Recently, Mr. Trump has been displaying signs of aging in a very public manner. He recently boasted about passing a cognitive test during his presidency but mistakenly mentioned the wrong doctor who had administered it. He has also been mixing up names, confusing Nancy Pelosi with Nikki Haley and Mr. Biden with Barack Obama.
Democrats have been watching their own set of video clips, observing Mr. Trump’s peculiar tangents about sharks and boats with electric batteries, as well as the way he struggles with his words. During a rally, he criticized the Biden campaign for calling “the videos of crooked Joe shuffling” clean fakes. He then asked the crowd, “Do you know what a clean fake is?” The term he was looking for is actually “cheap fake” – real footage that has been deceptively edited.
In Racine, some of Mr. Trump’s supporters took a more nuanced view of the videos of Mr. Biden and the age factor, considering how it might impact the upcoming debate.
“Oh, absolutely, we see them on every channel and all over the internet, of course,” said Marjean Stern, 79, a retiree from Kenosha, Wis., referring to the videos of Mr. Biden. However, she admitted feeling uncomfortable at the way her candidate has been highlighting Mr. Biden’s senior moments.
“We’re elderly, so we don’t like that,” she said. “I don’t want to make fun of him. I respect him.”
Will Moes, 23, a recent graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison who will be voting for the first time in a presidential election, acknowledged that videos of Mr. Biden may be edited to portray him as confused. “But a lot of the context you see them in, when you watch the full videos, it’s hard to fake that,” he remarked.
