Denial. Normalizing. The elephant in the...Elephant.
People here on DK who have taken care of family members, or others, suffering from progressive dementia know. Many older voters also recognize and express...what is usually softened in media reports as "worry"or "concern." Medical professionals, in line with professional standards, button their lips.
Media professionals, for the most part, try to normalize, and to maintain the ritual "horse race."
(If readers knew how much normalizing reporters normally do, such as quietly correcting subjects' obvious verbal slips, tightening messy quotes, ignoring triggers of cognitive dissonance, giving ambiguous facts their best or most logical interpretation, and tacitly all the time reassuring audiences that the system has things basically under control -- if readers were aware of all that as a normal practice, the current normalizations might seem less surprising. In general, people, including journalists, will do whatever they've long been conditioned to do. The trouble is, when you hit an outlier....)
But all the same, sometimes it's not too hard to see through the Emperor's clothes. You just have to glance in that direction.
This morning, MSNBC opinion writer and editor Zeeshan Aleem handed us a brief, direct, uncensored and diagnostic glimpse, caught during a Trump speech last Thursday in Potterville, Mich. Here goes:
"She destroyed the city of San Francisco, it’s — and I own a big building there — it’s no — I shouldn’t talk about this but that’s OK I don’t give a damn because this is what I’m doing. I should say it’s the finest city in the world — sell and get the hell out of there, right? But I can’t do that. I don’t care, you know? I lost billions of dollars, billions of dollars. You know, somebody said, ‘What do you think you lost?’ I said, ‘Probably two, three billion. That’s OK, I don’t care.’ They say, ‘You think you’d do it again?’ And that’s the least of it. Nobody. They always say, I don’t know if you know. Lincoln was horribly treated. Uh, Jefferson was pretty horribly. Andrew Jackson they say was the worst of all, that he was treated worse than any other president. I said, ‘Do that study again, because I think there’s nobody close to Trump.’ I even got shot! And who the hell knows where that came from, right?"
Let's run that by again?
"[H]e was attempting, at least initially, to criticize Kamala Harris’ record in San Francisco, presumably referring to her tenure as district attorney there," Aleem writes.
"She destroyed the city of San Francisco, it’s — and I own a big building there — it’s no — I shouldn’t talk about this but that’s OK I don’t give a damn because this is what I’m doing. I should say it’s the finest city in the world — sell and get the hell out of there, right? But I can’t do that. I don’t care, you know? I lost billions of dollars, billions of dollars. You know, somebody said, ‘What do you think you lost?’ I said, ‘Probably two, three billion. That’s OK, I don’t care.’ They say, ‘You think you’d do it again?’ And that’s the least of it. Nobody.
We humans are genetically and socially programmed to presume that when someone is talking to us, they have something meaningful that they are trying to get across. And if the communication is not clear, we automatically "try to make sense of it." We humans are good at this; we can get tightly focused on that task and sometimes even miss the forest in plain sight.
Aleem here dutifully does the best he can. But even putting the best, most logical possible interpretation on it, the riff goes sideways in double time, Aleem notes.
Trump’s asides stack atop each other with such density that it’s dizzying for even professional political observers to discern what he’s trying to get at. Why is a presidential candidate leapfrogging from talking about Harris’ policy record to the bath he took on a property he owns to where he ranks on the list of “horribly” treated presidents? His asides themselves are often unintelligible. What is this alleged anecdote about his San Francisco property meant to convey?
In truth, who even knows if Trump in his own mind can distinguish Kamala Harris from Nancy Pelosi -- both powerful Democratic women politicians from California that he hates -- at this point? We presume, because that's what we're programned to do, but in the past he's made equally bizarre errors, such as confusing President Biden with President Obama, and the rest of just that very short quote immediately shows how far his sense of reality has slipped.
He's riffing in an automated way on grievances, repeating a perpetual whine of victimization.
A person with significant dementia can actually sound better than this on the surface. You might even have to spend time with them a while, trying to have a logical conversation, to figure out that they can't follow a train of reasoning.
Who knows if his sense of where he is and what he's trying to do even lasts for more than a phrase at a time?
To continue:
And that’s the least of it. Nobody. They always say, I don’t know if you know. Lincoln was horribly treated. Uh, Jefferson was pretty horribly. Andrew Jackson they say was the worst of all, that he was treated worse than any other president. I said, ‘Do that study again, because I think there’s nobody close to Trump.’ I even got shot!
Come again?
And that’s the least of it. Nobody. They always say, I don’t know if you know. Lincoln was horribly treated. Uh, Jefferson was pretty horribly. Andrew Jackson they say was the worst of all, that he was treated worse than any other president. I said, ‘Do that study again, because I think there’s nobody close to Trump.’ I even got shot!
In his obsession with winning the victim Olympics, Trump forgot -- besides Lincoln -- a more recent President who was shot by a would-be assassin and unlike Trump, seriously wounded: Ronald Reagan.
INSERT: And of course John F. Kennedy, shot down in Dallas.
(Thanks for your comment, swizzle.)
FURTHER INSERT:
"In addition...Republican Presidents James A. Garfield (shot July 2, died of follow-on infection September 19, 1881). William McKinley (shot September 6, died September 14, 1901)..."
And there were other assassination attempts that failed.
(Thank you, Justus.)
ENOUGH SAID?
In what world is this deranged person running for the highest office in what is still, arguably, the most powerful country in the world? In any reasonable society with equivalent resources, he would be in Memory Care, or being looked after full-time by his wife, or, given his putative wealth, at home with 24-hour staff to assure his safety (and screening his phone calls to make sure he doesn't fall for some elder-targeting scam). That is, if he hadn't been convicted of 34 criminal charges and facing more.
But in this country, as in, unfortunately, some families until the reality really takes hold, he is granted the power not only to do whatever he wants while others follow along to support him in his delusions and sometimes attempt a degree of damage control. Not only that, he is being encouraged by an array of bad actors who apparently think his election will help them in their quest to remake the U.S. as itself in Leave It To Beaver, a libertarian's wet dream, a theocracy (Catholic or evangelical, take your pick), a male supremacist bastion, an oil executive's paradise, and Nazi Germany. All at once.
It hasn't even been necessary here to mention that he was a sociopath, a malignant narcissist, and a con man enabled by others, to begin with. He told everyone right out loud that he was a scorpion all along. But there is also that, of course. See: the courageous testimonies of one who knows directly, Mary Trump. :-/
I even got shot! And who the hell knows where that came from, right?"
Excuse me! We do know where that came from!
And whatever this demented sociopath is trying to imply, there is little mystery about it: another troubled, disaffected young male loner with too-easy access to firearms. And a "target of opportunity."
Zeeshan Aleem also reminds us, this is not an isolated instance:
The incoherence of the Potterville speech is just one of countless examples. During a recent event in Wisconsin, Trump’s response to a question from the audience about reducing inflation entailed darting from his belief that Americans don't eat bacon any more to his assertion that wind energy doesn't work. During remarks this spring, he stumbled from an attack on Biden’s age into a nonsensical reverie about the actor Cary Grant, which then spun off into an anecdote about a conversation he had with Michael Jackson. Compared even to his first term in office, Trump’s inability to focus on one train of thought appears to be growing significantly worse.
Twitter link below, to allow ground-truthing of transcript. (The quoted part is in the second video, as I was unable to separate the Tweets.)
...
Addendum to main story:
In the same speech, btw, Trump complained -- or bragged, difficult to say -- that he has had accumulated more indictments than "Alphonse" Capone (more usually known by the nickname Al).
And Trump went wrong there as well.
My transcript of the first Trump video below, best I can do:
"...in the last year, I think I had nine indictments, far more than Alphonse Capone, who was quite well known in Chicago, and the environs. He liked killing people. But he had nothing like me."
(Capone. Hannibal Lecter. Scorpion and frog. Shooting someone on Fifth Avenue. Trump apparently grooves on murder the way RFK Jr. likes collecting animal corpses.)
But background: Capone -- a Prohibition-era crime boss with powerful political connections -- was never convicted of murder, or even for his original, primary occupation, bootlegging.
After Chicago became notorious as Mob Murder Town, Federal authorities charged Capone with 22 counts of...tax evasion. In a hard-fought case, he was convicted on five of those counts in 1931. Capone got an 11-year prison sentence but, in failing health, gained release after just eight.
If Wikipedia's chart is correct, Trump was indicted last year on a total of 88 counts in four separate state and federal cases. Interpreting, alternately, "the last year" as the 12 months prior to the Potterville speech, there were zero fresh indictments in that period. (A recent superseding indictment filed by Jack Smith kept the original four charges in that case.)
Therefore, Trump's claim that he's been indicted on more charges than Capone is abundantly true, but his reference to his being indicted on "nine counts" cannot make any sense. Further, nine would have actually been fewer than Capone's 22.
More significantly IRL,Trump has been convicted on 34 of the 88 counts, in New York State, for falsifying business records in order to make the facts of an extramarital affair go away before the 2016 election.
A point he did not choose to mention in his self-pitying rigamarole -- assuming that in his current state of cognitive decline, he is even able to distinguish in his mind between indictment and conviction.
Which seems increasingly doubtful. Considering -- how soon the media forget -- he reportedly fell asleep multiple times in the courtroom during his trial.
Unplanned and irresistable bouts of napping, another phenomenon typical of dementia.
Just a sidebar.
Three little words: THIS IS NUTS.
The question to the country is the same one that can face families in less politically charged environments. Assuming resistance, which is typical when someone has no insight into their condition, and may even be suffering from paranoid delusions: what do we, what should we, what can we legally, what can we practically -- do, to prevent more harm?
Not normalize. Not minimize. In the name of all that's holy, not enable further, not get inured.
Elect Harris, of course.
And in the long term, or otherwise? Wish I knew.
