Via Trump, Defending His Sanity, Says He’s a ‘Very Stable Genius’.
Update, Noon: The Times has now changed its online headline from ‘sanity’ to ‘mental fitness’ – Trump’s unfit for office in any event, as a matter of cognition, knowledge, or character.
I’ve been musing for some time that Trump is deep into dementia. Yesterday and today he copped to it in tweets.
Yesterday:
“the Fake News Mainstream Media are taking out the old Ronald Reagan playbook and screaming mental stability and intelligence.”
Today:
“I’ve had to put up with the Fake News from the first day I announced that I would be running for President. Now I have to put up with a Fake Book, written by a totally discredited author. Ronald Reagan had the same problem and handled it well. So will I!”
It certainly seems that he finally got his physical from someone not his gastroenterologist, and they got flinty-eyed with him. You certainly remember well that Lord Ronnie was into dementia relatively early in his first term and was complexly dotty in his second. Nancy, her astrologer, and Mike Deaver kept the whole charade going to the end. That they pulled it off is one of the unsung hero stories of the modern American era. It was an absolutely amazing feat.
I harp on Trump being demented not because he really had anything to do with it, but rather because he has no business attempting to run something as complex as the USA in his condition. He is simply not up to the task anymore. Alzheimer’s is not voluntary. That he is clearly suffering from it is not his fault. What is at fault is the Republican party’s willingness to enable a clearly disabled man for brutally crass political reasons. That is both voluntary and non-forgivable.
We all either are, or will be, dealing with dementia at some point before too long, either personally or as a caregiver. There are few more vicious diseases, and very few that exact such a toll on the sufferer’s caregivers.
Watching Trump…How would you handle being his caregiver??
Callum Borchers has an assessment of Trump’s comments that also notes how foolish it is of Trump to respond to this topic himself: “Trump’s ill-advised claim that the media are covering his mental fitness like Reagan’s.”
Sec. Clinton was right – Trump can be baited easily, with a tweet, book, etc.