During a speech at a rally in Philadelphia on June 22, Donald Trump asserted that the media portrays him as “cognitively impaired” if he makes even minor verbal missteps, according to Newsweek. Trump expressed his displeasure with this treatment and compared his press coverage to that of President Joe Biden, claiming that even if Biden “falls off the stage,” he won’t receive the same level of criticism from the media.
Following a series of primary wins, Trump amassed enough delegates in March to become his party’s presumed nominee. He and Biden are likely to face off in November 2024, in a rematch of their contentious 2020 presidential race.
Both Biden and Trump have sparked concerns about their mental faculties and ability to serve a second four-year term due to their ages and occasional blunders.
At the rally, Trump criticized the media, saying, “If I blow it up here, though, they—actually, they take a perfect, brilliant, beautiful statement that I make. I go for two hours without teleprompters, and if I say one word slightly out, they say, ‘He’s cognitively impaired.'”
He added, “Whereas Biden can run into walls. He can fall off the stage. He can fall up the stairs. He falls up.”
Both Biden and Trump have been scrutinized for perceived gaffes in recent months. In a June interview with Time magazine, Biden appeared to mix up Chinese President Xi Jinping with Russian President Vladimir Putin and incorrectly predicted that Africa’s population would reach one billion “in the next several years,” despite the continent already having over 1.4 billion people.
However, Biden’s yearly health review, written in February by his physician Kevin O’Connor, described Biden as “a healthy, active, robust 81-year-old male, who remains fit to successfully execute the duties of the Presidency.”
On the other hand, in May, during a rally in Phoenix, Trump remarked, “What they’re doing here in Texas.” Newsweek later clarified through his spokesman that “President Trump was obviously saying ‘here’ as in Arizona and then mentions Texas as well.”
At the Philadelphia rally, Trump also addressed crime, denying newly disclosed FBI data that indicated a 15% decrease in violent crime in the first three months of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023.