Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, claimed without evidence on Tuesday that Trump’s Democratic rival has dementia.
“Look, the man has dementia,” Giuliani claimed of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden on “Fox & Friends” early Tuesday. “There is no doubt about it. I have talked to doctors. I’ve had them look at 100 different tapes of his — five years ago and today.”
On Fox & Friends, Rudy Giuliani says Joe Biden "has dementia. There's no doubt about it. I've talked to doctors. … The president's quite right to say maybe he's taken adderall." The hosts get visibly uncomfortable. pic.twitter.com/2Ma7DKNBpS
— Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) September 29, 2020
The comments came as Giuliani predicted that Biden would win the debate “by the crooked media,” adding that he would not judge the presidential debates on their terms.
The Trump loyalist then plowed ahead with a claim that appeared to have no anchor in reality, suggesting not only that Biden couldn’t recite the Pledge of Allegiance, also offering the vague claim that Democratic nominee “can’t do numbers.”
“He actually displays symptoms that two gerontologists told me are classic symptoms of middle level dementia,” Giuliani said.
But the clips Giuliani appeared to reference were edited by the Trump campaign and its allies in an apparent attempt to make Biden look confused or senile, an effort that has been made a key yet unfounded campaign attack against the Democratic nominee.
The Fox News hosts became visibly uncomfortable before co-host Steve Doocy interjected — “the Biden people say he is fine.”
But Giuliani, who loyally distracts from the President’s rhetorical missteps, swooped in further to sow doubt about the Democratic candidate’s mental acuity.
“I think the president is quite right to say maybe [Biden] is taking Adderall or some kind of an attention-deficit disorder thing,” Giuliani said.
For months, Trump has challenged the mental sharpness of his opponent.
In June, the President repeatedly bragged about how well he’d “aced” remembering five different words in order for a 10-minute cognitive test, suggesting at the time that Biden wouldn’t have performed nearly as well. But the Montreal Cognitive Assessment Trump spoke of was designed to detect early signs of dementia and is usually administered to those with related concerns, experts told the Washington Post. It was not, in fact, evidence of Trump’s innate intelligence although he has appeared to tout it as such.
President Trump told reporters on Sunday that Giuliani and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) were helping him prepare for the upcoming presidential debate, which will be moderated by Fox News’ Chris Wallace on Tuesday night.
The former New York mayor, has a record of trying to smear Biden — last year he met with a Ukrainian parliamentarian in Kyiv who has since been sanctioned by the Treasury Department for offering the attorney documents in an attempt to dig up dirt on Biden ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
Topping a list of 17 questions that the Trump campaign wants Biden to answer during this week’s debate is likely related to the documents obtained by Giuliani from the Ukrainian MP that seek to smear Biden by going after transactions made by his son.
