like, you have to pick a lane here, because i don't think that we typically associate people suffering dementia and a head cold with sticking *too* closely to the list of facts, stats and figures they have spent the previous days memorizing in order to rattle them off in a 2m response window
what drives me up the wall is that the very thing that hobbled him in the first 15 of the debate — trying to cram in a ton of facts and figures and references that he clearly committed to memory over the previous few days — is a thing that people who actually have dementia normally can't do well.
you can freely criticize him for trying that approach *and i will heartily agree*, because i think it was extremely stupid and undercut most of his natural strengths (as well as exposing his longstanding liabilities), but, like, it was pretty clear to me that this is what he was trying to do.
It's gotten lost in all the sturm und drang, but you could have a reasonable conversation about Dem debate prep being not great in the last several elections.
