A regular feature of any Donald Trump rally is the moment when he mocks what he says is President Biden’s cognitive decline.
“Remember, Biden went to say, ‘It’s great to be in Idaho.’ They said, ‘Sir, you’re in Iowa.’ Do you remember that?” Trump told an event in Des Moines, Iowa, last month.
“‘It’s wonderful to be in New Hampshire’ — ‘Sir, you’re in Florida’,” he continued.
But Trump, 77, appears increasingly to be suffering from the same sort of lapses he attributes to his 80-year-old rival. At his most recent campaign appearance there were hoots from the crowd in Sioux City, Iowa, when he began: “A very big hello to a place where we’ve done very well: Sioux Falls. Thank you very much Sioux Falls.”
Brad Zaun, an Iowa state senator, was caught on an open microphone telling Trump that he was not in South Dakota but 85 miles to the south, in Iowa. “It’s Sioux City, not Sioux Falls,” Zaun said.
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Trump returned to address the audience, saying: “So Sioux City, let me ask you, how many people come from Sioux City?”
Biden has been mercilessly pilloried for numerous verbal gaffes and stumbles such as tripping over on the Air Force One steps, looking bewildered when he has to find his way off stage and, in September, bringing a frustrated reaction from Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva when he forgot to shake the Brazilian president’s hand after a joint appearance at the United Nations.
However, Trump’s Republican rivals have begun making fun of their own party’s frontrunner for the presidency after a series of his recent blunders: at a New Hampshire rally on October 23 Trump praised Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, as “the leader of Turkey”, and he informed his audience in Sioux City that “Hungary fronts on both Ukraine and Russia.” Ukraine lies between Hungary and Russia.
Ron DeSantis, 45, the Florida governor challenging Trump for the Republican nomination, launched a “Trump accident tracker” to highlight slips by the former president.
“This is a different Donald Trump than 2015 and 16,” DeSantis said while campaigning in New Hampshire. “Lost the zip on his fastball. In 2016, he was freewheeling, he’s out there barnstorming the country. Now, it’s just a different guy. And it’s sad to see.”
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Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesman, called the DeSantis tracker a “weak, bitch move by a dying campaign. They never have an original idea of their own”.
Chris Christie, another of Trump’s Republican rivals, told MSNBC: “I think it is the stress of what he knows is coming in his criminal problems.”
According to Politifact, a fact-checking website set up by the non-partisan Poynter Institute, Biden did not mix up Idaho and Iowa. It said the myth grew out of a headline on a satirical website, The Boise Times, which ran a skit in 2020 based around a joke that Biden had praised Iowa potatoes, when the state most famous for producing the potato is Idaho.
• A court in Colorado was shown videos of Trump supporters rioting at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, as part of a civil case seeking to bar the former president from the state’s ballot paper next year. A group of voters claim that Trump should be disqualified under the 14th amendment of the US constitution, which prohibits anyone who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” from public office. The court is trying to determine if the invasion of the US Capitol constituted an insurrection.
The Minnesota Supreme Court is set to hear a similar case on Thursday. Both might end up in the US Supreme Court for a final ruling.
