After the Wall Street Journal published "Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping" — criticized as a "hit piece" based on claims from Republicans — a former top aide to Mike Pence suggested that she could help the News Corp. publication report on former President Donald Trump's "own mental acuity & fitness for office."
"We can start with the closed doors discussions on milkshakes during intel briefings, windmills causing cancer, what bleach does & doesn't do & and go from there," the former national security advisor, Olivia Troye, posted on X.
The Journal article, which reported that "participants in meetings said the 81-year old president performed poorly at times," was co-written by Siobhan Hughes and Annie Linskey, the latter once mocking Biden's visit to the burial site of his son Beau. They wrote that the participants cited instances of soft speaking, reading from note, and extended pauses as evidence of Biden's slippage, but also acknowledged that many of them were Republicans whose party has used Biden's age to criticize him on the campaign trail. Two generous providers of hearsay were House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and his predecessor, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif.
Though Troye provided just a brief preview of what she might reveal about Trump, the former president has himself stepped up to provide fodder for the public. In recent months, he has repeatedly gotten confused about names (often switching Biden and Barack Obama), developed a tendency to nod off in public, forgotten what year he was president and generally rambled off-topic at public events.
In March, Salon published an interview with University of British Columbia forensic psychiatrist Dr. Elizabeth Zoffman, who observed changes in speech patterns, a decline in cognitive focus, changes in movement and gait, and other indicators that led her to conclude that Trump appears to be suffering from behavioral variant frontal-temporal dementia and should be evaluated by neurologists who specialize in the condition.
Another psychologist, Dr. John Garter, told Salon what he thought about the difference between the two 2024 candidates: "Biden's brain is aging. Trump's brain is dementing."
