple for Republican critics, including her vague reference to falling from a coconut tree and her oft-repeated line about being “freed from the burdens of the past.” Those scenes, once fodder for critics, have been remixed by her fans and transformed into eulogistic TikTok videos, Instagram memes and Etsy merch.

Before Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump, the media tended to tread carefully about presidential candidates' mental health, partly out of a desire for objectivity but also out of fear of a repeat of what happened to Barry Goldwater, the Republican senator from Arizona who ran for president in 1964.

An article in the now-defunct magazine Fact was headlined “1,189 Psychiatrists Say Goldwater Is Mentally Unfit to Be President!” and cited the results of an informal poll of American psychiatrists, none of whom had actually met Goldwater.

After his crushing defeat by Lyndon B. Johnson, Goldwater sued the magazine for libel and won, after which the American Psychiatric Association instituted the “Goldwater Rule,” stating that “it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he has conducted an examination and obtained proper authorization.”

As a result, psychiatrists today are generally hesitant to make armchair diagnoses.

Dr. Zaldy Tan, director of the Memory and Healthy Aging Program at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, noted that partners at law firms are sometimes required to undergo neurological evaluations. There's no such requirement in politics. So what are the standards?

“I think the tricky part is where to draw the line between what's age discriminatory and what's really fair,” says Tan. “Reviews are driven by what work is considered important,” which, she says, will also be difficult to agree on.

Jamieson encouraged voters to watch candidates closely and distinguish between behavior that is of real concern and minor incidents. The latter category includes getting someone's name wrong or boasting about crowd sizes. Jamieson said many people make careless mistakes when identifying people, and Trump has a long history of boasting.

Other statements, such as Trump's claim that Harris' audience size was faked using artificial intelligence-generated imagery, also deserve further scrutiny, she said.

“If he truly believes that, he's delusional,” Jamieson said.