Is America ruled by demented presidents?
Each day we are forced to ask anew, and with more urgency, whether Trump is just an ignorant buffoon not up to the job or whether he is what they might have in the old days called catawampus, past-it, mentally unwell or even broken. How would you categorize the assertion that he doesn’t know whether he is obligated to uphold the Constitution? Has he gone completely Mad King?
Do his top advisors slather him with praise in ways that would make Kim Jong Un blush because Trump is just an egomaniac who needs to be surrounded by fluffers? Or is it something worse than that? Is he so fragile they fear the consequences if they don’t slide on the knee pads and polish his balls until they shine like the rest of his cheeseball throne room?
Mary Trump: My uncle wants to be president for life
Donald Trump’s niece – a psychologist and writer – on what makes him tick and why understanding his insecurities is key to bringing him down.
Joe Biden was less lucky. Had he refrained from running for a second term for whatever reason (health, age) he would be admired as a wise, elderly gentleman enjoying retirement.
His predecessor and successor Donald Trump is now in the focus of attention. And the opinion of the psycho pundits is less than flattering. Some are even poking fun at him.
Trump, dementia, and the duty to warn
is the title of an essay by Sabrina Haake which details the cognitive decline, the progressive dementia of Donald Trump and the global danger he poses as commander-in-chief of the US nuclear arsenal.Haake doesn't mince words: Analysts at notoriously conservative Wall Street Journal wrote on Friday that another Trump impeachment is “already in the bag.” Calling Trump’s tariffs stunt “neurotic,” a WSJ op-ed said Trump, clearly divorced from reality, had “fabricated a gratuitously ambitious mission to meet his misguided sense of importance… Nobody in Mr. Trump’s orbit actually shares his belief in the magical efficacy of tariffs.
She quotes a petition signed by 3000 credentialed mental health professionals warning that the president has probable dementia:
“Donald Trump is showing unmistakable signs strongly suggesting dementia, based on his public behavior and informant reports that show progressive deterioration in memory, thinking, ability to use language, behavior, and both gross and fine motor skills…. his vocabulary is impoverished, he often has difficulty finishing a thought, sentence or even a word. Typical of dementia patients he perseverates and overuses superlatives and filler words…”
Haake arrives at a sad conclusion:
Leaders of the EU are too intelligent to sneer out loud at Trump’s flip flop on tariffs. Aware of his deranged lust for revenge, they are reluctant to utter the truth about his ignorance. But the world is aware, even if Americans aren’t, that our president is deranged.
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Demented Presidents: Risks and Side-Effects: Intellectually challenged heads of state have had a remarkable impact on the course of history and the problem of age-associated impairment in politicians appears to increase with growing life expectancy. Lenin, Paul Deschanel, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Heinrich Lübke, Urho Kekkonen, Mao tse tung, Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II., and Robert Mugabe were still in power while showing signs of cognitive impairment.
We may have had a dozen or more presidents with dementia throughout history, but we will never know. Even if a proper diagnosis could have been performed and confirmed, chances are that those closest to the President and the press would be mum about it. It would be disrespectful.
Right now, the only confirmed case of dementia (in this case, Alzheimer’s) was Ronald Reagan. He went public in 1994, but his son and others admit he was showing symptoms ten years earlier. He was making more that the typical slip-ups that we all make. I distinctly remember an instance when members of the press caught he and Nancy coming from/going to an event and Reagan paused to answer a question called out to him, but he froze. Nancy murmured in his ear, and he gave the canned response.
In 1964, a magazine article was written about presidential candidate Barry Goldwater that carried the headline “1,189 Psychiatrists say Goldwater is Psychologically Unfit to be President!” The article quoted an informal poll of US psychiatrists, none of whom had actually met the candidate.
Goldwater lost the election and successfully sued the magazine for making untrue allegations. Out of this case came the ‘Goldwater Rule’, which to this day strongly discourages psychiatrists from trying to diagnose a person without ever meeting them or doing a proper assessment.
The rule states: “...it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.”
Although the Goldwater Rule is often broken, it remains an essential piece of ethical guidance for any health professional or expert who might be tempted to diagnose a person without ever meeting them.
A new bombshell book claims to reveal the scale of the cover-up that hid Joe Biden’s mental decline. Rob Crilly, our chief US correspondent, takes a closer look at how those in the former president’s inner circle went to extraordinary lengths to protect him. Not least Mr Biden’s worst enabler, his wife Jill.
Surely Trump’s Wacko West Point Commencement Speech Proves He’s Mentally Unfit to Serve
President Donald Trump told graduates to avoid "trophy wives" during his commencement address at the United States Military Academy at West Point on May 24.
"He ended up getting a divorce, found a new wife. Could you say a trophy wife? I guess we can say a trophy wife," Trump said, referring to real estate developer Bill Levitt. "But that doesn’t work out too well, I must tell you, a lot of trophy wives, it doesn’t it work."
USA Today.
Katie Phang trashed President Trump’s eyebrow-raising West Point speech as “diarrhea of the mouth.” During his address to graduates at the United States Military Academy at West Point, Trump ranted about DEI, drag shows, golf, and trophy wives. Phang, whose MSNBC show was cut as part of the network’s closure of its Miami-based broadcasting operations in February, called the president’s bizarre address “incoherent.” “It was such a keen example of his lack of mental acuity and his lack of competency,” Phang added. “He has no faculties that are left uncompromised.”
At one point in his address to the young cadets, Trump said “The job of the U.S. armed forces is not to host drag shows, to transform foreign cultures, but to spread democracy to everybody around the world at the point of a gun,” the president said.
- “I went through a very tough time with some very radicalized sick people, and I say, I was investigated more than the great late Alphonse Capone. Alphonse Capone was a monster, he was a very hardened criminal. I went through more investigations than Alphonse Capone, and now I’m talking to you as president, can you believe this?” (Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts of fraud and former DOJ Special Counsel Jack Smith said that he believed Trump would have been convicted for trying to overthrow the 2020 election had he not won reelection last November. A prior fact check from CNN found that Trump’s claim he was indicted more than Capone was false: Trump has been indicted four times, but Capone was indicted six times.)
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.......he couldn't keep track of things from one second to the next. It was brought home in a question about student visas.
Reporter: When could the administration resume interviews for foreign student visas?
Trump: On what?
Reporter: For the student visa. Yesterday was the -—
Trump: For the French?
Reporters together: Foreign. Foreign.
Reporter: All the foreign students.
Trump: Oh, for the foreign visas. What are you referring --- foreign visas for what? Are you talking about colleges? Okay, you're off of Israel. Now you're talking about colleges, right? Okay, well, we're gonna see.
Then he started attacking Harvard.
Bill Addis -- Daily Kos.....according to NBC's inside sources (as many as five of them), he (Trump) rarely even attends the "President’s Daily Brief" (PDB) to get updates on national security from his utterly unqualified Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Tulsi Gabbard. According to NBC News...
"Trump’s intelligence chief is exploring ways to revamp his routine intelligence briefing in order to build his trust in the material and make it more aligned with how he likes to consume information, according to five people with direct knowledge of the discussions. [...]
"One idea that has been discussed is to transform the PDB so it mirrors a Fox News broadcast, according to four of the people with direct knowledge of the discussions. Under that concept as it has been discussed, the national intelligence director’s office could hire a Fox News producer to produce it and one of the network’s personalities to present it"