Donald Trump Says Kamala Harris ‘Mental Challenges’ Worse Than Biden’s

Former President Donald Trump told his rally attendees in Georgia that Vice President Kamala Harris has “bigger cognitive problems” than President Joe Biden.

The comment came a little more than an hour into the rally, after Trump discussed Biden’s decline and the threat he perceived it put the U.S. in with other leaders, like China’s Xi Jinping, “at the top of their game”.

“All over the world they’re laughing at us,” Trump said. “You know what they’re really laughing at? Kamala. They can’t believe that she’s really going to be president. They can’t believe. You talk about cognitive problems? She has bigger cognitive problems than he has in my opinion.”

He did not clarify specifically to which problems he was referring before talking about the Russia-Ukraine war.

Newsweek reached out to Trump and Harris’ campaigns and did not hear back immediately for comment.

Trump, 78, had attacked his previous opponent, President Joe Biden, 81, for being too old for office. At one point he labeled Biden as a “bad 81-year-old.” At the beginning of the year, many polls also showed voters thought Biden was too old to run in 2024.

Hours after Biden withdrew his candidacy in the 2024 election, Democrats began to question Trump’s age.

As the narrative has flipped, a Morning Consult survey of around 2,200 registered voters showed that now Trump is facing off against the 59-year-old Harris, fewer voters believe Trump is in “good health”.

Psychiatrist Richard Friedman wrote in The Atlantic earlier this month that Trump is showing signs of cognitive decline.

“Tuesday’s presidential debate was, among other things, an excellent real-world test of the candidates’ cognitive fitness—and any fair-minded mental-health expert would be very worried about Donald Trump’s performance,” Friedman starts his piece with.

A 90-minute debate with unknown questions and rebuttals requires candidates to think quickly, something that is a “much more demanding and representative test of cognitive heath than a simple mental-status exam you take in a doctor’s office.”

While Friedman wasn’t offering a specific medial diagnosis, he said that by watching Trump’s vocabulary, verbal and logical coherence as well as his ability to adapt to new topics, his expressions were “alarming.”

“He displayed some striking, if familiar, patterns that are commonly seen among people in cognitive decline,” Friedman wrote.

Tony Schwartz, a former journalist who is now a vocal critic of Trump, made MSNBC‘s Ari Melber that Trump has lost a “great deal mentally” and is a “very different man” to the one he knew in the late 1980s when he ghostwrote the bestselling The Art of The Deal.

The majority of Trump’s speech on Tuesday in Georgia, a crucial state in the 2024, focused on manufacturing. The Republican nominee said more production will take place in the U.S. under his administration and they will be “exported through the port of Savannah.”

This year’s election is likely to hinge on seven states. Georgia has been a contested state, and Trump’s appearance Tuesday is just the most recent for both campaigns.

A survey of 9,794 swing state voters published September 23 by Redfield & Wilton Strategies for The Telegraph found the state leaning toward Trump, who is leading by two points against Vice President Kamala Harris, with 48 percent support.

Another poll by the Institute for Global Affairs, which involved 1,835 respondents surveyed between August 15 and 19, included Georgia in its tally of swing-state results.

In the poll, Trump’s lead widens on the question of specific foreign policy issues, with 58 percent of swing-state voters he is more likely to end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza than Harris (41 percent).

Trump is also the more trusted candidate in the swing states when it comes to China, with 58 percent believing he would “respond effectively if China attacks Taiwan,” compared to only 42 percent for Harris.

In Tuesday’s election model, The Silver Bulletin shows Trump taking a slight lead in Georgia, receiving 48.2 percent of the vote over Harris’ 47.2 percent.

“Needless to say, stranger things have happened than a candidate who was behind in the polls winning,” Silver wrote. “And in America’s polarized political climate, most elections are close, and a candidate is rarely out of the running.”