'Bizarre rambles': New Yorker writer examines Trump's 'age-related diminishment'

The New Yorker's Susan Glasser on Friday took stock of former President Donald Trump's lengthy rant to congressional Republicans on Friday that one member compared to the ramblings of a "drunk uncle."

Taking in Trump's performance as a whole, Glasser expressed shock that President Joe Biden is facing intense media scrutiny for his age while Trump seems to be getting a pass.

"If there were ever a case for age-related diminishment of a candidate, Trump is it," Glasser contended. "The ex-President’s bizarre rambles and odd obsessions—remember the whole cancer-causing-windmills thing?—have long characterized his public performances. But, in the 2024 campaign, the weird has got decidedly weirder."

As a case in point, Glasser points to this past weekend's instantly infamous rant about sharks in Las Vegas.

"Just this past weekend, Trump interrupted a campaign rally in Nevada for an extended discourse on what one should do about a hypothetical shark attack when aboard a hypothetically sinking electric boat, and how he himself would prefer electrocution to being eaten by the shark—a sentence, which, as I am writing it, makes absolutely no sense and yet is a more or less accurate summary of what Trump said," she recounted.

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And this isn't all, as Glasser also recounted a string of Trump blunders that would have made front-page headlines for days had Biden made them.

"It’s also worth noting that Trump, pushing eighty, has made so many gaffes involving mixed-up names and places that they are hardly treated as major news—he has confused Pelosi with his Republican primary opponent Nikki Haley, forgotten that he is running against Biden and not Barack Obama, and once thought that he was in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, when he was in Sioux City, Iowa," she noted. "Wherever one stands on the broader question of Trump’s mental health, the evident decline in his ability to speak clearly and coherently feels striking."

Read the whole analysis here.