Dem
51
GOP
49
By now, most readers will have heard about Donald Trump's mental lapse this weekend:
If you don't care to watch (though it's less than 30 seconds), he said: "You know, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, you know they—do you know they destroyed all of the information and all of the evidence? Everything. Deleted and destroyed all of it. All of it because of, lots of things. Like, Nikki Haley is in charge of security. We offered her 10,000 people." Obviously, he meant "Nancy Pelosi." Trump has also recently mixed up Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and Kevin McCarthy and Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), and he also predicted that Biden is going to lead the U.S. into World War II [sic].
More speculative at this point, but still a topic of much conversation, are Trump's potential physical problems. He appears to have lost weight, and he definitely looks more than a bit worn down on the campaign trail. He also had what appeared to be visible sores on his hands last week. The exact nature of the sores is not clear, but many hopeful Democrats guessed secondary syphilis.
This creates a somewhat interesting situation for Joe Biden and the Democrats. On one hand, they could make hay out of Trump's issues, in hopes of neutering that line of attack against the President. On the other hand, doing so could send the message that armchair diagnoses are legit, and could actually strengthen the case against Biden. The choice here seems pretty obvious to us, and it's clear that Team Biden agrees, because the campaign has already made its move, launching an ad showing Trump's meltdown this weekend, interspersed with clips of Nikki Haley asserting that Trump's cheese is sliding off the cracker.
It gives Biden and the Democrats a fair amount of cover that it's not ONLY Democrats who are expressing concern about Trump's mental and physical state (besides Haley, it's also come up on Fox). And Biden doesn't need to win on this issue; he just needs to muddy the waters. If voters believe that neither man has a particular advantage in mental fitness, then that would neuter one of Biden's biggest weaknesses. (Z)