Back in September, I published a post about the age and health of President Biden and former President Trump. In it, I wrote:
On the other hand, when Donald Trump was president, he was not known to keep a very rigorous schedule of official duties. He didn’t seem to understand the complexities of the job, such as dealing with classified materials. He was volatile and resorted to bullying, name calling, and lying to try to get his way, regardless of facts, laws, or policies. Sometimes, when he is speaking without a teleprompter, he doesn’t seem able to construct cogent sentences. I don’t know if there is a medical diagnosis that elucidates these behaviors or not, but I don’t think his age is the salient factor.
While there are some in the media who have been talking about these things for years, Trump’s recent behavior has pushed these topics into the mainstream, both in the press and among some politicians. A few days ago, Trump repeatedly referred to his primary opponent, Nikki Haley, when he seemingly meant to say Nancy Pelosi. When campaigning, he has sometimes been confused about where he is. He has repeatedly said that he ran against President Obama, which he did not. He doesn’t seem to have much control over his emotional reactions and speech, for example, when he went on a rant at the New York trial over damages for fraud regarding his real estate businesses. His victory speech after the New Hampshire primary featured rambling, repetition, threats, and vitriol.
It seems that some of the tendencies he had during his presidency have heightened. What is even more alarming to me and to some observers is that Trump’s cognition and control seem to have slipped. I’ve been exposed to numerous people as dementia was developing and observed how their language skills eroded and how they struggled with self-control. It makes Trump’s recent behavior seem eerily familiar. That others are pointing it out confirms that it is not just a personal bias.
Donald Trump’s father, Fred, had dementia from Alzheimer’s disease for years before his death. Alzheimer’s disease is known to run in families and Donald’s age does become salient on this point, given that he is now 77 years old and the risk of developing Alzheimer’s increases with age. It’s also frequently not diagnosed in its early stages. While Fred Trump was diagnosed in his 80s, it’s likely that cognitive decline began years earlier, which would put Donald in the same age bracket as his father was when symptoms started to develop.
Despite all this, many Republican elected officials are currently endorsing Trump for the nomination and the presidency. They don’t seem to recognize the danger of having someone in cognitive decline and with poor impulse control exercising the powers of the presidency. Things could go very badly very quickly.
There is no health test to run for president. I do hope that, at the very least, there will be pressure for Trump to debate Nikki Haley so that potential voters can see how he answers questions and reacts to issues in real time. This would also reveal to other Republican party leaders what his current capabilities are so they could assess if he is fit to serve for the next presidential term. I don’t know whether or not they can set aside their own hunger for power or not but, perhaps, it will scare them enough to act to safeguard the country from the disaster of having a mentally incompetent person in charge.
Trump has been using increasingly authoritarian language and issuing threats against opponents and even other Republicans who disagree with him. He should not ever again be in a position where he can carry out these threats, many of which are illegal and would threaten the stability of our democratic institutions. Oh, and Trump is insisting a president should enjoy total immunity from prosecution, no matter what he does.
Please consider these things before you vote. Look at what each candidate says, does, and believes. Don’t just look at their party or family name.
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Joanne Corey 
Please don’t vote for trump ! 💜💜
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Thank you for that succinct summary, Willow!
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Lol I am nothing if not to the point 💜😁
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❤
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Thank you for this well-stated look at the current front runner of the GOP.
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Thank you for visiting and commenting!
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I always say: to have a genuinely representative democracy, there first needs to be a truly democratic electoral system for the citizenry. The electoral system is a large part of the illusion masquerading as real democracy. And, of course, many voters get to wait in long, bad-weather lineups to participate.
While the First Past The Post ballot [FPTP] may qualify, though barely at that, as democratic within the democracy spectrum, it is the proportionally representative system thus governance that’s truly representative, regardless of political ideology.
FPTP does seem to serve corporate lobbyists well, however. I believe it is why such powerful interests generally resist attempts at changing from FPTP to proportional representation electoral systems of governance, the latter which dilutes corporate influence. Low-representation FPTP-elected governments, in which a relatively small portion of the country’s populace is actually electorally represented, are likely the easiest for lobbyists to manipulate or ‘buy’.
It can and often enough does enable the biggest of businesses to get unaccountably even bigger, defying the very spirit of government rules established to ensure healthy competition by limiting mass consolidation. [Currently, corporate lobbyists can actually write bills for Canada’s governing representatives to vote for, albeit perhaps with some amendments, and have implemented, supposedly to save the elected officials their own time.]
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Thank you for that reflection. There are certainly many electoral reforms that we could use in the US, such as universal registration and easy vote-by-mail.
And, yes, the corporate money, lobbying, and “ruling the roost” has to go. Corporations are NOT people and money should not be considered speech, despite the Citizens United ruling. Some of the Supreme Court justices only observe the text and intent of the Constitution when it suits their political viewpoint, not to mention precedent.
I think it would also help to reform the Senate, so that there is some sense of population incorporated. The small-population states have too much power so that the minority of voters control the reins even when the majority are in favor – and with corporate interests thrown in besides, you get gridlock and/or bad legislation enacted.
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I also largely believe that any American president who [quite unlike Trump] seriously tried implementing truly humane, progressive policies — notably universal single-payer healthcare, a significant reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions, military spending, a genuine anti-war effort, and increasing the minimum wage while also reigning in Wall Street abuse/corruption [etcetera] — would likely be assassinated. [Bernie Sanders as president comes to my mind as a good example of this.] …
A few victorious social/labor uprisings notwithstanding, notably the Bolshevik and French revolutions, it seems to me that the superfluously rich and powerful essentially have always had the police and military ready to foremost protect their power/money interests, even over the basic needs of the masses.
The police and military can, and probably would, claim they must bust heads to maintain law and order as a priority; therefore, the absurdly unjust inequities and inequalities can persist.
Thus, I can imagine there were/are lessons learned from those successful social/labor uprisings — a figurative How to Hinder Progressive Revolutions 101, perhaps? — with the clarity of hindsight by the big power/money interests in order to avoid any repeat of such great wealth/power losses.
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“If voting changed anything [in favor of the weak/poor/disenfranchised] they’d have made it illegal.”
‘Calamity’ Jane Bodine, Our Brand Is Crisis
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Yikes! I had hoped that we had ramped up presidential protection sufficiently to avoid another assassination. I got to hear Bernie Sanders speak during his campaign, the only time I’ve been able to see a presidential contender live during the campaign. He was mayor of Burlington when my spouse was in college, so I’ve been following his political career for a long time.
A lot of the progressive policies you cite are also in line with Catholic social justice principles; I wish that Biden were able to go further with them than he has. Cutting the military is especially difficult; Eisenhower warned about the military/industrial complex. It’s so entrenched in every state that it’s almost impossible to imagine Congress voting for cuts because it means jobs in their state.
To me, one of the scariest threats from DT is to use the military within the US under the Insurrection Act. Yes, while the police already have a lot of military-style equipment, especially in urban areas, it would be terrifying to bring US military firepower to our streets.
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Yes.
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