Weighing in this weekend is the editorial board of The Philadelphia Inquirer (non-paywalled link here):
... little attention has been paid to Trump’s incoherent debate performance because he is often incoherent. Trump told more than 30 lies in 90 minutes during the debate like it was another day at the office.But lying doesn't indicate incipient dementia. Many people with very sharp minds lie repeatedly. If you can lie in a way that works to your advantage and get away with it, that's a sign that you know what you're doing, not a sign that you don't.
In discussing abortion, he falsely claimed Democrats want to execute babies in the ninth month of pregnancy....
The Inquirer editorial points out that during the debate Trump said, “we had H2O, we had the best numbers ever.” But that's probably just Trump mixing up CO₂ and H₂O. (Carbon dioxide emissions in America were at a forty-year low in 2020, but Trump deserves no credit for that -- millions of Americans who'd previously driven to work were working for home, a phenomenon that temporarily lowered carbon emssions worldwide that year.)
The Inquirer editorial cites Trump's recent speech riff about sharks and the alleged dangers of electrocution from batteries in boats. Yes, that was weird. But if you don't understand how boat batteries work -- or choose not to because you hate renewable energy, and motivated reasoning leads you to conclude that the batteries must pose an electrocution risk -- then you might believe a submerged boat battery is as dangerous as a group of sharks. (And if you had as many adoring fans as Trump does, you might think all your after-dinner speech riffs are extremely witty and clever.)
But when Trump critics suggest that he's the one who's really suffering from dementia, they contradict the main anti-Trump message, which is that he's a highly motivated authoritarian with criminal tendencies who intends to destroy democracy in a second term while using the government to advance his own interests and the interests of other very dangerous extremists. Can he really be a potential American Putin and a doddering old man whose brain is turning to mush?
It's true that Republicans talk this way about Biden, who, in their telling, is both the corrupt, well-remunerated capo of the "Biden crime family" and an Alzheimer's-riddled shell of his former self. Republicans also used to talk this way about Barack Obama, who was described as both a mental lightweight who couldn't utter a coherent sentence without a Teleprompter and the all-powerful leader of a Muslim-socialist conspiracy to destroy America. But these contradictory arguments never made sense to anyone but the faithful. Lately, Republicans appear to have chosen a lane in each case: Obama is a fiendish anti-American and Biden has lost his marbles.
I still believe that most of Trump's verbal glitches can be explained by ignorance -- an ignorance that's dangerous for America. Trump knows nothing about the risks of fossil fuels and wants to terminate all programs that encourage the use of renewables. Trump doesn't understand the importance of government checks and balances to the survival of a democratic America, so he wants absolute power. He doesn't understand the relationship between global alliances and the security of America, so he wants to break free from those alliances. And so on. He just wants what he wants, and he's allied with radicals who hate the American experiment and prefer a totalitarian theocracy. The danger isn't a mush-brained Trump -- it's a Trump who's ignorant but has the presence of mind to pursue his goals.
America might survive a Trump administration in which the president doesn't know what he's doing. THe risk of a second Trump presidency is that he actually will know what he's doing.
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