Donald Trump appears to freeze at NRA speech in Dallas (Getty)
Donald Trump denies that he froze up and stopped speaking for more than 30 seconds near the end of a speech at the National Rifle Association (NRA) convention in Dallas, TX, on Saturday night (5/18/24). Trump's denial, however, does not hold up under scrutiny, according to a report at The New Republic (TNR). Under the headline "Cognitive Decline? Trump Melts Down After Reports on Freezing Episode; Donald Trump wants to pretend he didn’t totally freeze while giving a speech at the NRA convention," TNR's Hafiz Rashid writes:
Donald Trump wants everyone to know that he did not, in fact, freeze for more than 30 seconds during his speech at the National Rifle Association convention in Dallas on Saturday.
In a Truth Social post late Sunday night, the former president claimed that reports indicating he went silent in the middle of his remarks were false, and that he actually paused because of a musical interlude in his speech, something he claimed is part of most of his speeches.
“The reason they came up with this Disinformation is that Biden freezes all the time, can’t put two sentences together, and can rarely find his way off the stage without help. Donald Trump doesn’t freeze!” Trump posted
Here is the rant/post Trump published on social media. Video from the speech is available at this link. We've seen no reports that Trump has taken questions from the press about the speech.
Here is more from TNR's Rashid, who was not persuaded by Trump's heated post: For one thing, Trump has experienced a number of peculiar incidents on the campaign trail that point to his apparent cognitive decline:The Biden Campaign… put out a Fake Story that I ‘froze’ for 30 seconds, going into the ‘Musical Interlude’ section, when in actuality, the 30- to 60-second period of silence is standard in every one of my Speeches where we use the Music,
The reason they came up with this Disinformation is that Biden freezes all the time, can’t put two sentences together, and can rarely find his way off the stage without help. Donald Trump doesn’t freeze!
Unfortunately for Trump, the alleged freezing was caught on video, and the former president appears to awkwardly stop, and then resume while the music is still playing.
The incident was the second fumble by Trump this weekend. On Friday, speaking at the Republican Party of Minnesota’s annual Lincoln Reagan Dinner (which he left his youngest son’s graduation celebrations immediately to attend), Trump’s podium almost fell down after he appeared to lean on it too hard, causing the former president to attack the event’s workers and drawing a mocking tweet from the Biden campaign.
Are these more examples of Trump’s cognitive decline? For the past few months, Trump has made incoherent claims, saying that there were “millions of people” who didn’t speak real languages arriving at the southern U.S. border and that he would stop banks from “debanking” Americans. He has mixed up former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, and described his plan for America’s missile defense system by going, “Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.… Boom. OK. Missile launch. Woosh. Boom.” None of this helps Trump’s argument that he can go toe-to-toe with President Biden when debate season begins.
