Trump On Meet The Press— Defiant Of Facts For Sure... But Why? Gaslighting Or Genetic Dementia?

Trump Has Very Bad Genes-- Yes They Live Long... But With Alzheimer's

Much of the analysis of Trump’s little outing to Meet the Press yesterday has been about legal matters and his marked propensity to lie and gaslight at will. No one is talking about the elephant in the room: severe cognitive decline. There were too many lies and distortions to fact check all of them but, as usual, Daniel Dale did a good job. So did NBC News’ Jane Timm, who noted that Trump “made a spate of false and misleading comments about immigration, foreign policy, abortion and more… ‘I have all the facts,’ he said at one point, falsely claiming that the 2020 election was rigged and that there was broad evidence of it.” When NBC booked him for the high-profile [non-Fox] interview, did they expect something else? That suddenly he wouldn’t gaslight their audience and lie his ass off? Apparently not. Timm wrote that “Trump’s presidency was marked by repeated false, exaggerated and misleading claims. Some of those claims drove policy, while another triggered an impeachment. Trump's false view that the election was stolen helped land him and dozen people of others in legal trouble in Georgia. One senior aide— during a Meet the Press interview— even coined the phrase ’alternative facts’ in his defense.”

Some of the biggest lies:

• Trump claimed there were “millions of illegal immigrants coming into our country, flooding our cities, flooding the countryside. I think the number is going to be 15 million people by the time you end this, by the end of this year. I think the real number is going to be 15 million people.”

• “I saw some statistics, and it said in 2019, there were no terrorists. They caught no terrorists,” he said. “And now this year, it’s a record number like they’ve never seen before.”

• “We gave $85 billion worth of equipment to the Taliban,” Trump said, speaking about the Afghanistan withdrawal.

• “These people on Jan. 6,” Trump said, “some of them never even went into the building, and they're being given sentences of many years.”

• “If this were ever before a court, we would win so easy. There is so much evidence that the election was rigged,” he said.

• “Things are not going right now very well for the consumer. Bacon is up five times. Food is up horribly— worse than energy,” Trump said.

• “You know, when I lowered taxes, we took in more revenue,” Trump said. “When I lowered taxes, I cut taxes tremendously, created tremendous jobs, but more importantly, we had more revenue with lower taxes than we did with higher taxes.”

• “We had the greatest economy in history, and then we got hit with Covid. And we had to keep this, this beautiful thing going,” Trump said. “We had to do things that were very severe. We had to let some money come out.”

• Asked about abortion, Trump claimed that Democrats support infanticide. “The radical people on this are really the Democrats that say after five months, six months, seven months, eight months, nine months, and even after birth, you are allowed to terminate the baby,” he said. “You have a Virginia governor, previous governor, who said after the baby is born, you will make a determination, and if you want, you will kill that baby.”

• Trump claimed "the news is no longer reporting about the war. They don’t report about the war anymore," he continued. "You don’t find much reporting. That means that Ukraine’s losing. OK? I see very little reporting from NBC, your network. I see very little reporting from NBC, ABC, from CBS, from anyone about the war."

Throughout the interview he attempted— as he always does— to avoid specificity and to meander off into his own world in order to derail meaningful conversation. Some of the fact-checks Welker did while she had him on-screen were done with her panel at the bottom of the page.

Liar or senile? Liars end to make make false statements with the intention to deceive others— maybe to gain an advantage, to avoid punishment or because of a need for attention or approval. On the other hand, people with cognitive decline may make false statements because they’re unable to accurately remember or process information or because they’re having difficulty understanding and responding to questions. In some cases, people with cognitive decline may make false statements because they are experiencing delusions or hallucinations.

Here’s what we know: Trump has a history of making false statements that goes back into his childhood and that accelerated as he matured— consistently lying even when there was no evidence to support his claims. We also know that cognitive decline is common in 77 year olds and that the good “genes” he’s always babbling about include a propensity towards Alzheimer's disease, which is genetic. His father was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1993 and died from it in 1999. His aunt Elizabeth, his father's sister, was also diagnosed with it (2004) and died from it in 2011. Trump often exhibits— as he did yesterday— behaviors that are consistent with cognitive decline, such as difficulty remembering things, making repetitive statements, difficulty following conversations and wandering off on tangents. His vocabulary and way of expressing himself has become simpler and more like a grade school student’s, with shorter sentences, fewer complex words, more filler words, more grammatical errors and... did I mention a lot more repetition.