Editorial: Stumped by Trump on the stump: A candidate's coherence matters

At an appearance at the Economic Club of New York Thursday, Donald Trump confounded listeners and produced plenty of mockery with a long, rambling and fundamentally unintelligible answer to a simple question about whether he’d support legislation to bring child care costs down under control.

Over nearly 400 words of stream of consciousness, Trump referenced Sen. Marco Rubio, tariffs, America First, the deficit and other disjointed points, none of them appearing to really connect to child care. The torrent was so notably hard to follow that it has generated a news cycle, but the truth is that this is not a particular anomaly to Trump’s public appearances these days; just try watching the entirety of one of his raucous rallies.

Presenting Trump as he actually sounds should not be a question of bias. If he rambles, he rambles. Just like President Biden’s obvious incoherence in the June debate wasn’t a partisan question (even though some Democrats tried to deny his difficulties).

Is it the place of the press to clean up his language, to interpret and insert cogency where there is none, to extrapolate meaning and even policy from word salad? Sure, Trump is trying to convey a message, just as Biden was when he mumbled on stage with Trump: “Look, if – we finally beat Medicare.” But candidates have to speak for themselves. For the media to translate gibberish into English is not to inform the public in the ways it needs to be informed ahead of making the incredibly significant choice of who occupies the White House.

Biden’s gaffes even before the debate did not get a pass. The question of his practical ability to guide the country for another four years was treated as a crucial one requiring clear-eyed and unsparing examination, as well it should have. Every public pronouncement and appearance was picked over with a fine-toothed comb for evidence that Biden was not all there. The debate was the end of that process (and his campaign as well), not the beginning.

Perhaps everyone’s just used to a certain level of nonsense from Trump, who New Yorkers have known for decades as a man never very succinct or precise. Are his verbal wanderings the same old Trump or it is more pronounced? Or did the fall of Biden heighten our listening? Like Biden, (and like everyone), Trump is getting older.

We can’t say from afar exactly how often this happens or how bad it gets, but Trump, who made this a daily issue against Biden (and still hammers Biden on it), may want to provide the same transparency he demanded of his former opponent. That’s unlikely, we admit for a man who tried to pretend that he wasn’t really sick when he had COVID and was given oxygen and hospitalized in 2020.

So that leaves the press as the predominant force for trying to assess Trump’s mental sharpness, an effort that should be pursued with as much gusto as it was for Biden, and with the objective of giving the voters the information they need to make an informed decision — not partisan, not biased, but in keeping with our duty to accountability.

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