Since 2016, we’ve speculated about Trump’s mental fitness. Diagnosing the Old Felonious Authoritarian Traitor has become a national pastime, and as a nation, we’ve explored a variety of potential mental illnesses:
- Narcissistic Personality Disorder
- Alzheimer’s
- Parkinson’s Disease
- Dyslexia
- Dementia
- Psychopathy
But now, his normal age-related cognitive decline (maybe it’s normal?) has become so widespread and outrageous that even the access-reliant, inside-the-Beltway press can no longer ignore it. It’s gotten so bad that the mainstream media, known for its horse-race bothsidesism, is producing major stories about it. They’re popping up like weeds.
One of the things that everyone seems to be latching onto is the quality of his lies. They are completely out-of-touch with reality. He strings together phrases — they aren’t even sentences, just phrases — that are so tangentially related no one can find the through line that connects them.
His lies are so obvious and blatant that they hardly warrant debunking. Yet, of course, there’s an entire online cottage industry dedicated to doing just that. You can find plenty of examples with a quick search, along with videos of the rambling discourse he substitutes for actual speeches at his rallies. Late-night comedy hosts are having a field day, and even Saturday Night Live struggles to satirize the sheer absurdity of it all.
These lies have spread so widely on social media, and every website’s algorithm pushes them out so quickly, that I don’t feel the need to catalog them here. If you want a thorough and up-to-date rundown, check out this tragi-comedy article on The Guardian.
The thing that has struck me, though, is the sheer transparency of his lies. They seem to mark a significant change in the Old FART’s modus operandi. Let’s go through just a few of the more recent ones just to remind us all of them:
- Trump FEMA Claim Debunked: Agency Not Running Out Of Money Because Of Migrants
- Did JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon Endorse Donald Trump? What We Know
- Fact check: Amid bipartisan praise for Biden hurricane response, Trump falsely claims reviews are ‘universally’ negative
- Trump Spreads Baseless Conspiracy Theory That Democrats Are Withholding Hurricane Aid in “Republican Areas” of North Carolina
- Trump says ‘violent day’ of policing will end crime
- Despite blow-out jobs report, Trump claims all America does is lose jobs to other countries and to immigrants
Right? Everyone listening knew those things weren’t true before he reached the end of his claim. What I want you to comment on is why anyone would tell use whoppers. I can think of three reasons:
- NARCISSISTIC COLLAPSE: His overinflated, thin-skinned, delusional egomania has been punctured so biggly that he can’t keep it going any more. He’s convinced himself that everyone believes everything he says, so he says these things to comfort his painful deflation.
- COGNITIVE DECLINE: His mental faculties have so eroded due to age, poor diet, lack of exercise, and near constant stress that he can no longer manage this thought process or his emotions. His mind leaps from one topic to another based on the most inconsequential associations, and he cannot stop himself from blurting whatever comes to mind. It’s like we’ve peeled back the public persona and socially correct facade that we all present to the world, allowing us to peer directly into his hateful angry soul. There is no filter left. There is no longer any connective tissue left to hold his thoughts together.
- A WINNING STRATEGY: At his town hall in Fayetteville, North Carolina, he said that the key to winning was changing the name of Fort Liberty back to Confederate general and slaver, Braxton Bragg, as in Fort Bragg. In other words, appeal to all those too nihilistic to care about achieving a more perfect union by saying the most outrageous contrarian BS ever conceived of by human kind. There is some evidence that that is the core of his appeal to MAGA.
I believe he has lost the ability to control himself. It doesn’t matter whether it’s due to the despair stemming from his narcissistic collapse or if his mind is physically unraveling; what is clear is that he can no longer manage his own thoughts and actions.
I would love to hear what all y’all think in the comments, though.
Image Attribution
This image was found on Progressive Charlestown using a DuckDuckGo Creative Commons License search.
The Psy of Life 
I think it’s call “upping the ante”.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Howdy Silver!
Bingo! You win the prize. We’ve already achieved mass psychosis. Next stop, waves of terror. These people are, literally, willing to believe ANYTHING, do ANYTHING, and ignore ANYTHING. The only way to break the spell is for Trump to leave the national stage.
Huzzah!
Jack
LikeLiked by 1 person
Well, that’s what I called it when I was in abusive relationships with men, especially the one with my ex BF. No matter what you did, they always were
“upping the ante”. The only thing to do is to leave.
I don’t think many women realize that they’re in abusive relationships ~ especially if they’re not getting physically abused ~ & I don’t think the MAGA-ites realize it either. Like most of these relationships, the chaos, the confusion, the high drama is exciting & that’s what they crave. It’s a kind of addiction. Most DV therapists will argue against this but I will stand by being in an abusive relationship as an addiction.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Howdy Silver!
I think of it more like the dopamine rush of extreme sports or gaming. It falls short of a true addiction but keeps you coming back for more. I also think that MAGA knows that they are being used and abused. They may never know it. I go back to Arlie Hochschild’s “Stranger in Their Own Land,” in which she outlined the belief structure that keeps poor rural whites voting for Republicans that keep selling them like some cheap natural resource to big business to be used up and thrown onto a slag heap when they die young and painful slow deaths from exposure to toxins and a lack of healthcare. According to her, they think they are paying the price for the possibility of achieving the American dream. Their suffering enables the corporations to make cheap goods which powers the economy, and eventually it will trickle down to them. The problem in their view isn’t the trickery of the corporations, but the liberals who keep sneaking undeserving minorities past them in the line for the American dream.
Blog on Sibling!
Jack
LikeLike
That’s a hard one, Jack. My first thought was, “All of the above?”. One sure thing is that he has to believe he has a winning strategy. We have remember that much of his appeal, at least the least ideological and grievance driven part, with the MAGA base is entertainment. At whatever level he knows this, he knows he has to keep coming up with new material, new outrageousness, more socially unacceptable, more “He has to be telling it like it is, because nobody could make that up.” response, and more just plain word jazz. He could see that as a winning strategy because he also needs to believe that his followers are legion and a massive majority, because he is so great. He is not concerned with the opposition and the moderates. He needs to see them as small, few, and weak, some malcontents that, given the power, he can easily ignore and/or sweep away.
And under all that, deep within, there is the fear whose name must not be spoken, the terror of “looser”, “fake”, “imposter”, his smallness, weakness, and incompetence exposed and undeniable, and finally with that the scorn of his father’s ghost, a greater disappointment than his brother.
How aware is he, can he be, of his own cognitive decline, whether or not is is within the normal range of age related? Good question, and if he is aware, how does that affect him? I think he chooses not to see what he wants not to see.
The changed coverage in the media now has a corollary. Here in NC, we have Republicans, even some severely MAGA ones complaining, pleading, demanding that the conspiracy theories, lies, and disinformation, including his (though not labeled as such) about the hurricane response and FEMA in particular, be stopped. Their own monster is chewing on their ass, and they don’t like it. [It might be too much to hope for that they are having a Come To Jesus moment about climate change denial and lies in general.]
LikeLike
Howdy Bob!
In 2017, I made a series of memes depicting the complaints of MAGA about federal programs that were curtailed that affected them. In essence, the complaint was that Trump was supposed to be hurting OTHER people, not them. Same thing here. Trump is the scorpion that MAGA is taking across the river on its back. Trump is the snake that MAGA has invited into their house. Like the frog and the homeowner, they are surprised when he attacks them. Tragic as it is, there is a sweet irony to it. Not that the damage it is doing to North Carolina and other states and areas is sweet. But what did NC Republicans expect him to do?
Meanwhile, Trump is upping the outrageous scapegoating rhetoric in predictable ways: immigrants have bad genes and are poisoning the country. That does suggest that he has some control over what he’s doing and saying, but other remarks seem completely nonsensical and tangential and circular.
I think a combination of reasons explains his behavior, but he’s definitely losing his faculties. And, no one wants a JD Vance presidency except JD.
Huzzah!
Jack
LikeLiked by 1 person
What did they expect? Well, these are the same NC Republicans who defeated updating building codes to adapt to climate change. Maybe they expected all the hurricanes to go to Blue states. More likely, they expected to get to the election without a major disaster. It doesn’t help that a numbr of them come from the real estate business and had been selling WNC as a Climate Sanctuary.
It does seem that Trump can maintain fairly well in an interview with a friendly host, and in the beginning of a rally speech, but once he gets on a roll in front of an audience the control is lost. The reaction of the cheering MAGA audience is a drug for him. That’s one side of his personality we haven’t much considered, the same vulnerability to addiction that made his brother an alcoholic. Stroke his narcissism and he gets high as a kite.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Howdy Bob!
That’s the whole sundown-effect where the longer you need to exert focus and attention, the more cognitive load you’re under, and the less able you are to maintain it. I see it with all of my neurodivergent kids, too. I have to plan my last class period differently than I do the other classes just to account for the inability to maintain attention and impulse control, but these are eleven year olds.
I think you’re right about the addictive genes. Dopamine and endorphins and whatever else is being recruited by his liking and wanting system is as vulnerable as his brother’s was. His brother could only have killed a plane full or two of passengers at most. Trump could kill eight billion.
Huzzah!
Jack
LikeLike
And, however much he enjoys and depends on the adulation of the masses, the longer he talks, the less cognitive control he has. But also, the longer he talks, the less cognitive strength they have, until it is just the sound of his voice. And, so far, for length, he still can’t hold a candle to Fidel or Adolf, and several other long winded dictators. At his age, it is unlikely he will be able to ever match them, but that AI clone could.
I’ve had some thoughts about why the billionaire tech bros and others of that ilk can support his plans for tariffs with the very high probability that the experience of the Snoot-Halley Act in 1929 would be repeated. Then, I remembered that the crash of ’29 had winners as well as losers. People like the father of the Koch Brothers who had cash bought up whole industries for pennies on the dollar or less.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Howdy Bob!
I’ve long maintained that the real roll of the Trump tariffs was to drive small and medium-sized businesses, especially farms and landlords, out of business, so that they could be bought up by the corporations. The drive of fascism is to for industry to do the state’s bidding and the bigger the business, the easier it is to deal with. Oligarchy and fascism are two sides of the same coin. It’s the goal of all of them.
As far as Trump’s rallies and speeches go, I don’t think it matters what he says to MAGA or his big dollar backers. He’s hoping his outrage machine turns out low-propensity voters who like his violent racist misogynist anti-immigrant rhetoric. I just can’t get a feel for whether it is getting any real traction. It feels like we’re just sifting the same grain into smaller and smaller bits, but not really getting anything new.
However, we ended up with 25 million more voters in 2020 than in 2016 (they broke 15 million for Biden and 10 million for Trump). We had a turn out of 64% of the eligible voters, so there’s still more low-propensity voters out there. Of course, they are disengaged and seldom voters for a reason. I don’t know if more of the same is going to do it this time for him.
I also don’t feel much excitement from the Harris camp either. The honeymoon is over. I fear we’re seeing the same fizzle that we saw in 2020.
Blog on Sibling!
Jack
LikeLiked by 1 person
Trump is mainly just playing his greatest hits louder and longer. Even his anti-FEMA crap is amplified Reagan “the government is the problem” made more gross.
Several analysts have pointed out that one of the historically lowest propensity groups is young women, and that they are very low weighted in virtually all the polls, but have been registering to vote in droves around one issue (and one simple heuristic), abortion. As easy questions go, it doesn’t get easier than that one.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Howdy Bob!
I saw a headline this morning about how someone pulled a gun on a FEMA agent in NC. Troubling times indeed.
The problem with MAGA is that they treat Trump’s lies and hypocrisy like some kind of inside joke. They know he’s lying. They know he’s going to be an oligarch and line his own pockets, but they don’t care. In fact, they even encourage it. They like it. It is not a flaw, it is a feature. Even when it hurts them, it is okay, as long as it hurt the OTHER first and worst.
It is as sick as a co-dependent abusive spousal relationship. The enmeshment and enabling are nauseating. I only hope we have the votes and the legal system to stop them.
Huzzah!
Jack
LikeLiked by 1 person
We must hope so.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes, it is the goal of all of them, has been for that class since the beginning of written history and likely longer. They are predators, here to eat you. As such, they really ought to trigger everybody else’s Fight, Flight, or Freeze system. Alas, too often, the response is Freeze and they have gotten away with it.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Howdy Bob!
I had read a theory that human beings had domesticated ourselves. We ganged up on individuals who were overly aggressive, predatory, and domineering, and killed them like common chimpanzees. It could be that we haven’t taken that process far enough. We may need to remove the psychopaths and narcissists from our gene pool as well, but our current brand of humanism — Do your dream, you know, like Hitler and Jeffrey Dahmer did — won’t allow it.
If we don’t get them out of the gene pool, we should at least get them out of the public sphere, but we can’t seem to convince enough of our compatriots to do even that much.
Blog on Sibling!
Jack
LikeLiked by 1 person
I think that the ganging up on the bad actor worked best at the very small community level, as it does in other social animals. At larger scale where there is a need to organize large numbers of people who do not know each other well, symbols like religion and more abstract definitions of “us” and “them” come into play that are manipulated by dark triad personalities. “Civilization” has been struggling with that all along.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yeah. And, it may be what does us in after our very short run as the dominate species on the planet.
Jack
LikeLiked by 1 person
“The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.” – Gregory Bateson
“The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.” – Gregory Bateson
“The pathology is to want control, not that you ever get it, because of course you never do.”
Gregory Bateson
“But the myth of power is, of course, a very powerful myth, and probably most people in this world more or less believe in it. It is a myth, which, if everybody believes in it, becomes to that extent self-validating. But it is still epistemological lunacy and leads inevitably to various sorts of disaster.” – Gregory Bateson
LikeLiked by 1 person
Howdy Bob!
The power of belief in the human experience is just staggering. For everything else Trump is, he is the poster child for the power of belief, good or bad. Until we reached climate altering proportions, maybe it didn’t matter so much how disastrous the outcome of our beliefs were, but now, we threaten our own existence and 90% of the species on the planet.
I find a small comfort in the knowledge that no matter what happens due to climate change, life will go on on the planet. I’m a bit disappointed that I won’t be around to see it.
Huzzah!
Jack
LikeLike
Speaking of beliefs, I’ve been pondering whether anyone who truly believes that they live in a universe which is an absolute monarchy can really fully embrace and seek to live out the core values of democracy, or will “as above, so below” always leave us prey to authoritarians when times get tough.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Howdy Bob!
We all have that sweet spot where we want someone to take care of us. We all have a circumstance that will trigger the desire for a much more powerful being than ourselves to take care of the threatening things that we cannot and do not understand. Some of us have wider latitude in that need. We feel more threatened more easily, and turn to the the parental protective figure, more frequently or under more circumstances. Others of us, have a much narrower range of circumstances that will trigger the response.
We will always be vulnerable to it because it is buried deeply in our psyches. And, there will always be those who know how to exploit it, instinctively.
Blog on, Sibling!
Jack
LikeLike
Yes, the inner child does not disappear or cease to influence. Being an Atheist or even Agnostic brings an awesome responsibility to understand right from wrong and act on that difference entirely for oneself. In that way, it is much like the practice of democracy.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Howdy Bob!
Isn’t that the issue, though. Right from wrong are belief structures and what is right in one time and place among a group of people differs radically from what other groups think is wrong. There is nothing inherently right about democracy or human rights. They are choices we’ve made, but Sparta eventually defeated Athens. The non-democratic utilitarian militaristic cruel Spartans were able to overcome the democratic, creative, thoughtful, kinder Athenians. I’m not even saying that Sparta was “right,” I’m just saying that there is no absolute right and wrong and no belief structure will confer a guarantee of victory or winning.
We as a culture decided that the Bill of Rights and building a more perfect union where all people are created equally was our aspiration. We’ve struggled against those in our midsts who have rejected those principles as the foundation of our culture. We are at yet another crossroads of whether we will continue bending the arc of history towards justice — what we call justice — or whether we will go towards another form, albeit much crueler and a more stratified, of justice.
When the right says that education is indoctrination, they are right. It is indoctrination into the values and beliefs that form the foundation of our culture. By stopping our education system from passing those values and beliefs on to our children, they have divided us and are altering those very values and beliefs.
Huzzah!
Jack
LikeLike
We are creatures who do live in worlds defined far more by beliefs and values than by instinct, and our beliefs about the structure of reality and what it is possible to know and how to know it operate far below consciousness most of the time, As has often been said, believing is seeing, not the other way around. So, the education of children is always a battleground. Even in democratic Athens, Socrates was given a cup of poison.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Back in the 1980s my wife and I both worked for the Seventh Day Adventist health care system which at the time operated several small to large nursing home/elderly care facilities in central Wisconsin. This was at the time Reagan basically shut down the federal mental health care system, dumping the patients into the laps of the state and the families of the patients. We absorbed many of those patients. The entire third floor of our facility became a locked ward housing and caring for about 30 of these poor people many, alas, abandoned not just by the state but by their families as well, but never mind that.
The point is that I knew at least three men in their late 70s to early 80s who expressed many of the same traits as Trump is exhibiting right now. Inability to concentrate on a single topic for more than a very short time, slurred speech, delusions, unhealthy and even obsessive sexual instincts (they had to be kept segregated from female patients and female staff members were not allowed to be alone with them without an orderly or other male staff member present), and an almost complete disconnection from reality. I am most definitely not a health care professional, but from my past experience… I’ve said this before, perhaps even here: if this were anyone other than Trump his family would have been brought up on charges of elder abuse for taking advantage of a man who badly needs to be in treatment.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Howdy Grouchy!
I was a social worker back in the ’80’s and ’90’s and consulted with nursing homes and remember that exact same period. The small homes that I consulted with took in some of the elderly with declining faculties. We had similar issues. And, I’ve had the exact same thought, I would be required to refer Trump and his family to elder protective services if I were still licensed and working.
His family and the party ought to be ashamed of themselves for letting him go on like they do. It is criminal and exploitative. There is no excuse for it.
How much is cognitive decline and how much is stress-related is unclear, but it is clear that he is showing clear signs of decline. It will only get worse. For his own good, we cannot let him back in office. And, for our own good, we can’t JD Vance get anywhere near the office.
Huzzah!
Jack
LikeLike
In religious writings, lies, deceptions and treacheries are attributed to the forces of darkness…and they are malevolent forces and they are dangerous forces because the entice humans to act in certain destructive ways–they have the ability deceive people and to appear as positive, harmless or even helpful entities …and they confound and confuse many gullible people who are feeling left out of the social milieu for one reason or another or people who feel comparatively about some perceived slight on the part of government — History has proven over and over again that these forces can manifest in the form of dictators and authoritarians who seem to have super human powers to change minds and destroy lives in many varied and subtle ways. America is on the threshold of experiencing such horrors and the 2024 election is the springboard the “Entities” have chosen from which to launch their attacks against humanity. The operational center of all this springs forth from right wing extremism and is driven by the same.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Howdy John!
I don’t know about forces of darkness and religious texts, but MAGA, Trump, and his political allies are certainly being very manipulative as narcissistic personality disorders are known to be. On an individual level, narcissist using gaslighting to manipulate people. Gaslighting a large population becomes mass psychosis. After mass psychosis comes waves of terror, making the irrational and immoral behavior the psychotic exponentially worse.
Even though Trump is displaying clear signs of cognitive decline, he is also showing clear signs of ratcheting up the scapegoating waves of terror rhetoric by declaring that immigrants are poisoning our gene pool and soiling our genetic purity. Sound like anyone you know?
The bad news is, if we let them win in November, our democracy will be lost for a generation. The good news is, if they win in November, the global ecosystem will collapse and we won’t have to worry about regaining our democracy since the devastation will be so complete.
Huzzah!
Jack
LikeLike
Maybe the generation needs to lose their democracy for awhile to make those who recapture it appreciate it enough to make sure this kind of horse shit never happens again.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Howdy John!
We won’t have an ecosystem that will support eight billion people for a generation if Trump gets elected. Electing Trump is, literally, not an option, except for those keen on global suicide.
Huzzah!
Jack
LikeLike
We have about 77 million blinded people who apparently do have a yen for global suicide and they are all following –“him.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
Nihilism is all the rage on the right.
LikeLike
Since a Narcissist can never admit that they have done anything wrong, nor that they ever have been wrong about anything they think, I’ve thought his decline is more than likely dementia. He is clearly a danger to himself, and others (though the others would be due to his “followers”) and for his own benefit should be hospitalized. It isn’t going to happen though.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Howdy Suze!
If I were still a licensed social worker, I’d be legally bound to make a report of elder abuse to state protective services. It is one of the most shameful situations I’ve ever seen exploiting a person in such severe cognitive decline as his family and the party are doing.
You know its bad when the horse-race bothsidesing mainstream media are writing stories about it. Not even they can sane-itize his rambling tangential incoherence any more.
Huzzah!
Jack
LikeLiked by 1 person