JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Former President Donald Trump was able to avoid questions about his own advanced age when he was running against the older President Biden. That is no longer the case. The political advantage Trump enjoyed on the issue of age has been reversed. That was on display at the presidential debate with Vice President Harris. NPR White House correspondent Franco Ordoñez takes a look at new scrutiny on Trump now that he is running against someone almost two decades younger.
FRANCO ORDOÑEZ, BYLINE: When they first met in June, former President Donald Trump kind of stood back as President Biden stumbled and stalled through their evening debate.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I'm going to continue to move until we get the total ban on the total initiative relative to what we're going to do with more Border Patrol and more asylum officers.
JAKE TAPPER: President Trump?
DONALD TRUMP: I really don't know what he said at the end of this sentence. I don't think he knows what he said, either.
ORDOÑEZ: It's not that Trump had a great night. He said all sorts of things that were not true. But next to Biden, Trump came across as lucid, in control and younger. Then Biden dropped out, and everything changed.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: But America, we are not going back.
UNIDENTIFIED AUDIENCE: We are not going back.
HARRIS: We are not going back.
ORDOÑEZ: When Vice President Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic Party's nomination, Trump, at 78, became the, quote, "old guy" in the race. Like Biden, Trump also confuses names, wanders from topic to topic and speaks in non sequiturs, but it didn't seem to matter much before.
CHARLES FRANKLIN: I think as long as Biden was the opponent, Trump's misstatements or slips or meandering in his speech didn't get very much attention.
ORDOÑEZ: That's Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette Law School Poll, who says, now they are getting attention. A new Marquette survey found that almost 60% of Americans feel Trump is too old to be president.
FRANKLIN: Now, there's the chance that people will see his age as also saying something about fitness for office when he's compared to Kamala Harris.
ORDOÑEZ: Clips of Trump's stumbles and sometimes disjointed remarks have gone viral recently, such as when he was asked about his plans for affordable child care while speaking at the Economic Club of New York.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TRUMP: Child care is child care. It's - couldn't - you know, there's something - you have to have it. In this country, you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I'm talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they're not used to - but they'll get used to it very quickly. And it's not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they'll have a very substantial tax.
ORDOÑEZ: The Trump campaign argues the former president has more energy and stamina than anyone in politics and that it's the Democrats who are diminished and that Trump continues to outwork and outpace Harris. And Trump says that what others view as rambling is actually intentional. He calls it the weave.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TRUMP: You know what the weave is? I'll talk about, like, nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together. And it's like - and friends of mine that are, like, English professors - they say, It's the most brilliant thing I've ever seen.
ORDOÑEZ: Jenny Stromer-Galley researches campaigns at Syracuse University. She says, back in 2016, Trump strung non sequiturs together with remarkable skill. He was blunt yet plainspoken, slightly mean but also very clear in articulating his perspective.
JENNY STROMER-GALLEY: In fact, that was one thing communication scholars like myself noted, is that he spoke in ways that in the moment, with an audience, you could follow along, but reading a transcript afterwards, you'd be like, I have no idea what he's talking about.
ORDOÑEZ: She argues that what has happened is the non sequiturs are more pronounced, and he's shifting between topics quicker and more frequently.
STROMER-GALLEY: So he is still doing that, but I think it is magnified. He's doing more of that than what we saw even back in 2016 or 2020.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PHILIPPE REINES: Now he's over the board.
ORDOÑEZ: Philippe Reines played Trump during Hillary Clinton's debate preparations eight years ago. He reprised the role to help Harris prepare this year. He told CNN that he had to prepare differently the second time.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
REINES: Eight years ago, he would digress. He would talk about China, then he would talk about, the Bank of China was in Trump Tower. And he was all over the place but, to some extent, structured.
ORDOÑEZ: He says there's no structure anymore and pointed to how quickly Trump jumped from defending his crowd sizes to warning about World War III to lying about Haitian migrants eating cats and dogs. Franco Ordoñez, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
