Decryption | The Atlanta Cognitive Test

(New York) We already know the “Montreal cognitive assessment”, the one that Donald Trump claimed to have passed with a perfect score of 30 out of 30, on January 12, 2018.

On June 27, 2024, we will be entitled to the cognitive test in Atlanta, the city where CNN will hold the first presidential debate between the same Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

Certainly, this unprecedented confrontation – it will take place even before the conventions of the two major American parties – should allow the candidates to debate their respective positions on the major issues.

But tens of millions of viewers will also – or above all – watch it to determine whether one or the other of the candidates is really on the verge of senility, as the opposing camp claims. This is obviously due to their respective ages, but also to their behavior.

However, for certain well-known reasons, this test promises to be more perilous for Joe Biden than for Donald Trump.

“I think Biden has more to lose because the Trump camp has been so effective in trying to portray him as weakened or in the early stages of dementia,” says Susan Drucker, a journalism professor and expert on presidential debates at Hofstra University on Long Island, site of the first televised duel between the same two candidates in 2020.

“But I think both candidates are likely to make mistakes,” she adds.

Donald Trump proves it regularly. He notably confused Joe Biden with Barack Obama and Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi. And he gave the D^r Ronny Jackson, the same one who gave him the Montreal cognitive assessment, the name “Ronny Johnson”. All this while making fun of the mental health of his opponent.

Joe Biden’s campaign team never misses an opportunity to relay these errors on social networks, which it attributes to the decline of the Republican candidate’s cognitive faculties. In recent days, she has added to this barrage Donald Trump’s rambling speeches on various subjects, including sharks, batteries and “the late Hannibal Lecter”, a serial killer who eats his victims in the film Thesilenceofthelambs.

The question of image

But the Republican camp can add images to the Democratic president’s errors that reinforce his message. Images which show Joe Biden’s increasingly stiff gait, his falls and his sometimes lost look. Images that are often altered or truncated to create false impressions and are reported as such by conservative media outlets, including Fox News and the New York Postto the great dismay of the White House.

There remains an undeniable fact: the electorate is more worried about Joe Biden’s age than that of Donald Trump. Last February, 86% of Americans thought the president was too old to serve as president, compared to 62% who thought the same about his predecessor, according to an ABC News/Ipsos poll.

A month later, Joe Biden managed to reassure many Democrats and some independents by delivering an energetic and combative performance during the State of the Union address.

But doubts persist or return. Hence the question: can a presidential debate provide a useful assessment of the cognitive abilities of the first octogenarian president?

“Yes,” replies Quebec geriatrician David Lussier. “A debate can be a good way to assess cognitive functions, more so than the State of the Union speech, for example, where the text is read. Debate requires cognitive flexibility, good reasoning skills and a good memory to remember facts and report them adequately. That said, Trump will certainly fail all of these criteria, but we never know if this is cognitive or personality. »

The D^r Lussier puts his finger on one of the advantages of Donald Trump.

This advantage extends to Donald Trump’s most false or outrageous statements. Recent example among others: during a rally in Wisconsin, the former president insinuated that a good performance by Joe Biden in Thursday’s debate would be attributable to his cocaine use.

His supporters laughed. The media shrugged their shoulders.

Format of the debate

Donald Trump will perhaps adopt a more presidential tone during this confrontation, the rules of which will deprive him of the presence of an audience and the possibility of loudly interrupting his rival. “Microphones will be muted for the duration of the debate, except for the candidate whose turn it is to speak,” CNN said in announcing the rules.

But these details are secondary.

“I think the public will be less concerned with the rules than with the age issue,” says Susan Drucker, the Hofstra University expert. “And I think it will be less about what is said and more about how it is said and how it appears. »

By succeeding in imposing a debate at the end of June, Joe Biden and his entourage ensured that they had several months to forget a poor performance. They could then try to remind us that the president has always been a world-class blunderer.

“But in the current context where he is described as aging, weakened and unfit for the presidency, he finds himself in a particularly precarious position,” said Susan Drucker.

Preparing candidates for the first televised debate

Donald Trump

Donald Trump rejects this type of preparation, contenting himself with meeting experts or elected officials, including senators JD Vance and Marco Rubio, two potential running mates, to discuss various policies with them. “He does not need to be programmed by collaborators or doped with chemicals like Joe Biden,” Jason Miller, one of his advisers, told the Politico site, echoing an unfounded accusation concerning President.

Joe Biden

The president isolated himself with several collaborators at Camp David, during which he participated in fake debates in which his personal lawyer, Bob Bauer, played the role of the former president, as he did in 2020. In his memoirs published last week, the 72-year-old lawyer recalls that his role had been to be “as insulting and disjointed as Trump can be”.