Trump's Cognitive Impairment

Just about everyone now agrees that former President Joe Biden suffered disqualifying cognitive decline as President. Cult leader, convicted felon, and failed President Donald Trump has actually demanded an investigation into an alleged coverup of Biden's mental and physical health. However, there is ample evidence that Trump himself is suffering an equally-serious loss of cognitive abilities. However, the situation with Trump may be far more dangerous for our country than it was with Biden. The argument that Trump and his MAGA supporters make about the Biden Administration is that unelected staff members ruled in place of a cognitively-disabled Biden, thereby exercising unconstitutional powers. In the case of Trump, staff members are continuing to follow his instructions despite clear indications that he lacks the mental ability for the position. During the Biden administration, regardless of who was calling the shots — and, to be clear, I believe it was Biden — we had stable leadership and responsible decision-making. Now we are being led by a mad king, and his entourage is either unable or unwilling to acknowledge reality. As a result, we are going through inconsistent, unstable, and often senseless decision-making that changes daily depending on the President's whims. 

I have written before about Trump's declining cognitive abilities. For instance, his fixation on the word "groceries", which he believes to be an out-of-use old-fashioned term that he needs to define for his audience. I've also noted the bizarre incident in which he deviated from a speech about technology to tell a made-up story about his uncle teaching college courses to Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. That is simply something that could not have happened. Such incidences are continuing to occur. For instance, during a recent meeting with European Union President Ursula von der Leyen, Trump suddenly went off on a more than two-minute tangent to rant incoherently about windmills. Not only were Trump's remarks completely unrelated to the topic of the meeting, but nearly everything he said was factually wrong. It's no surprise that the White House no longer publishes transcripts of Trump's remarks, but the Democrats have picked up that job. He is a brief excerpt of Trump on windmills:

And the other thing I say to Europe, uh, we've, we will not allow a windmill to be built in the United States. They're killing us. They're killing the beauty of our scenery, our valleys, our beautiful plains. And I'm not talking about airplanes. I'm talking about beautiful plains, beautiful areas in the United States. And you look up, and you see windmills all over the place. It's a, it's a horrible thing.

Trump obviously has trouble speaking. He changes from subject to subject in mid-sentence and often appears to lose track of what topic he is discussing. But Trump is also showing that he is challenged in math. Twice now, Trump has claimed that he has made mathematically impossible reductions in drug pricing. He recently told reporters that "Well, one of the things they're going to be talking about pretty soon are the tremendous drop in drug prices. You know, we've cut drug prices by 1,200, 1,300, 1,400, 1,500 percent. I don't mean 50 percent. I mean 14-, 1,500 percent." If this were true, drug companies would be paying us to take their medicine. For instance, a 1,500 percent reduction on a drug costing $100 would be a discount of $1,500, resulting in the pharmacist paying a customer $1,400 when filling a prescription. If this was actually the case, I would personally be trying to fill every drug prescription possible. However, anyone who has been to a pharmacist lately knows that Trump is lying.

On Sunday, the Guardian published an article reporting doubts about Trump's mental acuity. The article quoted Richard A. Friedman, a professor of clinical psychiatry and the director of the psychopharmacology clinic at Weill Cornell Medical College, as saying, "Any fair-minded mental-health expert would be very worried about Donald Trump’s performance...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." The article also described how during a recent cabinet meeting, Trump suddenly went on "a 13-minute monologue about how he had decorated the cabinet meeting room."

John Gartner, a psychologist, was quoted as noting that Trump "really has trouble completing a thought". It was actually an example of Trump not completing a sentence that first inspired this post. Yesterday, Trump "truthed" on his social media network Truth Social that "The very wonderful and talented Lara Trump, whose show is a big ratings success, put racist sleazebag Charlamagne “The God” (Why is he allowed to use the word ‘GOD’ when describing himself?" Trump never got around to explaining where Lara Trump "put" Charlamagne. Instead, he ranted about ending wars that he hasn't ended and talking about "Sleepy Joe". Trump regularly engages in such incoherent diatribes, and they are generally simply ignored. This time, the New York Times actually wrote about the post, attributing Trump's anger with Charlamagne to Charlamagne's appearance on "My View with Lara Trump". While it is true that Trump specifically mentioned that appearance, it is more likely that Trump was, at least in part, motivated by a segment that Charlamagne recently conducted on "The Daily Show." In that appearance, the comedian compared Trump's behavior to a list of symptoms of dementia issued by the Mayo Clinic. As Charlamagne demonstrated, in humorous form, Trump easily meets each of the indicators.

It would be one thing if Trump's staff were reacting rationally to his clear cognitive shortcomings and simply giving him a cup of hot chocolate and sitting him in front of a TV while dressed in a bathrobe and slippers. But instead, they are taking him seriously. The result is situations such as that involving the on-again, off-again tariffs. On July 30, Trump wrote on Truth Social that "THE AUGUST FIRST DEADLINE IS THE AUGUST FIRST DEADLINE — IT STANDS STRONG, AND WILL NOT BE EXTENDED." Dutifully, cabinet secretaries rushed to the airwaves to assure the public that there would be no more TACO Trump chickening out. For instance, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told reporters that the "new round of tariffs will take effect Aug. 1, with no extensions or grace periods." Two days later, Trump announced that the tariffs would again be delayed. Now tariffs are scheduled to take effect on August 9, but who knows what will happen between now and then? Just like the rest of us, Trump's cabinet members have to constantly check their social media feeds to keep track of the current U.S. policy. None of them are brave enough to acknowledge that creating policies on the whims of a mad king is going to drive our economy directly into a ditch.

Another example is Trump's recent firing of Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, after the BLS issued a jobs report that Trump didn't like. Trump once famously disagreed about the path of a hurricane and simply took out a Sharpie and drew a new path on the map. It now appears that Trump is also going to use a Sharpie to create jobs reports. Just about anyone with at least two working brain cells criticized the move and argued that it would undermine trust in future government jobs data. For instance, the New York Times quoted Michael Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, as saying, "President Trump is completely wrong in asserting there’s been any sort of anti-Trump bias in the labor market data...I think that assertion is wholly unsupported." If trust in government data is lost, policymakers, investors, and businesses alike will have difficulty making decisions. Yet, Trump's advisors are allowing an obviously cognitively impaired man to lead us directly down that path.

It may well have been true, though I personally believe that the allegations are exaggerated, that Biden was cognitively impaired to the point that he was not actually leading the government. Now we face a worse situation in which a cognitively impaired president is unquestionably leading the government. The result is government policies that reflect the whims of a president who is not mentally up to the job. Mark Zandi, the Chief Economist for Moody's, said yesterday that the U.S. economy is headed for a recession. He cited both the tariffs and the BLS controversy, among other factors, as causes. If Trump were an elderly driver who was driving as erratically as he is making policy, someone would take away his keys. It is time for someone to take away Trump's keys to the presidency before he does even more damage.