Convicted felon Donald Trump staged another rally in Racine, Wisconsin on Tuesday, where he played all his classic hits, from xenophobia to fake news. But it was Trump’s attempt to smear President Joe Biden as senile that really went off the rails. Trump rambled for several minutes about artificial intelligence and misleading content on social media, appearing to invent a new term during a very confused rant about technology.
Trump, who’s 78 years old, tried to refer to footage of Biden, 81, at a recent G7 meeting in Europe that went viral on social media. The video appeared to show the president wandering off aimlessly during a skydiving demonstration, at least according to conservative media.
“The stage, it looked like he didn’t know where the hell he was, but he didn’t know where he was,” Trump said, despite the fact that Biden never appeared on a stage in that viral video. “He’s blaming it now on… AI. He’s saying… he doesn’t know what AI is, but that’s okay.”
The Biden campaign never blamed it on AI, instead pointing out the fact that he was walking over toward a parachutist just out of frame in the cropped version of the video that went viral. But after lots of confused rambling where he’d sometimes read his teleprompter as though he was learning about something for the first time, Trump continued, trying to paint Biden as mentally incompetent.
“Crooked Joe and his handlers are insisting he’s sharper than ever,” Trump said at his rally on Tuesday. “They say the videos of Crooked Joe shuffling around are clean fakes.”
And that’s when things got really weird. “Clean fakes” aren’t a thing, obviously.
“You know what a clean fake is?” Trump continued. “They’re deceptively edited. They say they’re deceptively edited. All of the mistakes that he’s made every day. He can’t go anywhere without a mistake. Now, if I’m perfect, they say he made a mistake. He did. Perfect. I don’t say clean fakes, although they do. They do that. Look how many you have out there.”
Trump appears to have been trying to talk about “cheap fakes,” a term coined in the 2010s for viral media that isn’t heavily manipulated but is still misleading in some way. Cheap fakes are different from deepfakes, which use AI technology, often to make it appear like a celebrity is saying something they never said.
The rally, which was streamed live on YouTube by a number of different news outlets, was just the latest Trump event in Wisconsin, one of six or seven battleground states that will decide who becomes the next president. Trump and Biden are locked in a dead heat in Wisconsin, according to a polling average for the state maintained by FiveThirtyEight. Trump is currently polling at 41.4%, Biden at 41.2%, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr at 8.2%.
Those numbers are strikingly similar to other battlegrounds. Michigan polling averages currently have Trump at 41.7%, Biden at 41.6%, and Kennedy at 7.5%, according to FiveThirtyEight.
Yes, Biden is old and stumbles over his words sometimes. But Trump is no better and appears to be losing his mental faculties at an even faster rate if you actually watch his rallies. Though we don’t necessarily recommend you tune in. They’re largely the same every single time he stages one. And when Trump does try to introduce new material—like whining about “clean fakes”—it couldn’t be more clear just how much he’s losing it.
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