How much of Trump's behavior is because he knows he's losing it - if he does at all?
Charles P. Pierce looked at Trump’s interview with the New York Times. He has a different take on it than most people. Trump’s New York Times Interview Is a Portrait of a Man in Cognitive Decline.
“….What Schmidt actually got out of this interview is a far more serious problem for the country. In my view, the interview is a clinical study of a man in severe cognitive decline, if not the early stages of outright dementia.
Over the past 30 years, I’ve seen my father and all of his siblings slide into the shadows and fog of Alzheimer’s Disease. (the president's father developed Alzheimer's in his 80s.) In 1984, Ronald Reagan debated Walter Mondale in Louisville and plainly had no idea where he was. (Would that someone on the panel had asked him. He’d have been stumped.) Not long afterwards, I was interviewing a prominent Alzheimer’s researcher for a book I was doing, and he said, “I saw the look on his face that I see every day in my clinic.”
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And…
In this interview, the president* is only intermittently coherent. He talks in semi-sentences and is always groping for something that sounds familiar, even if it makes no sense whatsoever and even if it blatantly contradicts something he said two minutes earlier. To my ears, anyway, this is more than the president*’s well-known allergy to the truth. This is a classic coping mechanism employed when language skills are coming apart….
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Read the whole thing. This isn’t funny, or just infuriating, or Trump being Trump. If Pierce is correct, the president is a man who is losing the ability to function while holding one of the most demanding jobs on the planet.
The people around him have to know this. The stories about Trump being ‘managed’, certain topics being avoided around him, opinions about him expressed in private and off the record — they all know he has serious problems. But they keep up the charade because they believe they can still use him to get what they want.
Trump is scheduled for a physical January 12, 2018. It will be the first official physical carried out by a doctor who is not in Trump’s direct employ.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders confirmed that physical will take place at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.
The White House physician, Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson, M.D., will conduct the exam and report the results.
Jackson has been in that role since 2013 and also examined and treated President Obama.
I do not envy Jackson. We’ve never had a president removed from office for mental incapacitation (although we should have). What will he find — and can we trust this administration to give us an honest report?
I think we all know the answer to that last question.
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What do you think?
I think Trump is an authoritarian, racist demagogue. That's bad enough all by itself.
I think Trump is an authoritarian, racist demagogue who is also in mental decline.
I'm going to reserve judgment - but I am concerned about his health, by what I see and hear from him.
WTF do we do if the doctor confirms it - and we have to trust the GOP to do the right thing?
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