On Thursday 7/22 the January 6 Select Committee ran clips from a video of then-President Donald Trump ostensibly being recorded for public release as a way of providing just enough acknowledgement and denouncement of the violence he worked to promote at the US Capitol to head off a removal from office — specifically by invocation of the 25th Amendment of the US Constitution.
At about 1:34 Trump does this thing he’ll sometimes do when giving speeches: he “short-circuits.” It would usually take the form of reading something off the teleprompter, getting hung up on a word, and then changing the subject to make it look like he had a spontaneous thought he has decided to talk about instead. But here in this video, you can see this short-circuiting play out a bit differently. What he actually says is “The demonstrators who infiltrated the Cap have defied the seat of...” and then there’s a rapid “chatter” during which he strikes the podium with the edges of his hands. He recovers after the podium strike and says “It’s ‘defiled,’ right? See, I can’t see it very well.” This time, he doesn’t so much change the subject as much as claim he can’t sufficiently see the teleprompter he’d already been reading from for some minutes already — the same teleprompter he’d been using for years, presumably. But whereas himself and chattered after the “defied,” his brain had already begun to misfire just before when he said “Cap” instead of “Capitol.”
At 2:20 he slurs his way through the word “yesterday” three times in a row. He, along with Ivanka and an unknown man audible off-camera, compensate by just removing a word that Trump no longer has enough motor control over his mouth to articulate — and he seems to know it.
2:38 shows Trump saying the sentence “My only goal was to ensure the integrity of the vote” twice, stopping himself each time afterward and reacting with a hand gesture, baring his front teeth, and making a sharp sucking noise the first time and then grimacing and striking the podium with his hand the second time. Why he stopped himself isn’t obvious; he didn’t mispronounce any words and while his delivery was slightly awkward the first time, that’s not the case the second time.
For a long time Trump has been covering for his mental decline and getting away with it. At his live rallies he can pace himself by going off-script when he feels like it or giving himself a break by ad-libbing a sure-thing applause line and he’ll go on for hours, but running down something prepared for him ahead of time is something that, by January 7, 2021, required many takes and attentive and forgiving handlers.