Lately, Trump has been experiencing his own adventures in ageing for all to see. Last week, he bragged about passing a cognitive test when he was president but mixed up the name of the doctor who’d administered it. He has confused Nancy Pelosi with Nikki Haley, and Biden with Barack Obama.
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And so Democrats have their own set of video clips they’ve been consuming, too – seeing evidence of ageing in Trump’s curious tangents about sharks and boats with electric batteries, or in the way he confuses words, as he did at the rally on Tuesday, when he barked at the Biden campaign for saying that “the videos of crooked Joe shuffling are clean fakes”.
He asked the crowd, “Do you know what a clean fake is?” The term Trump was reaching for is actually “cheap fake” – real footage that has been edited deceptively, omitting context by zooming in or cropping out.
In Racine, some of Trump’s supporters took a more nuanced view of the videos of Biden, the age factor and how it all played into expectations for the debate.
“Oh, absolutely, we see them on every channel, and all over the internet of course,” Marjean Stern, 79, a retiree, said of the videos of Biden. But, given her own age, she confessed to feeling a little queasy at how her candidate has revelled in Biden’s seemingly senior moments.
“We’re elderly, so we don’t like that,” she said. “I don’t want to make fun of him.”
US President Joe Biden has come across as wooden at times in recent appearances.Credit: AP
Will Moes, 23, who just graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and will be voting for the first time in a presidential election, said he accepted that videos of Biden might be edited to make him look addled. “But a lot of the context you see them in, when you watch the full videos, it’s hard to fake that,” he said.
Moes saw Trump’s verbal mistakes as the foreseeable gaffes of a garrulous candidate, not as signs of ageing. And as he looked ahead at the debate next week, he echoed Trump’s scepticism that the two candidates would be judged fairly.
As long as Biden “stands up there and doesn’t pass out and doesn’t stop talking for two minutes, the liberal media is going to paint him as a winner, no matter what happens, which is the scary part,” he said.
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Trump spoke for a little more than an hour on Tuesday in the early summer heat, Lake Michigan glistening behind him as he recounted how he’d won the state in 2016 before losing it in 2020.
“Look at that beautiful lake,” he said, digressing. “What’s better, this, or sitting on the Pacific or Atlantic, which has sharks?” he asked.
“You don’t have sharks. That’s a big advantage. I’ll take the one without the sharks.”