P.S. A Column On Things

By PAUL E. SCHINDLER JR. I am from Portland, Oregon, Beaumont ’66, Benson High ’70, MIT ’74. Some things are impossible to know, but it is impossible to know these things.

Questioning Trumps Mental State

Claude Finds Trump Cognitive Decline

I asked the Claude Large Language Model to compare two Trump news conference transcriptions: September 27, 2020 and April 6, 2026. It concluded that a comparison of Trump’s unscripted and impromptu words showed detectable cognitive decline during those six years.

Claude reported, “This is the most striking quantitative finding. The 2026 speech has nearly 3× more mid-sentence interruptions relative to word count. This reflects a significantly higher rate of losing the thread, restarting, or abandoning clauses — a known linguistic marker researchers associate with cognitive aging.” Full Claude Report

Project Structure, methods and sources. Why and how I did this comparison, why I trusted the generally inaccurate and hallucinating Claude LLM engine’s results and why it isn’t TDS.

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Paul E. Schindler Jr.

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