Left-wing podcaster airs shocking claim about Trump's health while arguing he's 'ducking' Kamala debates

A left-wing podcaster made an astonishing claim about former President Donald Trump 's mental health while arguing that he is 'ducking' Vice President Kamala Harris in debates.

Kara Swisher, a podcaster for New York Magazine, declared on Saturday that Trump's 'cognitive challenges are clear ' after another panelist on CNN 's The Chris Wallace Show defended the former president's decision not to have another debate with the vice president.

She claimed that Trump, 78, is 'ducking' another debate with Harris, 59, in an effort to avoid a reaction similar to the one President Joe Biden received after his abysmal performance in a debate with Trump before he dropped out of the race.

That debate performance fueled concerns about Biden's age and stamina, and on Saturday, Swisher suggested Trump wants to avoid any similar concerns.

'This last week, there's been several appearances where his cognitive challenges are clear and so when he's pushed in any way or when that debate happened with Kamala Harris, he has issues,' she claimed. 'We talked about it with Biden.

'It's so clear from so many of his speeches this week that he loses words, he mixes up people. He doesn't want that contrast because she doesn't do that,' Swisher continued.

'So he's not going to appear near her.'

Swisher's claim came in response to Wallace asking his panel why they think the former president is 'ducking' another debate with Harris as well as a 60 Minutes interview he would have done alone.

'The fact is presidential candidates go on networks and do debates,' Wallace said. 'Why is Trump ducking a debate and a 60 Minutes [interview] when he's going to have an interview by himself?'

Manhattan Institute President Reihan Salam then offered his own perspective, arguing it is the specific venues and outlets Trump is taking issue with.

'Respectfully, if you think about 60 Minutes' track record of covering Donald Trump, I think he has reason to believe that [it] is not necessarily going to be a venue that will be entirely fair and reasonable, just as Harris has objections to appearing on Fox,' Salam said.

Trump, himself, has previously claimed that Harris only wants a second debate because she fears she is in a losing position.

'I beat Biden, I then beat her, and I'm not looking to do it again, too far down the line,' he wrote on his Truth Social network this week.

'Votes are already cast - And I'm leading BIG in the polls.

'I'll she's incapable of it,' he argued.

But the former president has made headlines in recent weeks for some of his more outrageous comments, including his claim at the debate that Haitian migrants are eating pets in Ohio.

His performance at that debate left mental health experts 'very worried' about his cognitive abilities, they told DailyMail.com.

'If a patient presented to me with the verbal incoherence, tangential thinking, and repetitive speech that Trump now regularly demonstrates, I would almost certainly refer them for a rigorous neuropsychiatric evaluation to rule out a cognitive illness ,' said Richard A Friedman, of Weill Cornell Medical College.

He wrote in the Atlantic that even though Harris 'certainly exhibited some rigidity and repetition, her speech remained within the normal realm for politicians, who have a reputation for harping on their favorite talking points.

'By contrast, Donald Trump's expressions of those tendencies were alarming.

'He displayed some striking, if familiar, patterns that are commonly seen among people in cognitive decline.'

Friedman noted he watched the debate in Philadelphia with an eye to the candidates' 'vocabulary, verbal and logical coherence, and ability to adapt to new topics'.

'Much of the time, following Trump's train of thought was difficult, if not impossible,' he wrote. 'Evading the question is an age-old debate-winning tactic. But Trump's response seems to go beyond evasion.

'It is both tangential, in that it is completely irrelevant to the question, and circumstantial, in that it is rambling and never gets to a point.'

He also said Trump failed to defend himself.

'When Harris raised his infamous 'very fine people on both sides' remark regarding the 2017 white-supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump could have pointed out that even at the time, he had specified, 'I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists—because they should be condemned totally '.

'But he did not,' Friedman wrote.

Republican Rep. Ronny Jackson, a former White House physician, insisted last year that the former president remains 'incredibly sharp'.

'He's got a better memory than I have, than you have. We all know this,' he told Fox News's Sean Hannity.

But Friedman said the cognitive tests Trump claims to have passed are only designed to detect pronounced cognitive dysfunction.

'As such, they are quite easy to pass,' he wrote. 'They ask simple questions such as "What is the date?" and challenge participants to spell world backwards or write any complete sentence.'

'Only careful medical examination can establish whether someone indeed has a diagnosable illness — simply observing Trump, or anyone else, from afar is not enough,' the doctor said.

For those who do have such diseases or conditions, several treatments and services exist to help them and their loved ones cope with their decline.

'But that does not mean any of them would be qualified to serve as commander in chief.'