We had an incredible thing

Apr 3rd, 2019 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog
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Again. People continue to notice that Donald Trump’s brain appears to be crumbling to bits.

President Donald Trump’s recent confusion with words and facts, including about his own father, could be signs of pre-dementia and deteriorating cognitive skills, mental health experts warn.

“The ‘Tim Apple’ episode a few weeks ago, his calling Venezuela a company, and then yesterday, confusing his grandfather’s birthplace with his father’s, mispronouncing ‘oranges’ for ‘origins,’ and stating out of the blue, ‘I’m very normal,’” recited Bandy Lee, a professor of psychiatry at Yale University who has been waving red flags about Trump’s mental state for years. “There is no question he needs an examination.”

“I think he’s suffering from pre-dementia. And it’s only getting worse,” said John Gartner, a clinical psychologist with practices in New York City and Baltimore.

What is “pre-dementia”? It looks more like a euphemism than a medical term. Dementia is progressive anyway, so why isn’t it all just dementia?

Speaking in the Oval Office, Trump said that his father was “born in a very wonderful place in Germany.” In fact, his father was born in the Bronx. It was his paternal grandfather who emigrated from Germany. The president also said repeatedly that he wanted to take a look at the “oranges” of the special counsel investigation against him, when he clearly meant “origins.”

Last month, Trump called Apple CEO Tim Cook “Tim Apple” ― but later claimed that he had, in fact, said “Tim Cook Apple,” but people missed “Cook” because he’d said it very rapidly, and finally claimed that he was trying to save time by skipping some words.

Doesn’t sound very “pre.”

This is true even when he doesn’t make specific flubs, too. We’ve all seen it. He just comes across as profoundly dumb, especially when there are cognitively-intact people also in the room.

The White House this year did not make available the doctor who performed Trump’s annual physical exam and released scant information about its results.

In contrast, last year Trump authorized physician Ronny Jackson to field questions about his health for nearly a full hour. The president himself bragged about his performance on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a screening tool for Alzheimer’s disease that asks the patient, for instance, to identify a camel and to draw a clock.

“There aren’t a lot of people that can do that,” Trump said days later, boasting of his 30-out-of-30 score to a Republican National Committee audience.

Identify a camel and draw a clock? Err, I think you’ll find there are.

That test, though, was never designed to be an in-depth analysis of cognitive function, Lee and other experts said. “Ronny Jackson declared his boss and commander-in-chief ‘fit for duty’ based on a 10-minute cognitive screen on which full-blown Alzheimer patients and hospitalized schizophrenia patients are known to score in the normal range,” she said.

Large numbers of Americans who are not mental health professionals have also started to question Trump’s mental condition, including prominent critics like George Conway, the husband of top White House aide Kellyanne Conway. They’ve noted both the president’s actions and his televised speeches and public remarks, in which he is frequently incoherent and goes off on long, unrelated tangents.

Those tangents? Very Alzheimer’s-like.

On Tuesday night, during his speech at the National Republican Congressional Committee spring dinner, Trump, who was then in the middle of 90 minutes of rambling remarks, veered off on a two-minute, 22-second detour that touched on how wind turbines kill bald eagles and other birds, moved on to how North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un was not ready for a deal, came back to how people who use wind power can’t watch television if the wind doesn’t blow, and finished with former President Barack Obama playing golf in Hawaii:

Hillary wanted to put up wind. Wind. If you ― if you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations: Your house just went down 75 percent in value. And they say the noise causes cancer. You tell me that one, OK? “Rrrrr, rrrrr” ― you know the thing that makes the ― it’s so noisy. And of course it’s like a graveyard for birds. If you love birds, you’d never want to walk under a windmill because it’s a very sad, sad sight. It’s like a cemetery. We put a little, we put a little statute for the poor birds. It’s true. You know in California, if you shoot a bald eagle, they put you in jail for five years. And yet the windmills wipe ’em all out. It’s true. They wipe ’em out. It’s terrible. And I told the other day at CPAC. Great people at CPAC. We had an incredible thing. I had nothing to do. It was early on a Saturday morning. I had just gotten back from dealing with Kim Jong Un. We had a walk. He wasn’t ready for a deal but that’s OK because we get along great. He wasn’t ready. I told him, you’re not ready for a deal. That’s the first time anybody has ever told him that and left. It never happened to him before. Nobody’s ever left. But I said you’re not ready for a deal, but we’ll make a deal. We have a good relationship. We have a good relationship. But I told a story about, at CPAC. The woman, she wants to watch television. And she says to her husband, “Is the wind blowing? I’d love to watch a show tonight, darling. The wind hasn’t blown for three days. I can’t watch television, darling. Darling, please tell the wind to blow.” No, wind’s not so good. And you know, you have no idea how expensive it is to make those things. They’re all made in China and Germany, but the way, just in case you’re ― we don’t make ’em here, essentially. We don’t make ’em here. And by the way, the carbon, and all those things flying up in the air, you know the carbon footprint? President Obama used to talk about the carbon footprint, and then he’d hop on Air Force One, a big 747 with very old engines, and he’d fly to Hawaii to play a round of golf. You tell me, the carbon footprint.

Mens sana? I think not.

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