Those gaffes, though, were always there. His gaffes had a lot to do with his past failed runs for POTUS. People want to say it's new, but it isn't. I've been watching him all my life, and he was always prone to them. These days, I feel that it's because he's in the public eye so much more than ever before that it seems like he's doing it more. There's so much more attention focused on his every utterance. Plus, the rightwing of our politics isn't interested in the content of his speech; they are only interested in minutiae they can use against him – so every less than perfect syllable is magnified as cognitive failure. Why? Because they really have no substantive policy arguments to make.