Rick Rosner: So, it’s been two days since the Trump-Biden debate, and Biden appeared at 2 a.m. the night of the discussion when he arrived for a rally the next day in North Carolina. At 2 a.m., he was fine. The next day at the rally, he was strong, coherent, and energetic. Today, there were some more public appearances. Again, he was solid and cohesive, unlike during the debate. What’s been going around? His people said he had a cold. When he came out, his voice was raspy and soft. Initially, when he first came out, his voice was incredibly raspy. What’s going around and that many people agree with, with little pushback, is that somebody probably gave him cold medicine. With older people in particular, it can mess you up. The results would be transient, explaining why he was particularly woozy-ish during the beginning of the debate, then got a little better towards the end. Later that night, he didn’t appear weak or woozy at all.

He hasn’t appeared weak or woozy at other public appearances, like the State of the Union address only about 16 weeks ago. It’s not like he’s entirely fallen apart in the last 16 weeks. It’s mostly Libs who are saying Keith Olbermann and stuff on Twitter, saying, yes, cough medicine. Newsweek wrote an article, maybe cough medicine. They talked to a few doctors who said it could be that. When you temporarily degrade mental function, that’s the number one thing to look for. I assume tomorrow, the conservatives will punch back and say, you made fun of us for saying that he’s going to be on drugs. Now, here you are saying he was on drugs. Given all the circumstances, he’s been fine, and he was fine almost immediately after. He seemed to have a cold, and his people said he had a cold, but some person may given him some cough or cold medicine. That person should come forward, and that person should lose their job or at least be demoted. Cause that’s, you don’t give somebody some random medicine before something like this.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How much do you think being in his early 80s is a factor here, in the fact of cough medicine for looking for a reason?

Rosner: I haven’t read much about it, but plenty of people are now saying on Twitter that I’m in my 40s, and cough and cold medicine do that to me. But I’ve also read tweets from people saying it has a more substantial effect if you’re older. It’s usually older people who are scrutinized for being loopy or having a degradation of mental function. It doesn’t only happen a little with younger people. Biden had severe degradation of mental function. He got lost in his sentences a couple of times. It wasn’t like he appeared to have full-on dementia. He needed help getting his sentences out. He still had command of the facts. He messed up a couple of things. One of his biggest mistakes was when he said that the Border Patrol Union endorsed him.

The truth was that the Border Patrol Union endorsed Trump’s plan for the border, which was scuttled. It’s mostly older people who look loopy unless, when somebody is younger and is loopy, they ask if they are drunk or what they took or whatever. In older people, yes, cold medicine might have more potential to mess them up. A weird thing in older people is that a UTI, a urinary tract infection, can mimic dementia. I saw it happen with my mother-in-law and her brother. That’s having bacteria in your bladder. Then you give them antibiotics, and the apparent dementia goes away. If having an infection can make an older person temporarily demented, then I assume that cold medicine might pack more of a wallop mentally for an older person. We’ll find out over the next few days because it will be as much in the news as every other thing about this debate.

Jacobsen: What did you think about all the personal attacks from both in the middle of that debate?

Rosner: If I were Biden, I would have made many more personal attacks if I suddenly found myself in his body. You’re America’s rapiest president. Not even regular rape. You like to jam your fingers into women against their will as a show of power. Women, including a then 13-year-old girl, have credibly accused you of sexual assault or harassment, like a painted con man. Trump’s attacks were, yesterday was the day of all the fact-checking. I’ve looked at six articles that counted each person’s debater’s lies and half-truths.

Carole heard one count on the radio: 30 for Trump and nine for Biden. Then CNN said more than 30 lies or misrepresentations. In 30, he spoke for 38 minutes, so nearly a lie a minute. Trump’s attacks on Biden were largely nonsense. Trump deserved to be personally attacked more, especially since he was endlessly spewing nonsense. I’ve read more about the Gish Gallup, and they said it’s hard to counter it, but one of the only ways to counter it is to call the other person a liar continuing to lie.

What did you think about the personal attacks? The stupidest thing Biden did was argue with Trump about who’s better at golf. He should have said that as Americans were dying and losing their jobs, you politicized COVID, which led to the needless deaths of at least 400,000 Americans. You wouldn’t wear a mask because it would mess up your facial bronzer. While America was falling apart in 2020, with more jobless Americans than at any other time, you were playing golf. You played golf in more than 500 days of your presidency. Anyway, what do you think? It’s low points in American politics.

If you were Biden, wouldn’t you have attacked Trump personally more? In the moment, it would have pushed me. It certainly would have pushed me. It would have shown vitality. You say you’ve been a lifelong con man and reprehensible person. You were first investigated by the FBI in 1972 for refusing to rent to black people. You settled with the Department of Justice the following year when they sued you due to that investigation. You’ve been a piece of shit your entire life. You don’t deserve to be president. America doesn’t deserve the curse of you being our president.

Jacobsen: Would that work with most Americans, however?

Rosner: Yes, because most Americans dislike him. It’s closer than it should be, but it’s far away. Since 2015, it’s been straight up the line of approval and disapproval; 40% of Americans say they like him, and 55% say they don’t. But it’s not like this stuff about it in a debate. It’s not like all of a sudden, a bunch of Americans who didn’t previously support him would come rallying to him because you were mean to him. He’s a mean piece of shit, and it’s perfectly fair to be mean back at him, especially if the mean things you say are all true.

I would be caught in a half-truth if I said he played golf 500 times and 400 times in the 1400 days he was president. But yes, you come right at him and then see what he does. You can’t call him fat because it’s bad for a president to call somebody a name. You can’t call him fat because most Americans are fat, and that’s body shaming. But you can contact him as an orange buffoon, a serial sexual assaulter. He cheated on every wife he’s had. He killed abortion, even though he’s probably responsible for a dozen abortions himself. He’s a hypocrite and a moron who had to pay some smart kid to take the SATs for him.

Biden said some of this stuff. He said that 40 out of the 44 cabinet officers under Trump refused to endorse him. Rex Tillerson, his chief of staff, and Biden said that. But he could have said Rex Tillerson quit because he couldn’t work with him any longer and called Trump a moron. Biden said that, according to presidential historians, he was ranked the worst president in history in a survey. He didn’t mention that they did it twice in a study in 2018 and a survey this year. In three other surveys of presidential historians, they ranked him as the third, second, and fourth-worst president of all time.

Jacobsen: At what point in the debate do you think they talked more about policy and were not talking about personal attacks? They were lucid.

Rosner: Biden had trouble speaking crisply throughout the whole thing, but they mentioned, what will you do about fentanyl? There was an interesting answer. Biden answered, and then they said, you’ve got another 80 seconds, so you have anything else you’re going to do about fentanyl? He said there are these giant machines, these scanners that you can use. Every vehicle coming over the border at points of entry can go through these scanners to detect fentanyl. He said putting them in takes a while because they’re big and expensive. That was interesting that he had an actual thing you can do about fentanyl that addresses the way fentanyl comes in, which is that it isn’t smuggled over the border in people’s backpacks. It comes in through points of entry, like at the border between Tijuana and San Diego, where tens of thousands of cars and trucks cross the border daily, the one between Juarez and El Paso.

That’s how most of the fentanyl comes in. Some come in through the US mail. Through international mail, but again, you can probably scan that stuff with these big scanners, and if it’s not wrapped super well, if it comes loose, maybe you can catch some of the fentanyl, or he also told the precursors you could detect those. That was a good, exciting answer that I’d never heard before. Have you ever heard Trump talk about policy except to brag and say stuff that didn’t happen?

Jacobsen: No, I didn’t watch the whole debate.

Rosner: That was the high point in learning something from Biden policy-wise that I didn’t know before.

Jacobsen: What do you think is the absolute lowest point of that debate?

Rosner: The stupidest exchange was arguing about who’s better at golf. It was dumb for Biden to be drawn into that at all. He should have said, you golfed when you should have been saving the country. Instead of arguing about who’s, Biden’s saying he’s got a six handicap, who cares? One of the weirdest statements from Biden was what he was trying to say: we beat Medicare, he said. He was probably trying to say, but I’d have to listen to it or look at a transcript that he beat Medicare’s high-priced prescription drug policy by lowering the cost of insulin and maybe some other drugs to 35 bucks a month. But he didn’t say that; he said we beat Medicare. So that was bad; that was a low point. Trump, everything he said was nonsense. A low point for Trump was his refusal to answer whether he would accept the results of the 2024 election. He was asked that two or three times. Each time, he said that if the result were fair, which is the same thing as saying no, he wouldn’t. If he likes the results, he will accept them.

Jacobsen: So, that was not good for Trump. Will declining cognition be an issue for either candidate in the next year?

Rosner: It’s already an issue for Biden because he had this disastrous debate, and he’ll have to show, like, four out of five, eight out of nine, out of ten, appearances in the next 128 or so days, he will have to be vigorous and super coherent to make people believe that this debate performance was an anomaly. Now, Trump speaks incoherently, and he confuses stuff a lot, but his people don’t care. Trump’s strength differs from his speaking truthfully, genuinely, or early. His strength is that he speaks a lot. He can get up at one of his rallies and talk for two hours, but he says nonsense. He praises Hannibal Lecter and makes a joke. Yes, great guy. I had a friend for dinner, which is so stupid as not to be a joke. But he said that joke twice in two days. What is he talking about? But it doesn’t matter to his people. He confuses Obama and Biden quite a bit, like in some two months in live appearances. He attacked the current president, Obama. He talked about how he took a test for mental soundness, which is not absolute; it was a test to rule out dementia, given by his doctor, Ronnie Johnson, and that’s not his doctor’s name. Trump is often less than perfectly coherent, but libs say, “What is this?” But his people don’t care. He has frozen a couple of times, or at least once he froze for many seconds, but it’s speculated that his teleprompter went out, and he was waiting for it to get going again.

The most apparent instance of freezing in an old politician was Mitch McConnell, who has shut down several times in the past year while making a public statement. He was in the middle of a sentence, and then he quit talking and stood there staring out into space, and he had to be led away from the podium. His people never thoroughly explained what that was. But neither Biden nor Trump have had a glitch that bad. People question their mental soundness every day. Biden is mentally sound, and even during the debate, he mainly said actual stuff and had a breadth of knowledge of the issues, even as he was having trouble with his sentences. With Trump, he’s always been a blowhard who’s full of nonsense. It’s the same issue as with my mother-in-law. She always said a bunch of nonsense. It made Carole crazy.

I got a perverse enjoyment from the endless nonsense that would come from her at any age. Carol and I met in 1986. She died last year, so I knew her for 37 years. She was always full of nonsense, so when she started losing it, it was hard to tell whether it was dementia or her being her. Ditto for Trump. He’s always said a bunch of stupid stuff. Now, if you compare Trump at 78 with Trump, say Ho, Ward Stern in his 40s, there would probably be a demonstrable difference, but is it such a severe decline that you can’t attribute it to the difference between somebody who’s 78 and somebody who’s 48?

It annoys me that people have not statistically dozed either of those guys. It would be the easiest thing in the world to do. Take transcripts of their remarks at different ages and plug them into some utility that measures vocabulary and a variety of statements. Somebody must have lexical analysis tools to indicate dementia, possible dementia. Nobody’s This is the first time anyone’s ever done that kind of analysis. Reporters are lazy. Biden has verbal ticks. He says, “I’m serious folks, we’ve talked about this. I’m not kidding.” Is that an indication of anything? If it indicates something, is it something that somebody who’s 81 and mentally healthy might do compared to more than somebody who’s 51? The end. Another one?

Jacobsen: Do another session or call it a night?

Rosner: Call it a night.

—

Rick Rosner, American Television Writer, http://www.rickrosner.org

Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com

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