[Salon] IS TRUMP IN COGNITIVE DECLINE?




The view from inside is that the president has been slipping
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IS TRUMP IN COGNITIVE DECLINE?

The view from inside is that the president has been slipping

Oct 7
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President Donald Trump greets Secretary of War Pete Hegseth as he arrives to speak to senior military leaders at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, on September 30. / Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images.

Perseveration is a medical term used in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, and speech-language pathology to describe a particular response such as a phrase that is repeated or a gesture that is inappropriate. It’s a symptom most commonly seen in patients who have PTSD, autism, traumatic brain injury, or dementia. I thought of the term, which I heard many times over several years when a close relative was experiencing the degeneration of dementia, while viewing President Donald Trump’s seventy-one minute speech to an estimated eight hundred US military leaders who were assembled, for reasons still not clear, at the order of Pete Hegseth, the Army National Guard reserve major who is now the secretary of war, at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, on September 30.

After a rah-rah opening speech by Hegseth, the president delivered his usual mixture of personalized history and complaints—most notably, he has repeatedly claimed credit for solving international crises that he did not solve—that some of his close aides in the White House understand to be yet another sign of his increasing mental disorganization and inability to focus at high-level meetings.

Most significantly, I was told, Trump, always masterful in dealing with crowds, large or small, is no longer able to “read the room”—quickly size up the audience and let his instincts as a showman take over and get the audience engaged. It would have been refreshing, and perhaps unprecedented, for Trump to outline his views on foreign policy and give the assembled generals and admirals a chance to ask questions of their president. Instead, they got a reprise of Trump’s greatest triumphs. The president returned to one of his most misguided views—that of himself as a settler of wars. “I have settled so many wars since we’re here,” he said. “I’ve settled seven and yesterday we might have settled the biggest of them all,” referring to ongoing talks between Israel and Hamas. “Although,” Trump added, “I don’t know. Pakistan, India, was very big, both nuclear powers. I settled that.” There have been many newspaper reports from around the world disputing Trump’s accounts of the issues at hand, as well as his definition of what it means to “settle” a conflict.

A few minutes later, the president turned from discussing his success in solving the problems of military recruiting to a long harangue about a published report that Joe Biden used an autopen to sign documents and letters while in office.

The disclosure led to several minutes of unhinged contempt for his predecessor in front of senior officers who had served, presumably to the best of their abilities, during the Biden presidency. Trump professed his outrage at the use of the autopen, which is common for those officials in government and private life who receive vast amounts of mail. He said that military recruitment “during Biden’s four years—the autopen. I call him the autopen”—had fallen drastically. He then asked the assembled generals and admirals: “How would you like to have your thing signed by an autopen?”

He went on, according to a transcript: “When I have to sign for a general because we have beautiful paper, the gorgeous paper, I said throw a little more gold on it, they deserve it. Give me, I want the A paper, not the D paper. We used to sign a piece of garbage. I said this man is going to be a general, right?

“Yeah. I don’t want to use this. I want to use the big, beautiful firm paper. I want to use the real gold writing when you talk about the position. And they’re beautiful and—but how would you like to have that where you—some kid sitting in the back office is having it signed with an autopen? I thought about it and I thought about you people first, admirals, generals.

“I said somebody works his whole life, he gets into maybe the academies or wherever. But however you got there and you go through years of work and now you become an admiral or a general or whatever. And when you do, the president of the United States signs your commission, as you know, and that commission is beautifully displayed.

“And I sign it—actually, I love my signature, I really do. Everyone loves my signature. But I signed it very proudly. And I always think to myself, how can you have an autopen sign this? It’s just so disrespectful. To me it’s just totally disrespectful. And it turned out that almost everything [Biden] did was signed by autopen, except for when he gave his son, Hunter, a pardon. He signed that one.

“And that’s actually the worst signature I’ve ever seen. That was a bad—the autopen looks much better. But as leaders, our commitment to every patriot who puts on the uniform is to ensure that the American military remains the most lethal and dominant on the planet, not merely for a few years, but for decades and generations to come, for centuries.”

I present the above paragraphs to buttress the point of some of those on the inside in the Trump White House who have come to believe that the president clearly has diminished faculties and can no longer “read the room.”

I must note here that, as readers of this column might recall, I wrote harshly and repeatedly about Joe Biden’s diminished faculties in the last years he was in office. There’s an important distinction between then and now. There were no insiders in the Biden White House who chose to publicly speak the truth about Biden’s failing faculties—signs of which began appearing toward the end of his second year in office. My information came indirectly from those who saw the president, including those who had meetings or social exchanges with him on Air Force One. In a few cases the information came from journalists or former Senate colleagues who saw first-hand evidence of his mental fatigue or his inability to finish sentences.

It was refreshing to have those who are in the game in the Trump administration share their concerns with outsiders in ways that reached me. That never happened under Biden, as the mandarins who served the president and vice-president kept their worries to themselves, only to have the nation, and the world, see Joe Biden struggle in a presidential debate with Trump last June.

Today we have a diminished president who is presiding over a nation divided and in a state of high anxiety about his policies. The paragraphs above reflect a reality that does not bode well for the mental health of our president over the coming years of turmoil. To those who doubt this, I recommend a careful reading of the transcript of his appearance before America’s military leadership in Quantico.

Some of the president’s most glaring flaws have been there from the beginning and, along with his anti-immigration views—the issue that has sustained his popularity at the polls—were seen by millions of Americans as endearing, and honest.

Nine years ago, after the outsider Trump stunned the professional political class by winning the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, Charles Krauthammer, a conservative columnist for the Washington Post (he passed away in 2018), wrote a column headlined “Donald Trump and the Fitness Threshold.” I should note that Krauthammer, who was paralyzed in a swimming accident during his first year at Harvard Medical School, was an MD and practicing psychiatrist who briefly joined the Carter administration and later served as a speech writer for Vice President Walter Mondale. His widely circulated syndicated columns earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1987. In his later years he turned to the right and became a commentator for Fox News.

Krauthammer was no fan of Trump and was particularly aggrieved when Trump defied every political convention by attacking a Gold Star family who had criticized him. “Why did Trump do it?” asked Krauthammer. “He can’t help himself. His governing rule in life is to strike back when attacked, disrespected or even slighted. . . . He judges every action, every pronouncement, every person by a single criterion—whether or not it/he is ‘nice’ to Trump.”

“I used to think Trump was an 11-year-old, an undeveloped schoolyard bully. I was off by about ten years. His needs are more primitive, an infantile hunger for approval and praise, a craving that can never be satisfied. He lives in a cocoon of solipsism where the world outside him has no value—indeed exists—only insofar as it sustains and inflates him.

“Most politicians seek approval. But Trump lives for the adoration. He doesn’t even try to hide it, boasting incessantly about his crowds, his standing ovations, his TV ratings, his poll numbers, his primary victories.”

And his penmanship.

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