Kevin Drum argues that serial sex offender Donald Trump (SSAT) is showing signs of steady decline in cognitive ability and gives a list of recent statements that SSAT has made in support of that claim.
September 16: Says you need ID to buy a loaf of bread. (No you don’t.)
September 18: Claims that under Biden, we would be in World War II. (World War II already happened.)
September 18: Says he beat Obama in 2016. (He beat Hillary Clinton in 2016.)
September 26: Tells a rally audience that Jeb Bush invaded Iraq. (George W. Bush led us into Iraq.)
October 8: Says Hannibal Lecter was a great actor. (Lecter was a fictional character played by the great actor Anthony Hopkins.)
October 13: Thinks Obama is currently president. (Joe Biden is the current president.)
October 14: Says Republicans “eat their young” when they attack him. (The teleprompter probably said “eat their own.”)
Of course, SSAT says so many outrageous things on a routine basis that it is hard to know which things are due to ignorance, which are due to deliberate lying, and which are delusional. Drum is aware of this problem but says that these statements fall outside those realms.
These aren’t examples of routine Trump crackpottery. He says crazy stuff all the time. These are examples of Trump flatly forgetting or confusing things that he once knew. He’s losing it.
There have long been suspicions that SSAT has dementia, according to some even held by his supporters like Steve Bannon. But it is always dangerous to diagnose people’s mental capabilities without direct examination by a competent professional.
I am open to the idea that SSAT is suffering from serious cognitive decline but am not convinced by the evidence cited by Drum. This is because all of us have slips of the tongue or the memory where we say flat-out wrong things. Normal people immediately self-correct when made aware of the mistake. But SSAT knows that is supporters really don’t care what he says as long as he hits their emotional hot buttons and targets their enemies, and the people around him seem to be just intent on pleasing him which means not making any criticisms or corrections whatsoever. As a result, he has no need to monitor what he says to make sure that it is accurate or to make a correction when he is in error and can even make up outright falsehoods just to suit the moment and to make some kind of point. So he can be sloppy as he riffs in his speeches.
What all that shows is that if he is not suffering from dementia, he is a man who has absolutely no regard for the truth. In some ways, that is even more disturbing, because an unprincipled, pathological, narcissistic liar is more dangerous than some one with dementia.
It’s possible he’s a sociopath, a narcissist, and suffering from dementia. The various symptoms could mask eachother or synergise. On top of all that he is both stupid and ignorant.
The cognitive battery they gave him is one of many tests neuropsychologists use to assess cognitive decline and loss of memory. They don’t give you that test for funsies.
Says Republicans “eat their young”
He could be right on that one.
I am on the side of cognitive decline, because there are interviews of Trump in the 1980s and 1990s and early 2000s where he’s clearly more mentally functional than he is now.
I also don’t discredit the cognitive effects of a lifetime of being spoiled and catered to, his probable sociopathy and/or malignant narcissism and/or psychopathy, added to his understanding that he can say any crazy thing that pops into his head and his base will applaud him for it and ignore any contradictions with any other thing he just said.
He reminds me of any random mentally-ill and homeless person one might encounter gibbering on a street corner, except he’s got a base that love him and a MSM who give him a megaphone to broadcast his every uttering.
Everyone in my family tree has dementia, or died of it (I know, great prognosis, right?) -- I’m pretty familiar with how it works and what it sounds like.
One of the things Trump does that particularly makes me think he has at least mild dementia is the way he latches onto things from his past that anchor and ratify his present. That is very much of a dementia thing -- you reach back into behaviors that are well-known and comfortable, things you have done many times and can do practically in your sleep. Also, particularly, things you do effortlessly from your early life. Like bloviating and exaggerating, for example. In the case of Trump, he doesn’t actually do anything except behaviors he can do robotically. It’s one problem with Alzheimers’ patients: they know how to drive and often can still drive fine -- they just may not know where they are going. One of my relatives who had it really bad, for example, traveled extensively by train and used to act as though all transport was train. If you don’t recognize it as dementia behavior, it might just seem cute and quirky. Not that Trump does cute and quirky, but it could be that what we see as instinctive viciousness may be long-term behaviors expressing themselves.
Personally, I see clinging to the classified documents as very much dementia behavior. They were important to him, once, and ratified his sense of importance and knowing things other people do not know (bragging food). To me, cognitive decline would explain a lot, since it explains the remarkable fact that he is hoarding evidence of a crime, which makes no sense at all -- but “lock her up” over Clinton’s emails was cognitively important to him at one point. The way he speaks, looping back endlessly to fixed ideas, is very much a dementia behavior. Many of the verbal mannerisms we mock him for seem to be fixed ideas. I used the words “fixed idea” instead of the psychologists’ term “idee fixe” -- but it’s relevant because dementia patients frequently lock in on an idea and won’t let it go. Like, say, that the 2020 election was stolen. What I have noticed is that one of the things people with dementia or alzheimers’ do is forget. I mean, they forget what they were saying 10 seconds ago. I have seen this many times. In fact, it’s what I think happened with Trump when he famously complained that he was going to have to be in his New York trial, and then immediately, seconds later, said he was going to a golf tournament that day. Trump is complicated by being a lying asshole, and ignorant, and stupid, so it’s hard to tell what of those factors has the most influence at any given time. But I can easily believe that he sometimes really believes he won in 2020, and other times knows he didn’t and he can have all those ideas in his head at the same time -- it’s how he can plot to overthrow the election by stealing it when it was stolen, or something. It’s easy to see Trump as someone who doesn’t believe anything at all, because maybe he’s a really broken meat robot who is not capable of believing anything, anymore, in the sense more normal people understand things.
SailorStar@#3:
I am on the side of cognitive decline, because there are interviews of Trump in the 1980s and 1990s and early 2000s where he’s clearly more mentally functional than he is now.
Someone, I forget who, pointed out that in Trump’s videos of him being deposed in the early 00s, he lies much more smoothly.
Marcus Ranum @ 5
With someone as crude as SSAT even mild cognitive decline would possibly result in the lies getting noticeably cruder. The social polish flaking off.
If the other Republicans decide he is going gaga there will be a frenzy as they fight to get the nomination, a frenzy of universally charmless candidates. That would be good as they would burn campaign money early.
But even if Trump remains the top candidate non-cultist voters will observe his erratic conduct and draw their conclusions. Biden is old and not always steady on his feet but he can talk coherently.
These aren’t examples of routine Trump crackpottery. He says crazy stuff all the time. These are examples of Trump flatly forgetting or confusing things that he once knew. He’s losing it.
Another possibility is that he’s spouting nonsense for an audience who WANT nonsense and don’t even care about truth, and thus has less incentive to talk sensibly than he’s had before.
I don’t think SSAT is in any sort of cognitive decline; I tend to think he’s never done any of the normal cognitive development in the first place. He’s always been surrounded by people who were never willing to nudge or force him to grow up; and now he’s “leading” a base of base people who adore him for saying jaw-droppingly stupid shit ‘cuz he’s “owning the libs.”
Seeing the same in an old friend who isn’t much older than me.
He has had open heart surgery to replace a valve and has limited mobility due to arthritis.
His memory of the past is very good.
He can easily describe a dinosaur dig he was on thirty years ago.
He can’t remember events that happened two weeks ago.
Or all of the above?
He’s obviously ignorant about a lot of things. He’s also under the delusion that he’s a “stable genius”. So he lies about stuff left and right. Bingo!
This is just another sign of our gerontocracy showing how unstable it is. Feinstein definitely, McConnell pretty damn likely, Trump maybe. And lots of talk about Biden although there doesn’t seem much to support it outside of faked videos.
But really I think there’s another question that’s more important to most of us. Let’s say for the sake of argument Trump really is in a cognitive decline and that it’ll get worse and more visible as the election nears. I think the real question is will that actually matter? Will it change anything? I’m not so sure it would. I think he’d lose some support but not necessarily a whole lot. His current supporters know what kind of person he is. Do they seem like people with much empathy? Would they even care if he were in full decline on stage as long as he kept entertainingly insulting people they don’t like?
Trump never had any policies so the key disqualifier of dementia, namely that the person suffering through it would lose the plot and flail about, wouldn’t really be a factor. He didn’t have a plot to begin with.
@lanir, 10:
No -- because if you want to see real cognitive decline, look no further than the US electorate.
The first one is a claim he’s been repeating for years and, while that may have started because he’s an out-of-touch rich asshole who has probably never shopped for groceries in his life, the reason he keeps saying it is because it’s Pre-Millennial Dispensationalist ‘Mark of the Beast’ conspiracy theory stuff. You know, the whole ‘and no one will be able to buy or sell without the Mark’ thing. PMDs are his core constituency. That it’s not true is irrelevant: PMDs only care about the vicarious thrill of being the most oppressed group of people ever. They’ll latch on to anyone who reinforces that feeling, especially if they don’t have to actually endure any hardship.
In other words, like pretty much everything Trump says over and over, he says that you need ID to buy a loaf of bread because he gets positive feedback from his cult for doing so. PMDs are already predisposed to cult-like behavior, and their entire theology is built around them telling themselves flattering lies, so they were a ready-made pool of suckers just waiting to be scooped up by someone like Trump.
If it is dementia, I’m wondering how it will affect the trials. Many of the crimes require intent, and, legally, does dementia excuse that?
acuah -- I think you’ve just identified his last line of defence.
It worked for Ernest Saunders, the only man in history to recover from Alzheimers.
Trump, today:
Personally, I feel ready to chuck anybody who uses “genius” as an adjective into the Hopelessly Slow bus, but DJT belongs under it.
Marcus Ranum @ # 5: Someone, I forget who, pointed out that in Trump’s videos of him being deposed in the early 00s, he lies much more smoothly.
Possibly me.
@vudcolak: Trump appealing to the religious nutcases is just one example of things he says. I agree with you 100% that if Trump says something and gets a reaction from his base, he will repeat that action. Both my parents had dementia before they passed, and what I’m seeing and hearing from Trump is the same kind of stuff. More importantly; the man has been a media presence since the 1980s and so we have video evidence of his decline over decades. He spoke smoothly in the past and his lies were credible to anyone who didn’t know better. As Marcus Ranum in 4 and birgirjohannsen in 6 showed, what’s happening with him isn’t the occasional slip up that everyone has.
My personal theory is that his personality disorder is also making his probable dementia outbursts even worse.
Pierce R. Butler@#6:
Yes! That’s right! Thank you.
It was so witty and well-turned that it stuck in my mind and will probably never leave until I, Trump-like, think I said it in the first place.
“These were big bloggers, and they came to me with tears in their eyes and said, ‘Sir, we’ve never seen such a perfect takedown….'”