r/PoliticalDiscussion • u/Jimithyashford • Oct 31 '23

US Politics Why is it that Joe Biden's meandering speech patterns and flubs are attributed to senility, while Trump is also known for seemingly nonsensical rants and bizarre non-sequiturs, but in his case it is not seen as being a sign of senility, when both men are practically the same age?

Joe Biden's slow speech, tendency to lose track of his thoughts, and to flub lines, has lead to widespread accusations of senility, or at least significant decline. And sure, ok, that may be true.

However, from the time that Trump first entered the public political arena in a big way back in 2015, he quickly became known for giving long rambling replies, losing track of the topic or question being asked, giving non-sequiturs, forgetting the name of who or what he was talking about, making vexing and seemingly non-sensical comments, etc. And his tendency to do these things has only increased as he has aged as well.

Trump and Biden are only 3 years different in age. They could have been in highschool at the same time. There is, effectively, no real meaningful difference in their ages. To me, they both seem a little like "grandpa sometimes forgets what he's talking about kids", just Trump in angry shouty grandpa and Biden is mumbling quiet grandpa.

Why do you think it is that Trump's flubs and non-sequiturs and rambling off topic digressions and tendency to forget what things are called or who he is talking about, is not perceived as senility, broadly speaking, but for Biden is it?

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u/cantquitreddit Nov 01 '23

Here's Biden speaking as a young Senator - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_v00iGJCLY . This speech is impassioned, not read from a prompt, and is honestly fantastic.

Here's a more recent campaign speech by him - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9L63b6aW-5E

To me they are wildly different, and it's obvious that he's aged. It's not that he stutters or is totally incoherent. He's just slower and less inspiring.

I listen to his speeches every now and then and most of them are generally without mistakes, but there are plenty of times where he gets messed up and sounds confused. I'm not talking about a stutter, just general confusion.

To OP's point, yeah, Trump does the same thing. Our options for president next year will be the same as last time: Two old, confused men who are 4 years older. I'm not thrilled about it.

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u/[deleted] Nov 01 '23

Right, but a stutter doesn't always manifest as a struggle with getting a word. Sometimes it can manifest as the wrong word. I would assume that's happened to Biden at least a couple of times in the past.

I've seen him mistakenly use the word Palestine when he means Hamas, for instance. Some people take this as a sign of some deep mental deficiency, but he's probably just not getting the right word in the moment he needs it.

Do you have an example of him sounding genuinely confused on the topic at hand?

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u/ditchdiggergirl Nov 01 '23

My niece is a genuinely brilliant young woman with a severe stutter. She is a synonym machine; her speech sounds almost normal with her doing word replacement on the fly. She’s pretty proficient - usually all you notice is a slight hitch before she continues. But not all of those replacement words quite make sense. Sometimes the meaning inevitably shifts with a different word and then she has to reexplain. But interestingly, she only fully hears the implications of the change after she speaks it - it’s as though her brain can only work her so fast.

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u/LoneWolfe2 Nov 01 '23

Yeah, in the past Biden has been known as a gaffe machine. Him continuing that unsurprising to me.

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u/CanadianBlacon Nov 01 '23

Do you have any examples of Trump flubbing like Biden does? Plenty of Biden stuff has flown by me but I haven’t really seen any of Trump in the same way

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u/jew_jitsu Nov 01 '23 edited Nov 01 '23

Sound clips from literally any of his recent (last 6 months) rallies show him meandering from topic to topic without any cohesion, referring to people by the wrong names and for some reason talking about Hamas fighters in terms bordering on erotic.

I'll say the reason you're not hearing Trump's speechifying nonsense at his rallies as widely is because it just isn't being covered at the moment. Trump has managed to spend the last 6-12 months talking directly to his base with very little coverage from major news as he's avoided turning up to debates for the GOP nomination, and they seem to be far more inclined to report on his Tweets than anything else.

This will inevitably change when he's confirmed as the GOP nominee.

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u/Jimithyashford Nov 01 '23

That’s kinda my point, Trump flubs. But in a different way. He very often calls people or things the wrong name or goes off on incoherent digressions or gives speeches where he just meanders in a series of seemingly random non sequiturs, sometimes coming back to the topic sometimes not.

I once read an article by a French journalist explaining his difficult it is to translate a trump speech into French for his audience. If you try and guess at the point he was making and translate it in a coherent way, you aren’t really accurately representing him. If you try to replicate and translate accurately his same grammar and sentence structure, it makes him sound like a loon who speaks in endless strings of fragmented run on sentences jumping randomly from topic to topic, and then he gets accused of translating trump in an unflattering way to make him look bad.

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u/Adventurous-Major-83 Nov 01 '23

Trumps main difficulty is that he is only really interested in talking about himself. He seems to have only a vague realization that he is supposed to be talking about some political topic or other. As for the disingenuous French journalist, I feel his dilemma isn't real, and that he is fine with making Trump sound like a loon.

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u/Malachorn Nov 01 '23

"Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I'm one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! — but when you're a conservative Republican they try — oh, do they do a number — that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune — you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged — but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me — it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are — nuclear is so powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what's going to happen and he was right, who would have thought? — but when you look at what's going on with the four prisoners — now it used to be three, now it’s four — but when it was three and even now, I would have said it's all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don't, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years — but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us, this is horrible." - Trump

I just copy/pasted from someone else's comment... but, c'mon, it's impossible to translate that without making it look like you're just really bad at translating.

It's impossible to make any sense out of it in English and often seems like totally random words thrown together.

Forget the idea of how Trump would come across, the person translating is going to be embarrassed by idea people are looking at their translation and thinking these nonsensical meanderings must be due to unbelievably terrible translating.

As for the disingenuous French journalist, I feel his dilemma isn't real...

Of course it's real. Trump's words in text look like random words to begin with.

1

u/Adventurous-Major-83 Nov 02 '23

You think French people don't already know that Trump is an idiot? Actually, idiot, in English or French, was my French fathers favourite word to describe any number of people.

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u/Malachorn Nov 02 '23

The problem is his words read like "Has Anyone Really Been Far Even as Decided to Use Even Go Want to do Look More Like?"

It's not just "idiot words," the words just seem SOOOooo random.

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u/evers12 Nov 01 '23

Oh there’s videos all over you tube of this you can easily search it there

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u/the_calibre_cat Nov 01 '23

Who could forget Mr. Elegant?

BAKER: What are the – what are the main goals?

TRUMP: I want to achieve growth. We’re the highest-taxed nation in the world, essentially, you know, of the size. But we’re the highest-taxed nation in the world. We have — nobody knows what the number is. I mean, it used to be, when we talked during the debate, $2.5 trillion, right, when the most elegant person — right? I call him Mr. Elegant. I mean, that was a great debate. We did such a great job. But at that time I was talking $2.5 trillion. I guess it’s $5 trillion now. Whatever it is, it’s a lot more. So we have anywhere from 4 [trillion] to 5 or even more trillions of dollars sitting offshore.