Wednesday, May 29, 2024

Trump Agrees to Debate Biden

Ex-President Donald J Trump has had to sit through his hush-money trial for the last three and a half weeks, and he’s done better than I expected.  Although initially hit with nine contempt charges by Judge Juan Merchan (who has not ruled on the consequences), Trump has moderated his behavior more than I thought he would be able to.  At least once, however, Trump could not help grumbling uncontrollably about Stormy Daniel’s testimony for which Judge Merchan chided Trump’s attorney (?) but did not hold Trump in contempt.  It again raises the question of Trump’s mental competence.

Trump surprised me by agreeing to debate President Biden, once on June 27th and again on September 10th.  I suspect both campaigns felt they could count on the other imploding in a debate: Biden – for all his competence as president – does not fare well on the debate stage, and Trump will be … well Trump. 

For at least part of those debates, Trump will be unscripted and off the teleprompters, precisely the situation he should not be able to handle if he is as demented as I think he is (see here and here).  So there are three possibilities:

1. I’m wrong about Trump’s dementia, and he will be his usual narcissistically uncontrolled self.

2. He will find some excuse to cancel the debates.

3. He will ascend the debate stage, and his level of dementia will be obvious to anyone open to taking it in.

I’m guessing he’ll find an excuse to cancel the debates, but I’ll be delighted if he ascends the stage.  The more exposure the American people have to an unscripted Trump, the greater the possibility we will see the unprecedented danger to our democracy he embodies.

Monday, April 22, 2024

Does Trump Lack Impulse Control

It will be interesting to see whether former president Donald J Trump has the impulse control to sit through his New York hush-money trial without being penalized by the presiding judge, New York State Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan.  Just to be clear, Merchan’s demands of Trump – that he refrain from commenting in the courtroom or on Truth Social about witnesses, trial lawyers and staff and their families – are not exceptional and should not be difficult for a fully functioning adult.  So in that respect, whether Trump is able to maintain Merchan proscriptions will be another test of whether he is actually suffering from dementia that makes him truly incapable of controlling his outbursts.

According to journalists present at the trial, Trump was quiet today, so maybe he’ll be all right.  But we have a couple of weeks of trial ahead of us, and it will be a good test of the degree of Trump’s dementia.  Knowing full well that Judge Merchan will penalize him heavily, will Trump be capable of appropriately controlling himself?

Tuesday, April 9, 2024

Donald Trump’s Dementia

Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin and the editors of the online website Salon have pointed toward the severely declining mental capacities of Donald Trump that have not only remained unreported by the mainstream media but have been systematically covered up.  Numerous mental health experts, however, have signed a petition declaring that Trump is showing signs of severe, accelerating dementia.  Reviews of several of his recent speeches have shown startling cognitive problems.

One must acknowledge that even experts cannot reliably make definitive psychiatric diagnoses without a face-to-face examination in a structured setting.  But Donald Trump is unlikely to sit for such a professional evaluation and even less likely to make the results public.  So we must look to perhaps less reliable expert assessments-at-a-distance.  Psychologist Dr John Gartner has pointed to specific speech and behavioral pathologies that indicate actual dementia, not just the cognitive slowing of aging.  Gartner writes in USA Today

If Donald Trump were your father, you would run, not walk, to a neurologist for an evaluation of his cognitive health. You don’t have to be a doctor to see something is very wrong. …

In Alzheimer’s, as language skills deteriorate, we see two types of tell-tale speech disorders, or paraphasias:

Semantic paraphasia involves choosing the incorrect words. For instance, after Attorney General William Barr released a letter on the Mueller report, Trump said: “I hope they now go and take a  look at the oranges, the oranges of that investigation, the beginnings of that investigation."

Phonemic paraphasia, which is linked to the moderate to severe stages of Alzheimer’s, is described as "the substitution of a word with a  nonword that preserves at least half of the segments and/or number of syllables of the intended word.” For example, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu becomes “Betanyahu,” big league becomes "bigly" anonymous becomes “enenamas” or "anenomynous," renovation becomes “renoversh,” missiles become "mishiz," space capsule becomes “capsicle,” midterm elections become "midtowm" and "midturn" elections, and Christmas becomes “Chrissus.”

Trump’s speech patterns appear even more disordered when you go beyond the sound bite and look at a whole speech. He careens from one thought to the next in a parade of non-sequiturs, frequently interrupting himself in the middle of a sentence to veer into another free association. When commentators described his two-hour speech at the Conservative Political Action Caucus (CPAC) last month as “unhinged,” they were referring in large part to this quality.

Amanda Marcotte wrote in Salon

Those who learned about the speech from glancing at mainstream news headlines the next morning would have no idea how flat-out bonkers the whole thing was … even by Trumpian standards.

The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson said Trump “gave a rambling and incoherent two-hour speech in which he raved like a lunatic.”

Heather Cox Richardson suggests that

Trump is communicating with voters outside his carefully curated bubble almost exclusively through videos, even on a topic as important as abortion. At rallies [such as the CPAC convention], his speeches have become erratic and wandering, with occasional slurred words, and observers have wondered how he would present to more general audiences. It appears that his team has concluded that he will not present well and that general audiences must see him in carefully curated settings, like [his recent] apparently heavily edited video [on abortion].

What is astonishing to me is that at this point there has been no mainstream media analysis of Trump’s accelerating dementia.  There is plenty of coverage of President Joe Biden’s aging – his forgetfulness, his mixing up names, his physical gait – symptoms consistent with normal aging, but no coverage of Trump’s dementia, which should surely disqualify him from acting as president. 

Gartner writes that within the mainstream media:

There is … this focus on Biden's gaffes or other things that are well within the normal limits of aging. By comparison, Trump appears to be showing gross signs of dementia. This is a tale of two brains. Biden's brain is aging. Trump's brain is dementing.  

The press is pathologizing the normal in the case of Biden and normalizing the pathological in the case of Trump. It’s perverse.

The mainstream media talks of Biden and Trump as if their conditions – aging and dementia – were somehow equivalent.  It is a gross dereliction of duty.  If Trump wins in November, the failure of the mainstream media to warn us will bear a great responsibility.