Weekly Mind Dump: Trump's Dementia
And - Despite what Macron says, don't expect to see La Grande Armée in Ukraine any time soon.
Week of 2/25-3/2/2024:
As Trump’s Brain Fades Away, Are We Headed for a Woodrow Wilson Moment?
Please have a close read of the following recent utterings of Donald Trump:
Over the seas and it comes right over our land. And then they want us to have clean. I said wait a minute, we're gonna have clean but it's all flying. Just remember that. Does that make sense? In other words, it's all coming through the currents through the air. It all comes. You can, they can name it, they can say exactly where it's going to be and when.
We’re…going to place strong protections to stop banks and regulators from trying to debank you from your — you know, your political beliefs, what they do. They want to debank you, and we’re going to debank — think of this. They want to take away your rights. They want to take away your country. The things they’re doing. All electric cars.
When the magnetic elevators — think of it — magnets. Now, all I know about magnets is this: Give me a glass of water, let me drop it on the magnets, that's the end of the magnets.
Biden is cognitively impaired, in no condition to lead and…now in charge of dealing with Russia and possible nuclear war… Under Biden, we would be in World War Two.”
POLITICO’s Jonathan Lemire said on “Morning Joe” today, “I covered Trump 15-to-20 years ago and it’s clear he’s not the same guy he was then. And we're seeing it night after night on the rally stage where he seems to lose control of the English language... This is something his team knows, but they're just forging forward.”
John Gartner is a psychologist and former professor at the Johns Hopkins University Medical School and was a contributor to the 2017 bestseller The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. He commented in an interview this week:
It’s something we in the field call phonemic paraphasia. Now I’ve interviewed a bunch of experts…who say that phonemic paraphasia is always evidence of brain damage. This is a neurological smoking gun. He can’t complete a sentence or thought. This is the real breakdown in the capacity to think and use language that are formal diagnostic properties for someone who is experiencing dementia. The Dementia Care Society says that when you start mixing up people, not names, and generations, that’s a sign of dementia. He said seven times that he was running against Obama. He said his father was born in Germany; well, his grandfather was born in Germany. He also shows something called semantic aphasia where he uses words that don’t actually correspond to the meaning. So, for example, remember the "oranges" of the investigation, instead of the “origins”? That’s a classic example.
Trump’s father, Fred, was diagnosed with “mild senile dementia” in 1991 at age 86, and with Alzheimer’s two years later. He died in 1993.
As Woodrow Wilson was rendered incapacitated from a stroke, his wife Edith effectively ran the presidency during the last year-and-a-half of his second term, unbeknownst to the American people.
I have two messages —
To the news media: As you obsess over Joe Biden’s 81 years, how about reporting on what is clearly rapid cognitive decline in Donald Trump?
To the MAGA undead: If you don’t care to see Melania running the country, and really crave a leader who combines Mussolini’s judicious leadership skills with the steady hand and moral principles of Papa Doc Duvalier, you might want to reopen your political Pandora’s Box to see what flies out.
Aux armes, citoyens! Marchons! Oui, marchons!
French President Emmanuel Macron said this week regarding whether NATO countries might send troops to help defend Ukraine:
Nothing should be ruled out. Anything is possible if it is useful to reach our goal. Russia cannot win this war.
This is the same guy who urged the West to “not humiliate Russia” three months into its invasion of Ukraine.
Alors, c'est quoi ce bordel?
Ever since Waterloo, the French have struggled to forge a grandiose leadership direction for themselves in Europe, largely in vain. De Gaulle’s constant grandstanding was rooted in this obsession, from his “liberating” Paris from the Nazis to pulling out of NATO’s military wing, knowing full well Washington would defend France in the event the Red Army stormed westward.
In any case, the universal response from NATO partners was “Absolument pas!” Any deployment of NATO country troops in whatever capacity to Ukraine would constitute a huge propaganda win for Putin, who incessantly bellows that his disastrous “special military operation” is a battle against NATO. And besides that, the mission creep could be highly dangerous.
Some speculate that Macron’s true intent was to spur wavering allies — particularly the United States — to resume/increase their military aid to Kyiv.
But I’ll wager that Macron had in the back of his mind Napoleon’s lament after he lost to Wellington: “Ah! If it were only to be done over again!”
The opinions and characterizations in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent official positions of the U.S. government.