CNN
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Former president Donald Trump has made a mocking President Joe Biden and questions his mental fitness for the office a key part of his campaign speeches – even as he experiences his own recent string of blunders and verbal slips on the campaign trail.
“He’s always looking around, where should I go?” Trump said as he did an exaggerated impersonation of Biden walking on stage and looking confused at a campaign stop in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, last month.
Weeks later, Trump took the stage in Sioux City, Iowa, and accidentally thanked supporters who turned out in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, before an Iowa state senator tried to subtly correct him — a moment that was caught on a hot mic.
During a summit in Washington, Trump suggested that Biden could “plunge the world into World War II” – which ended almost 80 years ago – and appeared to confuse Biden with former President Barack Obama , saying he is ahead of Obama in the general election.
The recent mistakes they have created an unwanted wrinkle for Trump, his campaign team and the broader Republican political establishment. Republicans have questioned whether Biden is fit to serve as commander-in-chief, pointing to his age and mental fitness. But their own primary candidate seems to suffer from the same predicament, making their argument less compelling.
Trump he said wrong Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary, was the prime minister of Turkey – he quickly corrected this mistake. He has repeatedly mispronounced Hamas (huh-maas), the name of the Palestinian militant group that launched a deadly terror attack in Israel, as hummus.
And, during a rally in South Carolina in September, Trump upset Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, one of Trump’s 2016 GOP rivals, with his brother, former President George W. Bush
“When I came here, everybody thought Bush was going to win,” he said at that rally.
“They thought Bush because Bush was supposed to be a military … he put us in, uh, he brought us into the Middle East. How did that happen, right?’
Trump’s opponents are working to capitalize on his latest string of unnecessary mistakes, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSandis, whose presidential campaign has largely stalled under a barrage of attacks from the former president.
“This is a different Donald Trump than 2015 and ’16 — he’s lost the zip on his fastball,” he told reporters in New Hampshire in late October. “He’s married to the telemarketer. It cannot be downloaded from this telco. Whenever he does, he says things like “don’t vote.” He tells people not to vote, we have all the votes.”
DeSantis’ campaign also recently launched a “Trump Tracker” to highlight the former president’s missteps.
Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who has seen a slight boost in recent poll numbers, appeared to grill the former president over Trump’s foreign policy comments.
“Well, I’ve said it before. With all due respect, I’m not confused,” Haley said at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual meeting last week.
The Democratic National Committee has gone out of its way to outdo Trump mistakes. On its account on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, the committee reposted a screenshot of an MSNBC tweet that read “MSNBC: Trump’s gaffes seem to be getting more incoherent.” The committee also highlighted a video of Trump struggling to finish a sentence about terrorism. Another post contained the clip of Trump mispronouncing Hamas.
Biden’s re-election campaign also seeks to draw attention to Trump’s gaffes by clipping the moments and promoting them on social media.
Publicly and privately, some Republican strategists are skeptical of how effective this strategy will be. After all, Trump has boasted in the past that he could go out on Fifth Avenue, shoot someone, and only watch his support rise and win the election. His supporters know how old he is. Their criticism of Biden is that while Trump is unusually 77, Biden is a very tired 80-year-old.
“President Trump continues to dominate the primary polls and beat the crook Joe Biden in the general election,” Trump spokesman Steven Chung said in a statement. “None of these false narratives that the Biden team tried to use to deflect from their candidate’s failures changed the dynamics of the race at all, because people know that President Trump is the stronger candidate. The contrast is that Biden falls on stage, mumbles his way through a speech, gets confused about where to walk, and stumbles on the steps of Air Force One.”
Despite the relatively small age difference between Biden and Trump – about three and a half years – there is a big difference in how voters see the two faces.
In a recent NBC News poll, 59% of voters said they were concerned that Biden lacked the mental and physical health necessary to serve another term as president. That compared to 34% of voters who had great concerns about Trump.
Trump’s attacks aren’t just jabs at Biden’s age. Trump, who is just three years younger than Biden, said in a recent interview that he did not think the president was too old to run for re-election.
“No, he’s not big at all, he’s very incompetent,” Trump said in a recent interview with Megyn Kelly on her Sirius XM show of the same name.
Instead of directly attacking Biden over his age, Trump is trying to paint Biden as “incompetent” and “mentally retarded,” which he claims isn’t just about the president’s age.
“I have a lot of friends in their 80s … Age is interesting because some people are very kind and some people lose it,” Trump told Kelly.