An ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll in July 2024 found 44% of Americans thought Trump had the mental sharpness to serve effectively as president, against just 14% for Biden — a 30-point gap.
Today, Trump is 80 and has increasing bouts of trouble in public (he sleeps a lot during press conferences and frequently slurs his speech), and voters are taking note. Overall, 46% of Americans rate his sharpness as president as “poor” — within a few points of the 50% who retroactively said that about Joe Biden.
But do they? Do voters really rate Trump's mental sharpness today almost as poorly as Biden's during his presidency?
The "poor" numbers are comparable -- 46% for Trump now, 50% for Biden in retrospect -- but 38% of respondents still rate Trump's mental sharness as excellent or good, as opposed to 24% who say the same thing about Biden when he was president. If we treat this as a binary, with the top two ratings as positive and the bottom two as negative, Trump is at 38%-59% now and Biden as president is at an abysmal 24%-73%. If we treat "fair" as a neutral rating and eliminate it, Trump is at 38%-46% now (which isn't a horrible spread) and Biden as president is at 24%-50% (which is).
A couple of things are happening here. This is a result of GOP hero worship -- Democrats never regarded Biden as a demigod -- but it's also because Trump just talks and talks. He gets to the end of nearly every sentence, and the sentences make sense to the poorly informed because most voters are poorly informed. The sentences often rely on simplistic formulas (Democrats are communists; we're fighting a war because Iran must never get a nuclear weapon), and that's fine because most voters' understanding of the issues is as shallow and simplistic as Trump's.
Biden really did understand the issues at a deep level for most of his life. I think he still understood them in depth at the end of his term, and maybe part of his struggle to communicate was difficulty summoning up the words to convey the complex things he knew. He had a lifelong stutter, and I think speaking became harder and harder for him as he aged, but I'm not sure his thinking about the problems he needed to deal with in his job had really diminished. Biden struggled to craft sentences to convey complex concepts, but Trump just yammers, expressing simple-minded ideas that don't take much brain power.
I believe that Biden in 2024 not only had a sharper mind than Trump in 2026, he also had a sharper mind than Trump in 2017 (or 2000 or 1986). But Biden's tongue was too weak to convey what he knew. Trump knows fuck-all, so that's not a problem for him.
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