And people wouldn’t be wrong to do so. Adjudicated rapist and serial fraudster Donald Trump recently uttered this (it’s unclear how to punctuate this gibberish):

It’s where the army weathered it’s brutal winter at Valley Forge where General George Washington led his men on a daring mission across the Delaware and where our union was saved by the immortal heroes at Gettysburg Gettysburg what an unbelievable battle that was the battle of Gettysburg what an unbelievable I mean it was so much and so interesting and so vicious and horrible and so beautiful and so many different ways it represented such a big portion of the success of this country Gettysburg wow…

I go to Gettysburg Pennsylvania to look and to watch and the statement of Robert E. Lee who’s no longer in favor did you ever notice that no longer in favor never fight uphill me boys never fight uphill they were fighting uphill he said wow that was a big mistake he lost his great general and they were fighting never fight uphill me boys but it was too late.

While Trump’s statement about Frederick Douglass was hilariously ignorant (“Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.”), it was, at least, a comprehensible sentence. But Trump routinely has stretches in his speeches–if you actually watch them (and not just ten second sections)–where he is utterly incoherent, loses his train of thought, and can’t pronounce words.

I think (but who can tell?) Trump was trying to make anodyne points about Civil War heroism, ‘forging the nation’, and so on: typical politician boilerplate. But he couldn’t do it. Instead, he sounded like a seven year-old trying to make that speech (“Never fight uphill!”). Yes, it would be funny as hell if a seven year-old said this (and it’s the kind of thing you playfully mock someone about for decades), but no presidential candidate should ever speak like this. Like I noted at the beginning, if Biden did this routinely, there would be calls from both parties for his removal.

And this will only get worse as time goes on. Meanwhile, the NY Times and other papers simply will not cover the reality of Donald Trump’s publicly visible dementia (or some other comparable condition), even as they discussed Biden’s aging for months (not that the incompetent professional Democrats advising Biden did him any favors).

The only way for this to become a story is if powerful Democrats start referring to this–and this is where their age could be an asset, since they can talk about this without sounding mean (“As you get older, one thing you do worry about is your mental health, especially as you see people you’ve known for your entire life start to have real problems. And Donald Trump is having those problems.”)

The question is if they will do this.