Trump’s Mental Capacity Is Shrinking

Donald Trump’s performances over the past few days make it undeniable that his mental capacity has shrunk to a dangerous level.

Journalist David Rothkopf of Deep State Radio put it best when he wrote that Trump’s actions the last few days have left him “one cloudless night away from baying at the moon.”

Or, paraphrasing writer Robert Hubbell, if Trump were your grandfather and he was acting the way Trump is, you wouldn’t let him have keys to the car, much less the keys to our nuclear arsenal.

Trump’s mental problems are not new.  In 2017, the book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump contained essays from 27 psychiatrists, psychologists and other mental health professionals that clearly revealed that Trump is criminally mentally ill.  Not one of those professionals has backed off that assessment.

But more recently, consider his bizarre performance in Oak Ridge, Pa., where he abruptly stopped taking questions and just swayed to the music for 39 minutes.

Weird!

Or think about his answers the very next day when he was interviewed by economic authorities from Bloomberg News and the Economic Club of Chicago.  He told them, “It must be hard for you to, you know, spend 25 years talking about tariffs as being negative and then have somebody (meaning  himself) explain to you that you’re totally wrong.”

When asked about a Wall Street Journal piece that analyzed his plans for the economy and concluded  that they would explode the national debt, he replied, “What does The Wall Street Journal know?  They’ve been wrong about everything.”

And asked about inflation, he roamed to his annoyance with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s college experience.

The folks who heard all that that are authorities in economic thought.  They must have thought Trump was looney.

And then came that Univision town hall with Trump, which presented yet more evidence of his shrinking mental capacity.

Asked whether, given the mounting evidence of climate change, he still believes it is a hoax, he veered into talking about his Doral golf club outside Miami, and from there into  World War III.

Asked who will harvest food if he expels millions of undocumented people, as he has promised to do, he replied that he’s the best thing that ever happened to farmers.

Asked if he really believes legal Haitians in Ohio are eating white people’s pet cats and dogs, he replied that they are “eating other things, too.”

Asked about tax breaks for car loans, he found his way to a nerve-racking rocket landing.

And, worst of all, asked about his actions when insurrectionists stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, he described the day as a “day of love … Nothing done wrong at all,” and he went on to say that the rioters “were treated very unfairly.”  He even used the pronoun “we” when he described the mob, and he called police officers and National Guard troops “the others.”

He further said that “nobody was killed”  as a result of that riot – although four of his own supporters died there that day.  Capitol Police shot and killed one, another died of a drug overdose, and two others died of heart attacks.  Furthermore, one Capitol Police officer died as a result of injuries he sustained from attempting to control the riot, and two Capitol Police officers committed suicide.

At a rally in Latrobe, Penn., Trump told a long, meandering story about golfing legend Arnold Palmer that ended with references to Palmer’s penis.

He called Vice President Kamala Harris, whose name he deliberately mispronounced, “a shit vice president.”

His advice to an audience in Detroit to vote took its own wild turn: “Jill, get your fat husband off the couch. Get that fat pig off the couch. Tell him to go and vote for Trump.”

Topping it all off, asked by a 10-year-old boy (Friday on “Fox & Friends”)  to name his favorite president when he was a child, Trump rambled into a discussion of the revised NAFTA trade deal known as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

This is not normal.  This is not a person who anybody – anybody! – should want to be our president.  No matter what they thought of him yesterday, and regardless of why they thought it, all this is new proof that Donald Trump is a seriously deranged and dangerous person who must not be allowed into the White House ever again.

(To be fair, Trump claims that he has taken cognitive exams and aced them all, but he refuses to release written reports of those tests.)

But come election day, none of this will matter to most of his supporters.  They will not change their minds.

Why not? Political philosopher Eric Hoffer, in his 1951 classic The True Believer, explains how that can happen.   He wrote that demagogues appeal to people who feel they have lost power.  The demagogue promises them that he will restore them that power, and he cements their loyalty by giving them someone to hate, someone they can blame for their loss — in Trump’s case, immigrants, the news media and Democrats.  That loyalty grows stronger as the demagogue’s behavior deteriorates, because if his followers were to turn against him, they would be forced to admit they have been attacking people they now recognize as being ordinary human beings like themselves.

A shorter explanation: Trump’s followers don’t have the guts to admit they are wrong, so they’ll vote for him regardless.

Trump’s shrinking mental capacity is dangerous enough by itself but add it to his political beliefs and it becomes downright alarming that he might become president again.  Mark Milley, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when Trump was president, said Trump “is the most dangerous person ever … he’s a total fascist.  He is now the most dangerous  person to this country … a fascist to the core.”

Until Milley said that, most leading Democrats were leery about using the word “fascist” to describe Trump in public.  Now, though, they all are, led by Kamala Harris who made that point very clear during her recent interview with Fox News.

I’m glad that they finally publicly recognized that, for there can be no doubt that Trump is a wannabe fascist dictator.  His former wife Ivana testified under oath that he spent many nights studying Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kamph, which includes a roadmap for anyone seeking to be a dictator, and which Trump openly follows daily.  Trump has said in public that he will be a dictator if elected, and that he will suspend the Constitution on his first day.

Trump also once said he had never heard of Project 2025 but that he is against it.  Never heard of it but is against it?  Even though his running mate, J.D. Vance, wrote the introduction to it?  Really?

Trump refers to Americans as “the enemy within.”  He calls his political opponents “evil” and worse, and he promises to use the military against anyone who disagrees with him – just like Hitler did.  He often encourages violence, as when he told a woman heckler in California that later she would “get the hell kicked out of her.”

What more evidence could anyone ask that Trump is a fascist dictator wannabe who is losing his mental capacity?

Bad politicians are elected by people who do not vote, so please, good people, vote! Vote early, vote the entire ticket, and make sure that everyone you know votes, and that everyone they know votes.  It is the only way to win.

And we can win.  We must win.  We will win.

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