top of page
Search

Unraveling Reality: Trump’s Mental Deterioration And The Threat to America

Writer's picture: Howie KleinHowie Klein

We're Watching The First Post-Truth Presidential Campaign



It took long enough, but the NY Times finally allowed a pair of writers to almost admit that Trump’s brain isn’t working any longer. According to Peter Baker and Dylan Freedman, Señor T is very often “confused, forgetful, incoherent or disconnected from reality lately… He rambles, he repeats himself, he roams from thought to thought— some of them hard to understand, some of them unfinished, some of them factually fantastical. He voices outlandish claims that seem to be made spout of whole cloth. He digresses into bizarre tangents about golf, about sharks, about his own ‘beautiful’ body. He relishes ‘a great day in Louisiana’ after spending the day in Georgia. He expresses fear that North Korea is ‘trying to kill me’ when he presumably means Iran. As late as last month, Trump was still speaking as if he were running against President Biden, five weeks after his withdrawal from the race.”


He’s 78 and senile, likely suffering from Alzheimer’s, which kills males in the Trump family. His father died of it in 1999, Trump taking advantage of his illness to rewrite his will in his own favor. 


He has always been discursive and has often been untethered to truth, but with the passage of time his speeches have grown darker, harsher, longer, angrier, less focused, more profane and increasingly fixated on the past.
According to a computer analysis by the New York Times, Trump’s rally speeches now last an average of 82 minutes, compared with 45 minutes in 2016. Proportionately, he uses 13 percent more all-or-nothing terms like “always” and “never” than he did eight years ago, which some experts consider a sign of advancing age.
Similarly, he uses 32 percent more negative words than positive words now, compared with 21 percent in 2016, which can be another indicator of cognitive change. And he uses swearwords 69 percent more often than he did when he first ran, a trend that could reflect what experts call disinhibition.
…How much his rambling discourse— what some experts call tangentiality — can be attributed to age is the subject of some debate. Trump has always had a distinctive speaking style that entertained and captivated supporters even as critics called him detached from reality. Indeed, questions have been raised about Trump’s mental fitness for years.
John Kelly, his second White House chief of staff, was so convinced that Trump was psychologically unbalanced that he bought a book called The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, written by 27 mental health professionals, to try to understand his boss better. As it was, Kelly came to refer to Trump’s White House as “Crazytown.”
Some of Trump’s cabinet secretaries had a running debate over whether the president was “crazy-crazy,” as one of them put it in an interview after leaving office, or merely someone who promoted “crazy ideas.” There were multiple conversations about whether the 25th Amendment disability clause should be invoked to remove him from office, although the idea never went far. His own estranged niece, Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist, wrote a book identifying disorders she believed he has. Trump bristled at such talk, insisting that he was “a very stable genius.”
“There were often discussions about whether he could comprehend or understand the policy and knowing that he didn’t really have a grasp on those kinds of things,” Matthews said of her time in the White House. “No one wanted to outright say it in that environment— is he mentally fit?— but I definitely had my moments where I personally questioned it.”
A 2022 study by a pair of University of Montana scholars found that Trump’s speech complexity was significantly lower than that of the average president over American history. (So was Biden’s.) The Times analysis found that Trump speaks at a fourth-grade level, lower than rivals like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who speaks at an eighth-grade level, which is roughly average for modern presidents. 
Trump’s complexity level has remained relatively steady and has not diminished in recent years, according to the analysis. But concerns about his age have heightened now that he is trying to return to office, concerns that were not alleviated by his unfounded debate claim about immigrants “eating the pets” in a small town.
Polls show that a majority of Americans believe he is too old to be president, and his critics have been trying to focus attention on that. A group of mental health, national security and political experts held a conference at the National Press Club in Washington last month on Trump’s fitness. The Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group of former Republicans, regularly taunts him with ads like one calling his debate with Ms. Harris “a cognitive test” that he failed.
…He considers himself the master of nearly every subject. He said Venezuelan gangs were armed “with MK-47s,” evidently meaning AK-47s, and then added, “I know that gun very well” because “I’ve become an expert on guns.” He claims to have been named “man of the year” in Michigan, although no such prize exists.
He is easily distracted. He halted in the middle of another extended monologue when he noticed a buzzing insect. “Oh, there’s a fly,” he said. “Oh. I wonder where the fly came from. See? Two years ago, I wouldn’t have had a fly up here. You’re changing rapidly. But we can’t take it any longer.”
But like some people approaching the end of their eighth decade, he is not open to correction. “Trump is never wrong,” he said recently in Wisconsin. “I am never, ever wrong.”


Trump’s mental deterioration is bad enough, but the remarkable decision— and it was a decision— to disregard even the slightest semblance of truthfulness in his campaign is just shocking. He and Vance and his campaign spokespeople will literally just say anything. They’re in a post-truth universe of their own. It’s like Trump whisperer Corey Lewandowski decided that objective truth is no longer a primary criterion for its messaging. This shift is rooted in amplifying claims that appeal to the base’s emotions, grievances and their favorite and most titillating conspiracy theories, as though they were actually eager to disregard factual accuracy. The focus is on dominating the narrative and energizing the moron base, with no worries at all about spreading misinformation. Social media plays a critical role, amplifying these messages rapidly without the need for traditional fact-checking or accountability mechanisms.


This was something Trump may have learned from his attorney and mentor, Roy Cohn, who worked for JoeMcCarthy who also used a baseless, fact-free firehose of lies to elevate himself at the expense of his opponents. But no other presidential candidate has actually campaigned in a post-truth dimension, not even characters like Andrew Jackson and Richard Nixon, both of who bent the truth, rather than disregard it. In Trump’s case, this is absolutely a strategic decision, a guiding principle of the campaign, allowing it to mold narratives to suit its political objectives, rather than adhering to objective reality.


And, as the editors of the New Jersey Star-Ledger wrote last week, this is a masterplan is no longer an abstract threat: “a clear and present danger that women in New Jersey could lose abortion rights if Donald Trump is elected in November. It could happen in two key ways. The first is if Trump simply orders the Justice Department to enforce an old law still on the books called the Comstock Act, which could bar manufacturers from distributing any abortion pills or suction devices to carry out the procedure. He wouldn’t need any legislation. His Department of Justice would only have to prosecute a few doctors for obtaining these pills or medical tools to create a chilling effect on all doctors providing abortions everywhere, including in New Jersey. It would be a de facto ban, nationwide. The second option is for President Trump to appoint three more conservative justices to the Supreme Court who rule in favor of ‘fetal personhood’— the belief that a frozen embryo has all the same legal rights as a person, with the assumption that this would override the rights of the pregnant woman. That could ban abortion without any exceptions for rape or incest, even in New Jersey, and outlaw fertility treatments like IVF too.”


All it would take is for Trump to see some political advantage in this. He’d have the power to do it without the approval of Congress. The fate of women all across America – including in New Jersey— would lie in his hands.
Think about that when you cast your vote. This is also the problem with New Jersey Republicans who endorse Trump yet claim to be personally “pro-choice”— like Senate candidate Curtis Bashaw or Rep. Tom Kean Jr., who’s running for re-election. Trump presents an obvious danger to abortion rights, and helping re-elect the guy who bragged, “I was able to kill Roe v. Wade, much to the ‘shock’ of everyone,” is not pro-choice. Period.
Bashaw says he would vote for a federal law to codify abortion rights, but the reality is, such a protection would never pass in our current political environment. And he can’t control what Trump does once in office, how he uses the Justice Department or fills court vacancies. Kean is worse: He’s personally called for federal action “to protect the unborn from egregious abortion laws” on a secret website to burnish his credentials with conservative voters.
Which makes perfect sense, when you think about it: Those with the moral conviction that abortion is the murder of babies are not going to be satisfied with banning it in 22 states. This march is going to continue all the way up to the highest echelons of power, and toward the much larger goal of banning abortion nationwide. That order probably wouldn’t come from Congress, because it’s so profoundly unpopular, but it could happen just the same.
So far, the Supreme Court has declined to take up the issue of fetal personhood, but that could change after this election or the appointment of new justices. “We’ve seen this in other areas of the law: The Supreme Court has ruled that corporations are people for the purposes of our election laws, so corporations are now able to donate with reckless abandonment,” notes Kate Kelly, senior Director of the Women’s Initiative at the Center for American Progress. “When different categories are determined to have rights, that puts everyone else’s rights in jeopardy.”
Trump’s longtime close allies are already lobbying hard for a national abortion ban: Their roadmap, Project 2025, lays out in detail how a Trump administration could do this by blocking access to both abortion pills and medical equipment through the antiquated Comstock Act, deploying fetal personhood and undermining IVF. Trump’s VP pick, J.D. Vance, has also said he wants to enforce Comstock; he once signed a letter calling for the Justice Department to prosecute doctors and others who order abortion pills through the mail.
So, this is the fight they’re gearing up for, without a doubt. Whether Trump or other Republicans will admit that is a different question, since it’s so politically toxic. At a rally last week in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, Trump went on a tirade about how women are going to be so happy under his presidency that they “will no longer be thinking about abortion.”
“You will no longer be abandoned, lonely or scared,” he declared… “You will be protected. I will be your protector.”
We’ve seen how well that’s worked out for the women of Texas: Since Trump killed Roe, triggering the state’s near-total abortion ban in 2021, the rate of pregnant women dying there skyrocketed by 56% compared with just 11% in the rest of the nation.
Women in New Jersey have felt so secure about these rights that it hasn’t been a burning political issue. But now, this beast is at the door. Many didn’t take the threat to abortion rights seriously during Trump’s first run for office, until he appointed three virulently anti-choice justices to overturn Roe as a gift to the religious Right, leading to abortion bans in half the country. Let’s not repeat that mistake.
Do you really trust him not to empower more extremists? Look at the folks he surrounds himself with already: Like RFK Jr., who believes the pandemic may have been deliberately designed to spare Jewish and Chinese people, and that the covid jab was developed to control people via microchips. He says he’s already helping the future president pick the leaders of our federal health agencies. How reassuring.
Now picture what that might mean for our future Justice Department or Supreme Court bench.
Trump could outsource abortion policy to folks like Vance, who’s said he “certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally”; or Frank Pavone, an anti-abortion activist so incendiary that he was removed by Pope Francis from the priesthood— but says he’s discussed abortion policy at several receptions at Mar-a-Lago; or Russell Vought, a chief architect of Project 2025 and former senior Trump official, who wants to revoke the Food and Drug Administration’s approval for the widely used abortion pill mifepristone. 


130 views

2 Comments


Guest
Oct 08, 2024

Post truth prez campaigns have been around since at least 2000. w pretended to be a human being AND compassionate; cheney pretended to be a human being and gore pretended he wanted to be president.


and voters pretended to give a shit either way. the supreme court "found" that counting votes in a democratic election was contraindicated and the sound of crickets from voters was and still is deafening.


You could go back to the 1968 dem convention for open dishonesty and hypocrisy from both sides with good cause. slick willie was a skillful liar (I feel your pain). Obamanation was almost as good (I support a PO...).


Truth is kilt, burnt and buried every time a politician opens his/her…

Like
Guest
Oct 08, 2024
Replying to

sadly, so few voters can understand any of this.

Like
bottom of page