People are talking, as Donald Trump would say, about how obvious Trump’s mental incapacity is getting, and asking why this isn’t the lede of every news story about him.
The New York Times’ Peter Baker was on Morning Joe talking about his story:
Trump’s Speeches, Increasingly Angry and Rambling, Reignite the Question of Age
With the passage of time, the 78-year-old former president’s speeches have grown darker, harsher, longer, angrier, less focused, more profane and increasingly fixated on the past, according to a review of his public appearances over the years
After showing a clip of Trump at one of his weekend weaves, Mika read this paragraph:
He rambles, he repeats himself, he roams from thought to thought — some of them hard to understand, some of them unfinished, some of them factually fantastical. He voices outlandish claims that seem to be made up out of whole cloth. He digresses into bizarre tangents about golf, about sharks, about his own “beautiful” body. He relishes “a great day in Louisiana” after spending the day in Georgia. He expresses fear that North Korea is “trying to kill me”when he presumably means Iran. As late as last month, Mr. Trump was still speaking as if he were running against President Biden, five weeks after his withdrawal from the race.
Baker explained that Trump’s speeches go on twice as long as they used to—from an average of 45 minutes in 2016 to 82 minutes now, and, as he wrote:
Similarly, he uses 32 percent more negative words than positive words now, compared with 21 percent in 2016, which can be another indicator of cognitive change. And he uses swearwords 69 percent more often than he did when he first ran, a trend that could reflect what experts call disinhibition. (A study by Stat, a health care news outlet, produced similar findings.)
Mr. Trump frequently reaches to the past for his frame of reference, often to the 1980s and 1990s, when he was in his tabloid-fueled heyday. He cites fictional characters from that era like Hannibal Lecter from “Silence of the Lip” (he meant “Silence of the Lambs”), asks “where’s Johnny Carson, bring back Johnny” (who died in 2005) and ruminates on how attractive Cary Grant was (“the most handsome man”). He asks supporters whether they remember the landing in New York of Charles Lindbergh, who actually landed in Paris and long before Mr. Trump was born.
Nothing wrong with this guy, right? Nothing to see here.
As usual, Doonesbury cuts the crap and gets right to the heart of the matter. This Sunday, he showed a conversation between Trump and an aide who was suggesting a way of “leveraging your dementia.”
“I’ve compiled a list of words you’ve invented over the last few months,” he says. “Just start repeating them at every event. No judge would even consider jailing someone so impaired.”
Last April, Garry Trudeau introduced us to “Elias, Doonesbury’s veteran psychologist” who said,
“Someone has to speak for the many mental health experts reluctant to say what all of them believe: Trump has dementia!
When he freestyles off the stem of a word? That’s called phonemic paraphasia…” Elias explains, in front of a screen showing examples like evangelish, bonefishes, Venezheregull, Obamna, soup pie cane, crissus, steak hill, pivotal, mishiz, and lady lady la.
From phonemic paraphasia to disinhibition and dementia, we’re learning new words to describe our presidential candidates. The reason it’s fallen to satirists like Garry Trudeau to say out loud what mainstream journalists can only “review” shows how disconnected we are from politics.
As I’ve said before, when most people think politics is a clown show, they won’t be surprised when politicians act like idiots.
Most of them aren’t! I came to Washington, DC to work in politics in the 1980s, and as a writer for a media firm, proprietor of my own small propaganda factory and consultant to presidential campaigns (well, one) and candidates for Congress, Senate, state and local office, I never encountered political speech like Donald Trump’s outside of a Lyndon LaRouche rally.
Trump’s combination of demented speech with his treatment of words as what Maggie Haberman calls “disposable commodities, intended for single use, and not necessarily indicative of any deeply held beliefs” is particularly dangerous.
Not only is Trump suffering from multiple mental impairments, he has the memory of a goldfish. He’ll say the worst things imaginable, not understand them when he speaks them, and forget them entirely before you’ve had a chance to react.
I still believe he’s going to lose, and not by a little, but I’ll give my family a break and not elaborate on this today. But when he’s safely defeated and back in the headlines for his criminal trials and continue meltdowns on social media, Republicans need to ask themselves what kind of party they’re going to rebuild.
Axios puts it this way:
Potential Trump loss threatens destruction of modern GOP
An identity crisis. A brutal power struggle. Years in the wilderness.
If Donald Trump is defeated in next month's election, the Republican Party will face a reckoning unprecedented in modern political history.
Why it matters: Never before has a party's identity been so deeply entwined with the fate, fortunes and flaws of one man. Four consecutive poor election cycles would unleash a wave of sustained scrutiny that the GOP — as it currently exists — may not survive.
I can’t think of anyone who can inherit the mantle of Donald Trump, hold the same kind of rallies and incite the same level of loyalty, though J.D. Vance, Josh Hawley, Marjorie Taylor Greene et. al. will surely try. But I’m not sure the Bush wing of the GOP can make a comeback either.
For now, let’s encourage the media to take this conversation out of the realm of satire and commentary on cable news, and show how there’s madness to this MAGA. Such madness…