Losing It

Over the weekend, Donald delivered two speeches that left viewers shocked about his health. It wasn’t just the content of his speeches — the plethora of lies and the fascistic rhetoric — that made headlines: it was his apparent aphasia (or, to be technically accurate, phonemic paraphasias). That is the type of mental confusion that might leave one saying “Venzwhere” instead of “Venezuela” or “wall mongers” instead of “war mongers.”

"Putin has so little respect for Obama that he's starting to throw around the nuclear word," Donald said on Saturday night to a silent audience.

The silence likely stemmed from the fact that Obama hasn’t been president for over seven years.

Donald’s confusion and verbal lapses are starting to get more attention from mental health professionals who are publicly speculating about what might be going on with him. And even former members of his administration are starting to speak up:

What people close to Donald are saying about his decline

Just today, while speaking to CNN host John Berman, former White House advisor Alyssa Farah Griffin said that Donald’s cognitive difficulties seem to be getting worse:

"He is not as sharp as he was in 2016 and not even as sharp as he was in 2020,” she said.

Griffin is a Republican who served as Donald's director of strategic communications. After Donald’s visit to Iowa, she called his apparent decline, “remarkable.”

“I'm stunned, having spent a lot of time with him in 2020 and years before — he is slowing down,” Griffin said.

"There's a lack of sharpness in what he's saying and a lack . . . of clarity," she continued. "There's another clip where he basically says he's going to overturn Obamacare, but also says that he'll fix it. Just complete inconsistencies.” Griffin, here, is saying the quiet part out loud.

Of course she could have left it at that, but Griffin still chose to take a dig at President Biden:

“For Republicans,” she added, “our strongest case against Joe Biden is the age and the decline that some of us have seen. And if I'm being honest, head-to-head, I'm not sure which is struggling more."

The truth is there’s no contest here — Biden is old but he is not “declining” in any substantive sense. Donald is also old, but he can’t even seem to remember who the current president is, and he seems to be having an increasing difficulty stringing together a coherent sentence.

The different Donald my family knew

Fewer than two weeks ago, I was on MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell discussing something I think more people need to be aware of: It’s not simply that Donald makes gaffes and misstatements — it’s the degree to which his ability to communicate has deteriorated in recent years.

When Donald was younger, he was reasonably adept at getting his point across. He had the ability to make a perfectly reasonable statement, and to convey information clearly. One of the main reasons my grandfather chose Donald to succeed him instead of my father, the oldest son, was because Donald had the kind of arrogance that translated into a media presence my grandfather found useful.

Donald’s early interactions with the press, as well as his performances in depositions from the 1980s and 1990s — arrogant but measured and restrained — paint a very different picture from what we’re seeing now.

A key difference between President Biden and Donald

President Biden, a long-time stutterer, has recently been attacked by Republicans who, with a huge assist from the corporate media, are trying to make Biden’s age an issue in this campaign. Yes, Biden is 81, but he’s been making gaffes for years (In 2019, Biden called himself a “gaffe machine.”)

The incessant mentions of his chronological age often overshadow what people say about his acuity behind closed doors: namely, that he is in command of facts and in good shape for his age.

In October, General Mark Milley said the following about President Biden:

“I engage with him frequently, and [Biden is] alert, sound, does his homework, reads the papers, reads all the read-ahead material, and is very, very engaged in issues of very serious matters of war and peace and life and death.”

“So if the American people are worried about an individual, who is someone who’s making decisions of war and peace and makes the decisions of nuclear weapons and that sort of thing, I think they can rest easy,” Milley concluded.

In an interview with Salon, psychologist Dr. John Gartner, said:

“There is [ ] this focus on Biden's gaffes or other things that are well within the normal limits of aging. By comparison, Trump appears to be showing gross signs of dementia. This is a tale of two brains. Biden's brain is aging. Trump's brain is dementing.”

During his administration, nobody (at least nobody who was telling the truth) would have said that Donald read his briefings or was very engaged in any serious issues. His recent public appearances make it clear that he would be even less equipped if, by some tragic circumstance, he were allowed back in the Oval Office.

The Republican case against Biden is falling apart

As Trump’s former aide admitted herself, Republicans’ strongest case against Joe Biden (which, without media complicity, would be a very weak case) is his age. Any first-hand accounts of Donald’s cognitive decline threaten to diminish the salience of attacks on Biden.

At this point, Republican hypocrisy should surprise no one, but Donald is almost as old— he’s only three years younger, to be exact — and he is much less fit: President Biden is fond of riding bicycles. Donald is fond of riding golf carts.