Cognitive Decline? Trump Appears to Forget Who He’s Running Against

Donald Trump’s town hall was mostly an uninterrupted rant about the Republican presidential nominee’s various grievances, including an attempt to set the stage to call the upcoming presidential debate rigged against him, regardless of its outcome.

But between the lines of Trump’s ramblings lay a darker truth: that he simply doesn’t remember who he is running against. During a section of his tirade Wednesday night, the former president seemed to romanticize running against President Joe Biden, to the point that he linguistically forgot which candidate he’s actually up against.

“And by the way, New Hampshire was so badly treated by the Democrat Party and by Joe Biden and her, I can’t imagine New Hampshire voting for him,” Trump told Fox News’s Sean Hannity, referring to Vice President Kamala Harris.

“Anybody in New Hampshire—because they’re watching right now—anybody in New Hampshire that votes for Biden and Kamala, I really think, I call her Comrade Kamala because that’s what her ideology is, but you know that she did something after decades and decades and decades; it was Iowa, the first two—Iowa, New Hampshire—that’s what way people thought it was gonna be,” Trump continued. “He didn’t want to go to New Hampshire. He didn’t want to play the New Hampshire game.”

A pro-Trump account on X attempted to reframe the incident after the Harris campaign’s social media account posted a clip of the verbal flub, claiming that KamalaHQ was “purposely lying to their followers” by saying that Trump had forgotten who he was running against. But the full context revealed even more instances of Trump doubling down on his Biden beliefs than was originally posted by Harris’s team.

“He dumped New Hampshire. And I said to people today, who the hell from New Hampshire would vote for this guy?” Trump said.

Looking ahead to next week’s debate, the bloviating politician insisted that he would allow Harris time to speak.

“I let him talk—I’m going to let her talk,” Trump told Hannity. “There are those that say that Biden is smarter than she is. If that’s the case, we have a problem.”