The problem is that the MAGA base, being the unintelligent crowd they are, think this is what Trump is like, always. And they for whatever reason love it…
nonamenolastname on
Is losing? He lost it a long time ago. It’s been years since the last time the orange douche spoke coherently.
Trump has been insane since he first started campaigning, so it’s hard to notice a difference. Joe Biden’s decline is more obvious because he’s not a lunatic.
autotldr on
This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://www.newstatesman.com/us-election-2024/2024/09/donald-trump-is-losing-it) reduced by 93%. (I’m a bot)
*****
> That post appeared with several others: a photo of Harris in an orange prison jumpsuit, a photo of Barack Obama with a caption asking Trump supporters if they wanted Obama to be tried before a military tribunal, and photos of Trump with AI-created lions.
> The first was, he said, that Trump was too successful to be mentally ill – a bizarre argument that sounded like one Trump would make himself.
> "Mr Trump," Frances intoned, "Causes severe distress rather than experiencing it and has been richly rewarded, rather than punished, for his grandiosity, self-absorption and lack of empathy." Therefore Trump could not possibly be mentally ill, Frances concluded, apparently unaware of erratic politicians in world history who have achieved success in the exact terms defined by their insanity.
The dude is 78 years old and it shows. His speeches are increasingly a meandering mess. He will only sound and act worse in 4 years.
Rude_Tie4674 on
It’s elder abuse at this point. Someone in his family needs to come get Grandpa and take him off to jail.
Highthere_90 on
Trumps been cognitively decline for years now and the media was treating it like normal..
KillerZaWarudo on
NYT: Here how this is bad for Biden
Inner_Rope6667 on
Dementia Donald has a nice ring to it
KnownAd523 on
Both of my parents were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s within months of each other. As the primary caregiver, I learned a thing or two about the disease, particularly the early warning signs that I missed as I was working a very time consuming job. Clearly, Donald Trump has some cognitive issues. This could be attributed to age, stress, etc. He just seems more unhinged, confused and distracted. It is our job to not allow this man access to the nuclear codes. We, the people, have the power.
Pristine_Serve5979 on
All of Trump’s staff knows it. He was just as fucked up in 2016. They should get him to step down and let Vance run.
MaybeTheDoctor on
Maybe they can swap him out with that Kennedy guy
Orange_Kid on
Spoiler: it won’t receive the same scrutiny
commenter_27 on
I’m actually worried that a lot of the people around us who we might assume won’t vote Trump will indeed vote for him, when push comes to shove.
The same people that love to feel outrage, and will latch onto any reason they can to hate on Harris/Walz with enough hate that they’ll feel they have no alternative but to vote for Trump. In their mind, voting for a lesser of two evils, but in reality hyper-focusing on some bullshit reason to hate democrats/Harris/Walz because someone wore a tan suite or helped the needy with tax money, all while completing missing the fact that they’re literally voting for fascism.
The same people who “try not to talk politics nowadays” and say “I don’t like how he talks” but are quick to point out how they had more money or business was better back when Trump was president.
I was pumped after Harris was announced and after lil John made an appearance at the convention… but the more process it and think about all the people I know … I’m worried guys 😕
JimboDanks on
If the media covered Trumps decline like they did Biden’s there would be no contest so no ad money. They gota keep the orange one propped up weekend at Bernie’s style or the gravy train ends.
duckinradar on
He’s not losing something he never had which is why it’s being ignored
RealKarlFranz on
Two words. President Vance. If this country can’t get on the right side of history and run blue so hard it spins the GOP back to the shadows for a decade, then we get what we deserve.
icouldusemorecoffee on
It deserved it 8 years ago but the media found Trump to be entertaining so they ignored it. Hopefully it gets far more play. Biden was slower but he could still form normal thoughts and answer questions (read the transcript of the Biden/Trump debate), Trump cannot form a normal sentence, he’s always spoken a in droning slurred voice, doesn’t even understand the questions being asked, and has replaced trying to speak slowly with complete nonsense to fill the void.
rockum on
This needs to be talked about more. And in major media outlets.
Careless_View_4489 on
Dementia and cognitive decline oftentimes magnify and amplify the underlying core personality of the individual. Less filtering and far less self-awareness are what we are witnessing. Trump’s cognitive decline is simply pulling back the onion skins to the core of who, and what, he actually is. What’s far more troubling is that his flock of minions and operatives surrounding him are using his decline to justify their own nefarious behavior that, unlike Trump, are not impacted by cognitive decline, but rather by self-serving narcissism and hatred. They all know he’s a stooge in decay, but they are milking him dry to line their own pockets. Once he is of no use to them, they will dump him as quickly as they praised him. Parasitic opportunists of the worst imaginable kind.
The-Dachshund-pillow on
Behind paywall 1/2
The process of removing Biden as the Democratic presidential candidate can’t exactly be said to have worked well, but it worked. And now it’s time for Americans to turn the same self-regulatory instincts to Biden’s 78-year-old former rival. Trump’s campaign is already falling apart– most recently with the shameful attempt to use a ceremony at Arlington Cemetery as an electioneering platform. But there are deeper reasons to inspect Trump’s political credibility now. Because cognitively speaking, Trump is beginning to make Biden look like Oscar Wilde.
Events move so fast, the news cycle is so accelerated, that the most telling signs of Trump’s decline pass without commentary. It might be illuminating to dwell a little on one of them. About two weeks ago, Trump seemed to denigrate the Medal of Honor, America’s highest award for military valour in combat. Speaking at his New Jersey golf club, he was praising Miriam Adelson, the Israeli-American widow of the late Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson, when he recalled how he once gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “Miriam, I watched Sheldon sitting so proud in the White House when we gave Miriam the Presidential Medal of Freedom. That’s the highest award you can get as a civilian, it’s the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor, but civilian version. It’s actually much better, because everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor that’s soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead. She gets it and she’s a healthy, beautiful woman. And they’re rated equal.”
The liberal press, now comfortably primed to respond with moral outrage to every outrageous thing Trump says, pounced. Here he was, once again, spewing contempt for the military. However, few, if any, people pointed out that it is not the “Congressional Medal of Honor” but the “Medal of Honor”. Had Biden made that mistake, an outcry would have ensued. And Trump’s patterns of thinking here indicate a cognitive decline in the way he apprehends and makes sense of reality that goes beyond mere propriety or morality. It is, of course, wholly deficient in empathy to justify the lesser value of the Medal of Honor by citing the fact that the soldiers who receive it have “been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead”. But it is not simply, as people have suggested, that Trump, who despises “losers”, considers a “loser” anyone who has been wounded in battle, or taken prisoner in combat.
It is that, first, he does not seem to recognise the moral significance of bodies and minds in pain. And, second, he is not aware of the importance, social and moral, of pretending he does recognise another’s pain even if he doesn’t. Then there is the language itself. It suddenly swerves into the incoherent. Trump says that “everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor that’s soldiers”. (He could also mean: “everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor – that’s soldiers.”) The words verge on nonsense. Either he is saying that every soldier gets the Medal of Honor, which is absurdly untrue. Or he is saying that only soldiers get the Medal of Honor, but that every soldier gets it, which is similarly absurd, but with a twist. If Biden had spoken in such a way a year ago, he would have been pushed aside all the sooner.
Trump’s extreme rhetoric is still routinely dismissed as him “just being Trump” – the usual hyperbole and bluster. Yet it is hardly mere bluster or hyperbole for Trump to claim, as he has recently, that “you can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot, you get mugged, you get raped, you get whatever it may be.” Perhaps the most alarming part of that sentence is the disturbingly disconnected “whatever it may be”. And it is not merely vulgar for Trump to republish a post claiming that Kamala Harris has achieved political success thanks to dispensing oral sex. The claim is not just appalling; it is crazy to make it in public. That post appeared with several others: a photo of Harris in an orange prison jumpsuit, a photo of Obama with a caption asking Trump supporters if they wanted Obama to be tried before a military tribunal, and photos of Trump with AI-created lions. Sane people do not lack inhibition to this degree. But Trump’s repetition of such lunacy has made it routine. Call it the banality of madness. Trump’s assertion, made in deadly earnest in an interview last Tuesday with Dr Phil McGraw, that God had spared him from being assassinated in order to save America, and possibly the world, barely raised an eyebrow.
Incredibly, in America, where just about everything goes – Trump, for example – there is a tacit prohibition against discussing Trump’s obvious mental incapacity in public. The taboo was imposed in February 2017, just over one year after Trump’s inauguration. That was when the New York Times published a short letter, signed by “33 psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers”. Noting Trump’s “inability to tolerate views different from his own, leading to rage reactions”, and his pattern of distorting reality to suit his own “psychological state”, the letter reasoned that “[i]n a powerful leader, these attacks are likely to increase, as his personal myth of greatness appears to be confirmed”. The signatories concluded that Trump’s “speech and actions make him incapable of serving safely as president”. Trump’s continuing refusal to accept his defeat in the 2020 election makes the letter prescient.
The-Dachshund-pillow on
Behind paywall 2/2
The response to the letter was more than passing strange. Other mental health professionals rose to denounce the letter and its signatories. One was Allen Frances, the prestigious chairman of the task force that wrote the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV”, considered psychiatry’s diagnostic bible. Dr Frances had two problems with the letter. The first was, he said, that Trump was too successful to be mentally ill – a bizarre argument that sounded like one Trump would make himself. “Mr. Trump,” Dr. Frances intoned, “causes severe distress rather than experiencing it and has been richly rewarded, rather than punished, for his grandiosity, self-absorption and lack of empathy.”
Therefore Trump could not possibly be mentally ill, Frances concluded, apparently unaware of erratic politicians in world history who have achieved success in the exact terms defined by their insanity. Frances added, with an apparently unintentional touch of humour, that pronouncing Trump mentally ill was an insult to the mentally ill.
Reacting to the negative backlash, the Times then published an article about the controversy by Richard Friedman, a psychiatrist. Friedman referred to what is known in American psychiatry as the Goldwater rule. This was the American Psychiatric Association’s official prohibition against mental health professionals making a public diagnosis of a politician’s mental health. That edict itself was a response to mental health professionals participating, in 1964, in a public survey and judging then Republican candidate for president, Barry Goldwater, mentally unfit to be president. Siding with the APA, Friedman finished by declaring that clinically judging Trump to be mentally ill would let him “off the moral hook”. And from that point on, liberal attacks on Trump were unfailingly moral, a tactic that soon degenerated into a grossly ineffectual torrent of moral hubris, virtue-mongering and sanctimony.
There are, of course, sound reasons to resist declaring Trump mentally unsound. At this late moment in American civilisation, the concept of mental illness is nearly impossible to clarify. When I wrote, in 2017, about the dust-up over whether Trump should be publicly diagnosed, my very own therapist at the time paused in the middle of one of our sessions to scold me for doing so. The weapon of psychological stigma can be used, like impeachment, against any rival or adversary. In 2011, a psychologist named Drew Westen enraged people by publishing, again in the Times, a lengthy essay arguing, in effect, that Obama did not have the “character” to be president (a “deep-seated aversion to conflict”; “tic-like gestures of compromise”).
It could well be that the debate over whether it was acceptable to call Trump mentally unfit to be president is at the heart of the weird debate over who is more weird, the Democrats or the Republicans. America is becoming unrecognisable, so fast, in so many ways, to so many different types of people, that the words “weird” and “sick” are being anxiously domesticated into neutral terms of description. Yet, in the end, the unclarity is all the more reason to be vigilant about truly aberrant figures slipping into leadership of the country under the cover of a revolution of norms. Trump is truly aberrant. Everyone knows it, his supporters as much as his detractors. No one talks like this man. No one abuses other people like this man. No one misrepresents reality like this man. And he is not lying. He is describing what he perceives, which is not what is actually there.
Biden’s relational skills, his empathy, his moral perception of reality were never the issue. He had been, by all appearances and accounts, a mentally stable man all his life. That is why his cognitive decline became so apparent, once his entourage stopped shielding him. It is harder to discern Trump’s cognitive decline, because his behaviour, ironically, serves the same purpose as Biden’s entourage, obscuring the decline it is a symptom of. But anyone watching him abruptly change subjects in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, anyone who listened to that speech and watched him disappear into the rabbit hole of his own mind, can see that he is even further along in his deterioration than Biden.
The liberal media cried wolf in 2016, and now they are afraid to ring the alarm bells when it is vital to ring them. After January 6 and the spectacle of watching the effects of Trump’s “personal myth of greatness” being challenged, now is the time to apply the same scrutiny of Trump’s mental condition that was applied to Biden – the appearance of throwing stones from glass houses be damned. Having been criticised for questioning Trump’s sanity in 2017, and despite the daily evidence that Trump’s faculties are clearly degenerating, the ferociously partisan liberal press wishes to present itself as dignified and above the fray. Yet what was good for the octogenarian gander with declining faculties but an intact moral centre should be equally good for the septuagenarian gander with declining faculties and a pathologically absent moral centre. The great blessing in life, and the great curse, is that people can get used to just about anything. That inborn tendency is now, with regard to Trump’s unstable mind, a curse.
bucko_fazoo on
✋🤚 “the weave, they’re calling it” ✋🤚
AdaptiveVariance on
They say alarming–no one knows why, it’s such a bad, with this attack; but someone said alarming cognitive–and they should be sued by the way; they should be sued, and they probably will be very shortly–but the cognitive; they said the cognitive decline, which is fake, okay, and it’s a lie, just so you understand–but it’s not alarming, there’s no alarm, and if you look into it, the cognitive alarm is so fake, and phony, and I would say wrong–but, and so, and the fake news media, which has become so dishonest by the way; but it’s proven, they’re lying, they’re liars, just like the FBI and Sleepy Joe, and everybody knows it, believe me, and they know very strongly from the knowledge point of view.
pjflyr13 on
Part of his base speak in tongues so… right on target.
T1gerAc3 on
Corporate media will never attack the guy that is going to further cut their taxes
DrMux on
We’re just now noticing this?
meyou2222 on
On Trump’s best day he speaks like I do when I’m drunk.
LOLteacher on
Let me know when it gets so bad that everybody’s jaws drop to the floor. I *CANNOT* wait until that happens.
SpangleDam2 on
Not going to happen. Our vaunted media has not mentioned his age and mental decline in any fashion. Unlike Biden who was daily attacked by the media as too old. Our media sucks.
makashiII_93 on
The media does have a bias: Toward Republicans.
This election truly has destroyed my faith in mainstream outlets and media.
But remember! Kamela is the problem because she wouldn’t do an interview!*
*They cut out over half of her interview on CNN including many popular policy positions.
M00nch1ld3 on
Unfortunately there’s this:
Les Moonves in 2016, who was Chairman of CBS at the time:
‘It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,’ Moonves said at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in San Francisco”
“‘Man, who would have expected the ride we’re all having right now? … The money’s rolling in and this is fun,’ Moonves went on. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this, and this going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.’”
So while his cognitive decline deserves be be covered, it’ll be a cold day in hell before the psychopaths in main stream media do so in a fair, balanced, and neutral manner.
OkSeason973 on
Never had it
Due-Egg4743 on
The thing with him and Biden is they do it with so much more frequency compared to a few years ago. Biden was still sharp as a tack in the 2012 debates with negligible word salad or stutter and Trump both looks and sounds like a different person compared to 2016.
Trump looks so tired all the time versus his first run where frankly his stamina was pretty insane. 2016 Trump and 2012 Biden were both still very quick on their feet as speakers then. The presidency seems to really wear people out as unsurprising as it sounds.
Vince McMahon was kind of the same way. If you go back and watch him over the years he had a very rapid acceleration in slowing down into his 70s. The last several years have been really rough for him with scandals and aging. Vince is the definition of a caricature workaholic, though, who spent over half his life working/lifting weights like 20 hours per day and had no other hobbies.
justhavingfunMT on
The worthless mainstream media is so addicted to Donald that they can’t do anything that would push him out of their reach or make him go away..
Grinagh on
In my vision of this year I saw neither Biden nor Trump making it to the election. Biden makes sense now but Trump…well 64 days ain’t a lot of time however. When the media finally decides to report the Katie Johnson story, when the Trump biopic comes out, all of this will affect Trump and when he clutches his chest one day and cries out “Oh God” as he slumps forward many of us will breathe a collective sigh of relief while we watch the weirdest mourners in the world pay their respects.
MMW: debts come due.
grumpyliberal on
Stop trying to save stupid people from themselves. Vote for Harris. End of story.
YYCDavid on
Just keep him at the helm long enough to lose the election — then throw his ass in jail.
….is what I’d like to see, but the scumbag probably never face justice for his atrocities.
After he loses, watch him shift gears and claim immunity for medical reasons. The grift will shift to asking poor, gullible people to pay his medical bills.
KingMe091 on
We need to see this on CNN, msnbc, everything. The double standard shows just how money has infiltrated the media.
flux_of_grey_kittens on
Why aren’t more networks talking about it? I’d argue it would be better ratings to do so. So fucking weird that it gets largely ignored and ends up looking like he’s being protected.
mishma2005 on
And the media 🦗🦗🦗🦗
Polkawillneverdie81 on
It is 2015. I am reading a news article saying trump is mentally unwell and he should be stopped.
It is 2020. I am reading a news article saying trump is mentally unwell and he should be stopped.
It is 2024. I am reading a news article saying trump is mentally unwell and he should be stopped.
sturdypolack on
I don’t think Trump’s backers care. They have JD Vance in place to implement their horrible policies. They just need to secure the win and Trump won’t matter anymore.
nerofan5 on
Huh I watched his Theo Von interview and he sounded fine
Impressive_Mud693 on
What happened now
Passion_Emotional on
After everything, it will most likely come down to Pennsylvania, which is a very close race. Every night, I think, what if DonOLD wins…
48 Comments
The problem is that the MAGA base, being the unintelligent crowd they are, think this is what Trump is like, always. And they for whatever reason love it…
Is losing? He lost it a long time ago. It’s been years since the last time the orange douche spoke coherently.
[Obesity can cause changes in the brain similar to Alzheimer’s, study suggests](https://www.nbcnews.com/health/aging/obesity-can-cause-changes-brain-similar-alzheimers-study-suggests-rcna66555)
Trump has been insane since he first started campaigning, so it’s hard to notice a difference. Joe Biden’s decline is more obvious because he’s not a lunatic.
This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://www.newstatesman.com/us-election-2024/2024/09/donald-trump-is-losing-it) reduced by 93%. (I’m a bot)
*****
> That post appeared with several others: a photo of Harris in an orange prison jumpsuit, a photo of Barack Obama with a caption asking Trump supporters if they wanted Obama to be tried before a military tribunal, and photos of Trump with AI-created lions.
> The first was, he said, that Trump was too successful to be mentally ill – a bizarre argument that sounded like one Trump would make himself.
> "Mr Trump," Frances intoned, "Causes severe distress rather than experiencing it and has been richly rewarded, rather than punished, for his grandiosity, self-absorption and lack of empathy." Therefore Trump could not possibly be mentally ill, Frances concluded, apparently unaware of erratic politicians in world history who have achieved success in the exact terms defined by their insanity.
*****
[**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/1f7bzl1/donald_trump_is_losing_it_his_alarming_cognitive/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ “Version 2.02, ~693197 tl;drs so far.”) | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr “PM’s and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome.”) | *Top* *keywords*: **Trump**^#1 **Medal**^#2 **mentally**^#3 **moral**^#4 **Honor**^#5
He’s old. Stipulated.
The dude is 78 years old and it shows. His speeches are increasingly a meandering mess. He will only sound and act worse in 4 years.
It’s elder abuse at this point. Someone in his family needs to come get Grandpa and take him off to jail.
Trumps been cognitively decline for years now and the media was treating it like normal..
NYT: Here how this is bad for Biden
Dementia Donald has a nice ring to it
Both of my parents were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s within months of each other. As the primary caregiver, I learned a thing or two about the disease, particularly the early warning signs that I missed as I was working a very time consuming job. Clearly, Donald Trump has some cognitive issues. This could be attributed to age, stress, etc. He just seems more unhinged, confused and distracted. It is our job to not allow this man access to the nuclear codes. We, the people, have the power.
All of Trump’s staff knows it. He was just as fucked up in 2016. They should get him to step down and let Vance run.
Maybe they can swap him out with that Kennedy guy
Spoiler: it won’t receive the same scrutiny
I’m actually worried that a lot of the people around us who we might assume won’t vote Trump will indeed vote for him, when push comes to shove.
The same people that love to feel outrage, and will latch onto any reason they can to hate on Harris/Walz with enough hate that they’ll feel they have no alternative but to vote for Trump. In their mind, voting for a lesser of two evils, but in reality hyper-focusing on some bullshit reason to hate democrats/Harris/Walz because someone wore a tan suite or helped the needy with tax money, all while completing missing the fact that they’re literally voting for fascism.
The same people who “try not to talk politics nowadays” and say “I don’t like how he talks” but are quick to point out how they had more money or business was better back when Trump was president.
I was pumped after Harris was announced and after lil John made an appearance at the convention… but the more process it and think about all the people I know … I’m worried guys 😕
If the media covered Trumps decline like they did Biden’s there would be no contest so no ad money. They gota keep the orange one propped up weekend at Bernie’s style or the gravy train ends.
He’s not losing something he never had which is why it’s being ignored
Two words. President Vance. If this country can’t get on the right side of history and run blue so hard it spins the GOP back to the shadows for a decade, then we get what we deserve.
It deserved it 8 years ago but the media found Trump to be entertaining so they ignored it. Hopefully it gets far more play. Biden was slower but he could still form normal thoughts and answer questions (read the transcript of the Biden/Trump debate), Trump cannot form a normal sentence, he’s always spoken a in droning slurred voice, doesn’t even understand the questions being asked, and has replaced trying to speak slowly with complete nonsense to fill the void.
This needs to be talked about more. And in major media outlets.
Dementia and cognitive decline oftentimes magnify and amplify the underlying core personality of the individual. Less filtering and far less self-awareness are what we are witnessing. Trump’s cognitive decline is simply pulling back the onion skins to the core of who, and what, he actually is. What’s far more troubling is that his flock of minions and operatives surrounding him are using his decline to justify their own nefarious behavior that, unlike Trump, are not impacted by cognitive decline, but rather by self-serving narcissism and hatred. They all know he’s a stooge in decay, but they are milking him dry to line their own pockets. Once he is of no use to them, they will dump him as quickly as they praised him. Parasitic opportunists of the worst imaginable kind.
Behind paywall 1/2
The process of removing Biden as the Democratic presidential candidate can’t exactly be said to have worked well, but it worked. And now it’s time for Americans to turn the same self-regulatory instincts to Biden’s 78-year-old former rival. Trump’s campaign is already falling apart– most recently with the shameful attempt to use a ceremony at Arlington Cemetery as an electioneering platform. But there are deeper reasons to inspect Trump’s political credibility now. Because cognitively speaking, Trump is beginning to make Biden look like Oscar Wilde.
Events move so fast, the news cycle is so accelerated, that the most telling signs of Trump’s decline pass without commentary. It might be illuminating to dwell a little on one of them. About two weeks ago, Trump seemed to denigrate the Medal of Honor, America’s highest award for military valour in combat. Speaking at his New Jersey golf club, he was praising Miriam Adelson, the Israeli-American widow of the late Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson, when he recalled how he once gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “Miriam, I watched Sheldon sitting so proud in the White House when we gave Miriam the Presidential Medal of Freedom. That’s the highest award you can get as a civilian, it’s the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor, but civilian version. It’s actually much better, because everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor that’s soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead. She gets it and she’s a healthy, beautiful woman. And they’re rated equal.”
The liberal press, now comfortably primed to respond with moral outrage to every outrageous thing Trump says, pounced. Here he was, once again, spewing contempt for the military. However, few, if any, people pointed out that it is not the “Congressional Medal of Honor” but the “Medal of Honor”. Had Biden made that mistake, an outcry would have ensued. And Trump’s patterns of thinking here indicate a cognitive decline in the way he apprehends and makes sense of reality that goes beyond mere propriety or morality. It is, of course, wholly deficient in empathy to justify the lesser value of the Medal of Honor by citing the fact that the soldiers who receive it have “been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead”. But it is not simply, as people have suggested, that Trump, who despises “losers”, considers a “loser” anyone who has been wounded in battle, or taken prisoner in combat.
It is that, first, he does not seem to recognise the moral significance of bodies and minds in pain. And, second, he is not aware of the importance, social and moral, of pretending he does recognise another’s pain even if he doesn’t. Then there is the language itself. It suddenly swerves into the incoherent. Trump says that “everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor that’s soldiers”. (He could also mean: “everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor – that’s soldiers.”) The words verge on nonsense. Either he is saying that every soldier gets the Medal of Honor, which is absurdly untrue. Or he is saying that only soldiers get the Medal of Honor, but that every soldier gets it, which is similarly absurd, but with a twist. If Biden had spoken in such a way a year ago, he would have been pushed aside all the sooner.
Trump’s extreme rhetoric is still routinely dismissed as him “just being Trump” – the usual hyperbole and bluster. Yet it is hardly mere bluster or hyperbole for Trump to claim, as he has recently, that “you can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot, you get mugged, you get raped, you get whatever it may be.” Perhaps the most alarming part of that sentence is the disturbingly disconnected “whatever it may be”. And it is not merely vulgar for Trump to republish a post claiming that Kamala Harris has achieved political success thanks to dispensing oral sex. The claim is not just appalling; it is crazy to make it in public. That post appeared with several others: a photo of Harris in an orange prison jumpsuit, a photo of Obama with a caption asking Trump supporters if they wanted Obama to be tried before a military tribunal, and photos of Trump with AI-created lions. Sane people do not lack inhibition to this degree. But Trump’s repetition of such lunacy has made it routine. Call it the banality of madness. Trump’s assertion, made in deadly earnest in an interview last Tuesday with Dr Phil McGraw, that God had spared him from being assassinated in order to save America, and possibly the world, barely raised an eyebrow.
Incredibly, in America, where just about everything goes – Trump, for example – there is a tacit prohibition against discussing Trump’s obvious mental incapacity in public. The taboo was imposed in February 2017, just over one year after Trump’s inauguration. That was when the New York Times published a short letter, signed by “33 psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers”. Noting Trump’s “inability to tolerate views different from his own, leading to rage reactions”, and his pattern of distorting reality to suit his own “psychological state”, the letter reasoned that “[i]n a powerful leader, these attacks are likely to increase, as his personal myth of greatness appears to be confirmed”. The signatories concluded that Trump’s “speech and actions make him incapable of serving safely as president”. Trump’s continuing refusal to accept his defeat in the 2020 election makes the letter prescient.
Behind paywall 2/2
The response to the letter was more than passing strange. Other mental health professionals rose to denounce the letter and its signatories. One was Allen Frances, the prestigious chairman of the task force that wrote the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV”, considered psychiatry’s diagnostic bible. Dr Frances had two problems with the letter. The first was, he said, that Trump was too successful to be mentally ill – a bizarre argument that sounded like one Trump would make himself. “Mr. Trump,” Dr. Frances intoned, “causes severe distress rather than experiencing it and has been richly rewarded, rather than punished, for his grandiosity, self-absorption and lack of empathy.”
Therefore Trump could not possibly be mentally ill, Frances concluded, apparently unaware of erratic politicians in world history who have achieved success in the exact terms defined by their insanity. Frances added, with an apparently unintentional touch of humour, that pronouncing Trump mentally ill was an insult to the mentally ill.
Reacting to the negative backlash, the Times then published an article about the controversy by Richard Friedman, a psychiatrist. Friedman referred to what is known in American psychiatry as the Goldwater rule. This was the American Psychiatric Association’s official prohibition against mental health professionals making a public diagnosis of a politician’s mental health. That edict itself was a response to mental health professionals participating, in 1964, in a public survey and judging then Republican candidate for president, Barry Goldwater, mentally unfit to be president. Siding with the APA, Friedman finished by declaring that clinically judging Trump to be mentally ill would let him “off the moral hook”. And from that point on, liberal attacks on Trump were unfailingly moral, a tactic that soon degenerated into a grossly ineffectual torrent of moral hubris, virtue-mongering and sanctimony.
There are, of course, sound reasons to resist declaring Trump mentally unsound. At this late moment in American civilisation, the concept of mental illness is nearly impossible to clarify. When I wrote, in 2017, about the dust-up over whether Trump should be publicly diagnosed, my very own therapist at the time paused in the middle of one of our sessions to scold me for doing so. The weapon of psychological stigma can be used, like impeachment, against any rival or adversary. In 2011, a psychologist named Drew Westen enraged people by publishing, again in the Times, a lengthy essay arguing, in effect, that Obama did not have the “character” to be president (a “deep-seated aversion to conflict”; “tic-like gestures of compromise”).
It could well be that the debate over whether it was acceptable to call Trump mentally unfit to be president is at the heart of the weird debate over who is more weird, the Democrats or the Republicans. America is becoming unrecognisable, so fast, in so many ways, to so many different types of people, that the words “weird” and “sick” are being anxiously domesticated into neutral terms of description. Yet, in the end, the unclarity is all the more reason to be vigilant about truly aberrant figures slipping into leadership of the country under the cover of a revolution of norms. Trump is truly aberrant. Everyone knows it, his supporters as much as his detractors. No one talks like this man. No one abuses other people like this man. No one misrepresents reality like this man. And he is not lying. He is describing what he perceives, which is not what is actually there.
Biden’s relational skills, his empathy, his moral perception of reality were never the issue. He had been, by all appearances and accounts, a mentally stable man all his life. That is why his cognitive decline became so apparent, once his entourage stopped shielding him. It is harder to discern Trump’s cognitive decline, because his behaviour, ironically, serves the same purpose as Biden’s entourage, obscuring the decline it is a symptom of. But anyone watching him abruptly change subjects in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, anyone who listened to that speech and watched him disappear into the rabbit hole of his own mind, can see that he is even further along in his deterioration than Biden.
The liberal media cried wolf in 2016, and now they are afraid to ring the alarm bells when it is vital to ring them. After January 6 and the spectacle of watching the effects of Trump’s “personal myth of greatness” being challenged, now is the time to apply the same scrutiny of Trump’s mental condition that was applied to Biden – the appearance of throwing stones from glass houses be damned. Having been criticised for questioning Trump’s sanity in 2017, and despite the daily evidence that Trump’s faculties are clearly degenerating, the ferociously partisan liberal press wishes to present itself as dignified and above the fray. Yet what was good for the octogenarian gander with declining faculties but an intact moral centre should be equally good for the septuagenarian gander with declining faculties and a pathologically absent moral centre. The great blessing in life, and the great curse, is that people can get used to just about anything. That inborn tendency is now, with regard to Trump’s unstable mind, a curse.
✋🤚 “the weave, they’re calling it” ✋🤚
They say alarming–no one knows why, it’s such a bad, with this attack; but someone said alarming cognitive–and they should be sued by the way; they should be sued, and they probably will be very shortly–but the cognitive; they said the cognitive decline, which is fake, okay, and it’s a lie, just so you understand–but it’s not alarming, there’s no alarm, and if you look into it, the cognitive alarm is so fake, and phony, and I would say wrong–but, and so, and the fake news media, which has become so dishonest by the way; but it’s proven, they’re lying, they’re liars, just like the FBI and Sleepy Joe, and everybody knows it, believe me, and they know very strongly from the knowledge point of view.
Part of his base speak in tongues so… right on target.
Corporate media will never attack the guy that is going to further cut their taxes
We’re just now noticing this?
On Trump’s best day he speaks like I do when I’m drunk.
Let me know when it gets so bad that everybody’s jaws drop to the floor. I *CANNOT* wait until that happens.
Not going to happen. Our vaunted media has not mentioned his age and mental decline in any fashion. Unlike Biden who was daily attacked by the media as too old. Our media sucks.
The media does have a bias: Toward Republicans.
This election truly has destroyed my faith in mainstream outlets and media.
But remember! Kamela is the problem because she wouldn’t do an interview!*
*They cut out over half of her interview on CNN including many popular policy positions.
Unfortunately there’s this:
Les Moonves in 2016, who was Chairman of CBS at the time:
‘It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,’ Moonves said at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in San Francisco”
“‘Man, who would have expected the ride we’re all having right now? … The money’s rolling in and this is fun,’ Moonves went on. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this, and this going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.’”
So while his cognitive decline deserves be be covered, it’ll be a cold day in hell before the psychopaths in main stream media do so in a fair, balanced, and neutral manner.
Never had it
The thing with him and Biden is they do it with so much more frequency compared to a few years ago. Biden was still sharp as a tack in the 2012 debates with negligible word salad or stutter and Trump both looks and sounds like a different person compared to 2016.
Trump looks so tired all the time versus his first run where frankly his stamina was pretty insane. 2016 Trump and 2012 Biden were both still very quick on their feet as speakers then. The presidency seems to really wear people out as unsurprising as it sounds.
Vince McMahon was kind of the same way. If you go back and watch him over the years he had a very rapid acceleration in slowing down into his 70s. The last several years have been really rough for him with scandals and aging. Vince is the definition of a caricature workaholic, though, who spent over half his life working/lifting weights like 20 hours per day and had no other hobbies.
The worthless mainstream media is so addicted to Donald that they can’t do anything that would push him out of their reach or make him go away..
In my vision of this year I saw neither Biden nor Trump making it to the election. Biden makes sense now but Trump…well 64 days ain’t a lot of time however. When the media finally decides to report the Katie Johnson story, when the Trump biopic comes out, all of this will affect Trump and when he clutches his chest one day and cries out “Oh God” as he slumps forward many of us will breathe a collective sigh of relief while we watch the weirdest mourners in the world pay their respects.
MMW: debts come due.
Stop trying to save stupid people from themselves. Vote for Harris. End of story.
Just keep him at the helm long enough to lose the election — then throw his ass in jail.
….is what I’d like to see, but the scumbag probably never face justice for his atrocities.
After he loses, watch him shift gears and claim immunity for medical reasons. The grift will shift to asking poor, gullible people to pay his medical bills.
We need to see this on CNN, msnbc, everything. The double standard shows just how money has infiltrated the media.
Why aren’t more networks talking about it? I’d argue it would be better ratings to do so. So fucking weird that it gets largely ignored and ends up looking like he’s being protected.
And the media 🦗🦗🦗🦗
It is 2015. I am reading a news article saying trump is mentally unwell and he should be stopped.
It is 2020. I am reading a news article saying trump is mentally unwell and he should be stopped.
It is 2024. I am reading a news article saying trump is mentally unwell and he should be stopped.
I don’t think Trump’s backers care. They have JD Vance in place to implement their horrible policies. They just need to secure the win and Trump won’t matter anymore.
Huh I watched his Theo Von interview and he sounded fine
What happened now
After everything, it will most likely come down to Pennsylvania, which is a very close race. Every night, I think, what if DonOLD wins…