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How Sleepy Trump, 79, Became the Sequel Nobody Wanted to See

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There’s an awkward déjà vu settling over Washington, the kind that makes you wonder if someone hit repeat on the decline-and-fall playlist.

For all the derision Donald Trump heaped on Joe Biden—his slowness, his stumbles, his brain fog—Trump is now displaying precisely the same physical and cognitive slippage. The wandering sentences. The wandering off. The dozing in the Oval Office. The dozing in the Cabinet Room. The slack-jawed pause when he can’t keep up and the teleprompter marches on without him.

Oh and the boast that he’d “passed” his MRI, before admitting he couldn’t quite remember whether it was actually a brain scan or something else entirely, which rather defeats the point. Happily, Karoline Leavitt reassured us, it was “perfect.”

But here’s the real difference between Biden then and Trump now: Biden was hidden; Trump is exposed. Biden’s aides did the talking; Trump insists on ad-libbing his own decline. Biden’s true deterioration emerged during the debate when he was isolated from all the people who routinely covered for him.

Trump won’t let us look away long enough to miss a single wobble.

Last year I

© The Daily Beast