Trump's Cognitive Decline (And Immorality) Make Him Unfit To Be President

The following is part of an editorial by the Las Vegas Sun: 

Donald Trump’s racism, sexism, xenophobia and penchant for corruption have long made him unfit for any public office, let alone the presidency. But as he continues his bid for a second term in the White House, there is an unsettling and undeniable shift that is leading many experts, observers and even some Trump supporters to conclude that the former president’s mental acuity and sharpness are also in decline, that his physical health and stamina are waning and that his frustration and anger are boiling over.

Americans from both sides of the political spectrum should be alarmed by Trump’s words and behavior. The nation must confront the fact that beyond his hateful character, he is crippled cognitively and showing clear signs of mental illness.

There’s no need to resort to armchair psychology to interpret what’s apparent. If victorious, Trump would be the oldest president ever inaugurated. In recent weeks, he has canceled an increasing number of public appearances, with Trump’s own campaign citing the candidate’s exhaustion. When he does appear publicly, Trump struggles to complete sentences or sustain coherent thoughts, and has shown a pronounced difficulty concentrating and a tendency to repeat himself, sometimes within the same sentence. . . .

For those who believe in a country governed by checks, balances and the rule of law, a return to Trumpian leadership is dangerous in its own right. But to do so with an impaired leader who cannot govern competently and a fellow authoritarian waiting in the wings is perilous.

As voters consider Trump’s latest bid for the presidency, it’s essential to recognize that this election is not merely a choice between policy platforms or party loyalties. It’s a test of our willingness to safeguard our nation from leaders whose fitness for office is in serious question. This election is about protecting the integrity of our democracy from those who would let it collapse in the name of power, loyalty or expedience.

Donald Trump has never had the moral compass to lead this country. But even his supporters cannot afford to ignore the signs that he may no longer have the mental faculties to lead it either. The stakes are simply too high.

Trump Doesn't Answer Questions - He Just Gives A 'Word Salad'

I truly believe Donald Trump's mental capacity is rapidly declining. He used to be able to coherently speak about his hate agenda. Not anymore. He doesn't have answers to voter questions anymore, but just rambles in a nonsensical way.

Consider the following. Did he even come close to answering this voter's question?

At a Univision town hall on Wednesday, a voter asked Mr. Trump whether, given the mounting evidence of climate change, he still believed it was a hoax.

TRUMP: We went into rural parts of the country and fixed people’s water. They were drinking such terrible water. We were — it was very important to me. All of that’s important. At the same time, you can’t give up your country. You can’t say that we’re not going to have any jobs anymore. If they said — if they took their ultimate, which is $93 trillion, the Green New Deal, $93 trillion, that’s more money than we would have in 20 years. We wouldn’t be able to survive. We wouldn’t be able to live.

So I always feel that with the climate, and I have been a great — I have been an environmentalist. I built many things. I own Doral right next door, and we did that in a very environment. I get awards, environmental awards for the way I built it, for the water, the way I use the water, the sand, the mixing of the sand and the water. I mean, many different — but I’ve had many awards over the years for environmental, the way I’ve built. Because you know about building, that’s what you do. It’s very important to me. At the same time, we can’t destroy our country and we’re competing against countries that don’t spend anything on climate change, like China and others. And they’re able to make their product for tremendously less than us and we’re not going to let that happen either. We have to have a strong — a strong country and we have to have a nice climate. And there’s nobody better at that, I think, at that combination than me.

I will say this, though, I hear a lot about climate and they talk about global warming, et cetera, et cetera, because they now — they used to call it global warming, now they call it climate change because that covers everything but global warming. The real global warming that we have to worry about is nuclear. The water’s coming up an eighth of an inch, over 300 years, the ocean is going to rise. And, you know, nobody knows if that’s true or not, but they’re worried about the ocean rising an eighth of an inch or a quarter of an inch in 300 years.

What I’m worried about is nuclear weapons tomorrow because the power of nuclear weapons, and we’re going to end up with this administration, if she gets in, we will end up in a Third World War. She’s grossly incompetent. And if she gets in, Kamala, if she gets in, we’re going to end up in a Third World War. And with me, you’ll never end up in even a war. So we have to be very careful. Thank you very much. 

Trump Is Cracking Up - His Ego Can't Take Losing

Robert Reich says Trump is cracking up. He's right! 

As the Harris-Walz team soars (polls are already showing Kamala taking the lead), Trump is cracking up.

His ego can’t take it. He is freaking out that his opponent — a Black woman — has more energy and momentum behind her than he has. 

Last Thursday, after ten days of Kamala in the limelight, Trump was so desperate for attention that he held a news conference that provided no news. 

During it, Trump absurdly claimed that his January 6, 2021, rally on the National Mall was larger than Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 rally, when he gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. (King’s speech had summoned 250,000 to the Mall. Trump’s rally drew 53,000, according to the House Select Committee that investigated the events of January 6.)

King’s rally also led to the signing of the Civil Rights Act. Trump’s rally led to a deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol.

Why would Trump want to remind anyone of what he did on January 6, 2021?

He can’t help himself. He keeps repeating that the 2020 election was stolen, even though the claim turns off independent voters and does nothing to advance his case against Kamala Harris.

Over the weekend, he posted a link to a 2021 document questioning the security of Georgia’s voting machines. When he made a campaign stop in Georgia the previous Saturday, Trump attacked Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, and Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger — both of whom won reelection in 2022 despite Trump’s vocal opposition.

Why is Trump attacking Republican leaders in Georgia instead of Kamala Harris? Because Trump will never forgive Kemp and Raffensperger for not joining his attempt to overturn the 2020 election in the Peach State.

Trump told the crowd that Kemp is “a bad guy, he’s a disloyal guy and he’s a very average Governor,” adding that if it “wasn’t for me, he would not be your Governor. I think everybody knows that.” 

 

Trump’s rant against Kemp is particularly absurd because he needs Kemp’s organization in Georgia to help him in the race against Harris.

Why is Trump going on about the 2020 election being “stolen” anyway? That claim cost Republicans two Senate seats in Georgia’s special elections in January 2021 because it depressed turnout among Republicans who assumed their ballots wouldn’t count.

When Trump does talk about Harris, he’s unable to focus on the policies on which he could criticize her, such as the southern border, but dredges up racist tropes such as whether she’s “really Black.”

He mispronounces her name and attacks her with ideological platitudes, as he did last Friday at a rally in Montana when he proclaimed that “America cannot survive for four more years of this bumbling communist lunatic.”

Trump’s ego has been so injured by the huge turnout at Kamala’s rallies that he’s now claiming they’re “fake.”

Yesterday, in multiple posts to his Truth Social platform, he asserted that the huge crowd at her Detroit-area rally was faked by AI. It “DIDN’T EXIST,” he posted. “Nobody was there.”

On Wednesday, he complained that:

“If Kamala has 1,000 people at a Rally, the Press goes ‘crazy,’ and talks about how ‘big’ it was - And she pays for her ‘Crowd.’ When I have a Rally, and 100,000 people show up, the Fake News doesn’t talk about it, THEY REFUSE TO MENTION CROWD SIZE. The Fake News is the Enemy of the People!”

None of this has anything to do with how Kamala would govern America or whether she’d be a good president, but Trump appears incapable of separating his fragile ego from his desperation to get attention and get even rather than get elected president. 

He’s attacking everyone and everything. After The New York Times ran a piece a few days ago about the “the worst three weeks” of his campaign, Trump exploded at what he called “the Failing New York Times, which is a crooked newspaper run by a Radical Left group of Lunatics … losing readers at a record level.”

He’s making up stuff that has nothing whatsoever to do with Harris or Walz, such as a “scary” helicopter ride with California’s Willie Brown that never happened.

Trump is cracking because the attention and positive energy generated by Harris and Walz are threatening his ego so much he cannot focus on his opponent. So he falls back on the size of her crowds relative to his, her “Blackness,” the “stolen election,” his grievances against Republicans who didn’t support him, and The New York Times.

Trump’s rage has sometimes worked for him in the past, but it is not working against Harris and Walz because they are running by a playbook that’s fueled by excitement and hope rather than grievance and narcissism. 

Media Should Be Talking About Trump's Mental State

 

The media seems obsessed about President Biden's mental state. But they should be discussing Donald Trump's far worse mental problems. Here's how Robert Reich puts it:

A few weeks ago, at a rally in Nevada, Trump told his followers that boat manufacturers are now required to use electric engines. He claimed that someone at a boat company in South Carolina told him, “It’s a problem, sir. They want us to make all-electric boats.” (There is no such requirement.)

Trump then said the South Carolinian warned him “the boat is so heavy it can’t float. Also, it can’t go fast because of the weight.” 

Trump continued: 

“So I said, ‘Let me ask you a question,’ and [the South Carolinian] said, ‘Nobody ever asked this question,’ and it must be because of MIT, my relationship to MIT — very smart. He goes, I say, ‘What would happen if the boat sank from its weight? And you’re in the boat and you have this tremendously powerful battery and the battery is now underwater and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there?’

By the way, a lot of shark attacks lately, do you notice that, a lot of sharks? I watched some guys justifying it today. ‘Well, they weren’t really that angry. They bit off the young lady’s leg because of the fact that they were, they were not hungry, but they misunderstood what who she was.’ 

These people are crazy. He said there’s no problem with sharks. ‘They just didn’t really understand a young woman swimming now.’ It really got decimated and other people do a lot of shark attacks.

So I said, ‘So there’s a shark 10 yards away from the boat, 10 yards or here, do I get electrocuted if the boat is sinking? Water goes over the battery, the boat is sinking. Do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted, or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted?’ 

Because I will tell you, he didn’t know the answer. He said, ‘You know, nobody’s ever asked me that question.’ I said, ‘I think it’s a good question.’ I think there’s a lot of electric current coming through that water. 

But you know what I’d do if there was a shark or you get electrocuted? I’ll take electrocution every single time. I’m not getting near the shark. So we’re going to end that.”

I ask you: Is this the speech of a rational human being? 

But how much attention did this incoherent ramble attract in the media? Very little, especially in comparison with the nonstop media assessment of Biden’s verbal stumbles during the debate.

 

Trump is showing growing signs of dementia, but isn’t facing nearly the same scrutiny as is Joe Biden.

In April, Trump spoke to a rally in Schnecksville, Pennsylvania, about the famed Civil War battle at Gettysburg. Trump told the audience:

“Gettysburg, what an unbelievable battle that was. It was so much, and so interesting, and so vicious and horrible, and so beautiful in so many different ways— it represented such a big portion of the success of this country."

Trump then began talking about Confederate General Robert E. Lee and how Lee was now “out of favor.” Trump said that Lee told his troops,“Never fight uphill, me boys!” (Historians deny Lee ever said such a thing.)  

Trump continued, “Gettysburg, wow — I go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to look and to watch." 

These are not isolated examples of Trump’s incoherence. During the last several months of Republican primaries, Trump repeatedly claimed that his opponent Nikki Haley was in charge of Capitol security on January 6. (Haley never had any connection to Capitol security.)

He has repeatedly confused who he ran against in the past, such as stating, “With Obama, we won an election that everyone said couldn’t be won.” (Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016.) 

Trump has confused Biden with Obama so often that he’s had to put out a statement that the slips have been intentional. 

Last September, Trump suggested that the way to prevent wildfires in California’s forest lands is to keep them damp. Here are his words:

“They say that there’s so much water up north that I want to have the overflow areas go into your forests and dampen your forests, because if you dampen your forests you're not gonna have these forest fires that are burning at levels that nobody’s ever seen.”

In October, Trump warned his supporters that Biden will lead America into World War Two.

True, Biden has occasional difficulty keeping his train of thought, as we witnessed during the debate. But Biden has gotten major bills passed. He’s been negotiating with world leaders. In terms of running the government, Biden has been functioning as well if not better than most presidents. 

And what of Trump? As president, he accomplished nothing except dividing the country with his paranoid bloviation, and since then has mounted an attempted coup against the United States. 

It’s Trump — who has a family history of dementia — who’s increasingly unhinged.

Trump has said that under his administration, “If you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store.”

Trump has claimed that Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group, is “very smart.” That whales are being killed by windmills. That he won all 50 states in 2020. That he defeated Barack Obama in 2016. That the outgoing chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be executed. 

The most telling evidence of Trump’s growing dementia is found in his paranoid thirst for revenge, on which he is centering his entire presidential campaign.

On November 11, he pledged to a crowd of supporters in Claremont, New Hampshire, that:

“We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible — they’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.”

Are these the words of a sane person? Or of an aging paranoid megalomaniac? 

Even if it’s unclear to which category Trump belongs, shouldn’t this question be central to the coverage of his campaign for reelection?

I’m no physician, and I have no idea whether Biden or Trump is suffering from early dementia. But the weight of the evidence suggests Trump is. So why isn’t the media covering this? 

When I’ve asked members of the media, they say Trump’s malfunctioning brain is “old news.”

After all, in 2017, 27 psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health professionals concluded in The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump that Trump’s mental health posed a “clear and present danger” to the nation.

Members of Trump’s own Cabinet — horrified by the January 6, 2021, violence at the Capitol and Trump's lack of urgency in stopping it — discussed whether to invoke the the 25th Amendment to remove him from office due to mental incompetence.

But just because Trump has shown mental instability in the past doesn’t make his mental problems any less relevant now that he is seeking reelection. They’re more relevant. He appears even more delusional than before.

If Biden’s difficulties are fair game, why isn’t Trump’s apparent mental decline front and center? 

Biden may appear frail, but he’s rational. The growing evidence of Trump’s dementia and paranoia, on the other hand, poses a clear potential danger to the future of America — if he’s reelected. 

At the least, the media should be investigating and reporting on it. Right?

Media Should Report Trump's Growing Dementia/Paranoia

The media loves to report on President Biden's age. But they need to report more on Donald Trump increasing dementia and paranoia (which is far more dangerous to this country's future). Here is part of what Robert Reich has to say about it:

What if Trump really thinks he’s being persecuted? What if he has a persecution complex? What if he believes his paranoid fantasies?

 

Trump is not facing nearly the same scrutiny for his age as is Joe Biden, yet Trump should be — especially as to increasing signs of dementia.

 

Biden is sane. He’s getting major bills passed. He’s negotiating with world leaders.

But Trump — who has a family history of dementia — is increasingly incoherent and unhinged. 

He has confused Biden with Obama so often that he’s had to put out a statement that the slips have been intentional.

 

In September, Trump suggested that the way to prevent wildfires in California’s forest lands is to keep them damp. Here are his exact words: 

“They say that there’s so much water up north that I want to have the overflow areas go into your forests and dampen your forests, because if you dampen your forests you're not gonna have these forest fires that are burning at levels that nobody’s ever seen.”

Hello?. . .

In October, Trump warned his supporters that Biden will lead America into World War Two.

He has also claimed that Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group, is “very smart.” That whales are being killed by windmills. That he won all 50 states in 2020. That he defeated Barack Obama in 2016. That the outgoing chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be executed. That MSNBC’s parent company is guilty of treason, and will “pay.” And that he will only be a dictator on “Day 1” of a new term.

The most telling evidence of Trump’s growing dementia is found in his paranoid thirst for revenge, on which he is now centering his entire campaign.

On November 11, he pledged to a crowd of supporters in Claremont, New Hampshire, that: 

“We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible — they’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.”

Are these the words of a sane person? Or of an aging paranoid megalomaniac? Even if it’s unclear to which category Trump belongs, shouldn’t this question be central to the coverage of his campaign for reelection? 

When I’ve asked members of the media why they’re not covering the increasing signs of Trump’s dementia, they say it’s “old news.”. . .

But just because Trump has shown mental instability in the past doesn’t make his mental problems any less relevant now that he is seeking reelection. They’re more relevant. He appears even more delusional and unhinged than before. 

If Biden’s age is fair game, why aren’t Trump’s age and apparent mental decline? 

Biden may appear frail at times, but he’s rational. The growing evidence of Trump’s dementia and paranoia, on the other hand, poses a potential danger to the future of America — if he’s reelected. At the least, the media should be investigating and reporting on it.