Whose Cognitive Decline Is It Anyway?

Joe Biden is not the problem

Donald has always been easily swayed by whomever or whatever is in front of him, but lately his decline has become even more obvious—whether its due to some kind of neurological condition or the worsening of his long undiagnosed and untreated psychiatric disorders or a combination of the two, I don’t know. Sometimes it isn’t clear if he’s oriented as to space, time, and people and this has been particularly in evidence during some recent press conferences and interviews.

This week he directed Alcatraz prison to be reopened to admit “America’s most violent criminals.” Donald wrote on Truth Social, “When we were a more serious nation in times past, we did not hesitate to lock up the most dangerous criminals and keep them far away from anyone they could harm. That's the way it's supposed to be.”

There are a couple of possibilities for how Donald came up with this untenable idea. The 1979 movie Escape from Alcatraz aired twice over the weekend on Miami’s PBS affiliate while Donald was at Mar-a-Lago to play golf, which may have had something to do with it.

Seven hours after the second airing of the movie, Donald issued his unenforceable order. If Donald is using the plots of movies he catches on TV to craft policy decisions I really wish somebody would make an action movie about how tariffs work.

When asked how he came to the decision to reopen Alcatraz, Donald said the following:

Well, I guess I was supposed to be a movie maker. We started with the movie-making and we’ll end. I mean, Alcatraz is, I would say the ultimate, right? Alcatraz—Sing, Sing and Alcatraz, the movies. But most violent criminals in the world and nobody ever escaped. One person almost got there, but they, as you know the story, and it was a lot of shark bites, a lot of problems. We need law and order in this country, and so we're going to look at it. Some of the people up here are going to bring it back in large form, add a lot, but I think it's got a lot of qualities that are interesting and I think they make a point.

There is little profit in trying to shine a light into the dark interior of this depraved man's mind. But to ignore the extent to which he is incapable of answering a soft ball question about a project that is obviously very important to him (which is a problem in its own right) is to ignore all of those complicit in normalizing the dysfunction.

John Martini, an Alcatraz historian, points out that the former prison, which closed in 1963 largely due to its enormous operating costs, “has no running water, sanitation, or heating and almost no electric.” As a tourist attraction, Alcatraz, which is a historical landmark, generates over $60 million a year for the National Park Service.

Donald’s plan to reopen the prison combines some of the few skills he actually possesses—coming up with dramatic ideas that are both absurd and untenable; bolstering his fragile ego; and setting taxpayer dollars on fire. If we consider that one of the possible reasons he came up with the idea in the first place is that Al Capone was one of the more notorious prisoners housed there, we see just how desperate Donald is to be seen as a tough guy. After all, he has for years compared himself favorably (or unfavorably, depending on your perspective) to Capone, as if being a more successful criminal than a mob boss is something to brag about.

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Just 20 minutes after his Alcatraz announcement, Donald demanded the imposition of 100% tariffs on foreign films.

The Movie Industry in America is DYING a very fast death. Other Countries are offering all sorts of incentives to draw our filmmakers and studios away from the United States,” Trump wrote in his post. “Therefore, I am authorizing the Department of Commerce, and the United States Trade Representative, to immediately begin the process of instituting a 100% Tariff on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands. WE WANT MOVIES MADE IN AMERICA, AGAIN!

He described “the concerted effort” of other countries to lure filmmakers away from America as “a national security threat” without explaining how that could possibly be the case.

This seemed out-of-the-blue at the time until we learned just hours earlier Donald met with John Voight, one of his handpicked special ambassadors to Hollywood, at Mar-a-Lago during which Voight had pitched a comprehensive plan to boost domestic film production, which included tax code tweaks and federal subsidies. But Donald sees the economy and global trade only through the prism of tariffs so he completely misunderstand the whole premise and opted to enact a plan to get movies made in America that will make the process more expensive and endanger jobs in the industry. The question of what, exactly, he’d be taxing—the labor, the intellectual property, the concept—is irrelevant to him.

In response to the idea, one industry executive said, “On first blush, it’s shocking and would represent a virtually complete halt of production. But in reality, he has no jurisdiction to do this and it’s too complex to enforce.”

The two bizarre plans—the reopening of Alcatraz and the imposition of a 100% tariffs produced on foreign soil—have one thing in common: they harken back to Donald’s ambitions as a young man to be a big-time Broadway or Hollywood producer. Nothing came of this, but he clearly hasn’t let go of the dream which appears still to be very real to him.

It should be obvious to any objective observer that Donald is losing his cognitive capacities with age. Contributing to the decline, in addition to those untreated psychiatric disorders, are the enormous amounts of stress he continues to be under. He’s also well aware of what may be coming for him because his father, Fred, had Alzheimer’s.

While Donald is still a couple of years younger than my grandfather was when his decline accelerated, he is also much less healthy physically. Whereas my grandfather was in excellent physical condition into his 80s, Donald’s bad habits—from his poor diet and lack of sleep and exercise—all have a deleterious effect on his mental state. Where Donald experiences stress and and is extremely insecure, my grandfather was a sociopath who was entirely secure in the control he extended over his (albeit limited) spheres of influence.

Donald is also undoubtedly worried about what else might be waiting for him—the kind of contempt and lack of care he showed his father when he was at his most vulnerable. While it’s true that my grandfather was an awful human being, he treated Donald extraordinarily well throughout his life. It isn’t simply that he treated Donald better than he treated everybody else, Donald is literally the only person Fred didn’t abuse. He helped him at every turn, he threw hundreds of millions of dollars at him and used every bit of his power and influence to create the life of wealth and privilege that Donald squandered and abused. In return, Donald ignored Fred when he was no longer of use.

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My grandfather had a receding hairline and it always bothered him even though, as far as I could tell, he had as much hair in his eighties as he did his his forties. In the early 90s, when he was really struggling with dementia, he bought a brown wig and started to dye his eyebrows and mustache to match it.

One Mothers’ Day, we all met at my grandparents’ house before going to their country club for lunch. Most of us were in the breakfast room when my grandfather came downstairs, dressed impeccably in his three-piece suit, his shaggy wig slightly askew, and his mustache and eyebrows dyed a jarring shade of magenta.

He had left the dye in too long, which happened sometimes. He never noticed and that day was obviously proud of his appearance. Nobody else was. When my grandfather enterred the room, my grandmother said, “Oh, for God’s sake, Fred,” and turned away.

“For fuck’s sake,” my uncle Rob swore under his breath. Maryanne said, “Jesus Christ, Dad, you can’t go out looking like that.” Donald simply ignored his father and left the room. He didn’t look at or speak to my grandfather for the rest of the day. This was Donald’s typical reaction to his father at the time—his contempt and lack of patience for the man who had made him were no secret. He simply wanted nothing to do with him anymore.

Whatever had once tied them together, Fred’s favorite and favored child had given up all pretense of caring what his father thought, needed, or wanted. It was as if Donald believed Fred’s mental decline was somehow his own fault—that it made him weak and contemptible.

My grandfather had treated my father, his oldest son, the same way, so Donald’s attitude wasn’t surprising. But I wonder if in the back of his mind he worries that he will suffer the same fate—to become dependent on those who have nothing but contempt for him.

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Donald’s fantasies about reopening Alcatraz and the baffling nonsense about placing tariffs on movies (his entire theory of tariffs in general, actually) are just the latest in a long string of confused, erratic plans he’s floating which he can neither explain nor justify.

Given Donald’s increasing lack of impulse control and obvious detachment from reality, there must be panels of experts offering trenchant analyses of his bizarre and troubling behavior. Right?

No, of course not.

Instead, we have Joe and Jill Biden appearing on The View to defend Biden’s mental acuity. I’m not going to speculate about why they felt this was necessary—it wasn’t, and I don’t think it was helpful—but the story of Biden’s allegedly covering up his decline continues to be given oxygen by the corporate media. For years Donald has claimed that was “Sleepy Joe” who was unfit to serve and that’s a stone the media allowed him to throw.

Three books, one already published, have been written about Biden’s alleged mental lapses and his alleged covering up of them. Apparently, this issue is so important that Jonathan Allen, co-writer of “Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House,” spoke at the White House Correspondence Dinner to assert that the White House Press Corp failed to cover Biden’s “cognitive decline” properly.

The fact that we are re-litigating what is now a non-issue while we ignore the almost daily meltdowns of the man who is currently actually in charge of this country says much about our priorities and what we are willing to accept from a man whose worst qualities we have now been told for decades are already baked in. But let's consider the possibility that this will eventually change and it may not be a terrible idea to get one cell on Alcatraz ready.