Jake! My man! I am right next door, in a place I like to call the Mutilation Room.
You believe you struck a blow for truth and freedom with a book shining a bright light on Biden’s aging and associated mental decline. You haven’t really illuminated anything we did not know, but you got another book to hawk on CNN. Thanks for that. It is not much of a gift. Bob Woodword, Seymour Hersh, Ronan Farrow, Jane Mayer or ProPublica would have dug deep and revealed facts we did not know, but thanks for the effort.
Awful to learn of the cognitive decline of a man who began his term as president at age 78. He could be lucid but at times was anything but — rambling, incoherent, confused. The nation now has some experience with this.
No, I do not Biden. Trump. Trump entered his second term as a 78-year-old and displays mental decline and deterioration every day. He is often incapable of putting together or expressing a cogent thought. In an ever more disheveled and chaotic manner, he spews lies and nonsense, both to us and to other foreign leaders. He exercises exceptionally poor judgement but rather free form improvisation, sometimes based on the television show he saw last night. He meanders and wanders off point. With age he has become less constrained and more himself. His ambition to take illegal measures to prepare the country for dictatorship is more pronounced. The media that might examine this critically is mute and their corporate employers intimidated. Yes, there surely is a story in the attempt to cover up Biden’s true condition so the voters could decide on his fate, but the current cover up of Trump’s mental health is conducted not by his aides but by the news media. This is even more heinous and consequential.
Was Biden executed in 2020 and replaced with a robot, or did that conspiracy “theory” come from a raging lunatic in drastic mental decline? You and other journalists merely dismiss that as Trump being Trump, without any further examination. Journalists and their employers do not just launder Trump’s insanity, they pre-capitulate to his threats against them. The institutions that once drove a felonious president from office and reported honestly on the Vietnam war, instrumental to ending it, have been emasculated.
Trump’s mental deterioration is self-evident and a thousand-fold more dangerous than Biden’s gradual decline. Biden and the Biden administration operated within the laws and the Constitution and used crutches such as teleprompters to keep him on point. Trump, on the other hand, is purposely causing great damage to a great country, rewarding his cronies and looting the public treasury, demolishing lives and the public trust. He is openly enriching himself in office, taking official action in his own financial interest. This is without question corrupt and illegal. Trump’s base is not the ignorant and delusional White elites and the working class, as often cited.
His genuine constituency are a small number of billionaires, for which he provides recognition and remuneration. His cabinet and administration rests on more than a dozen people drawn from the ultra-rich, most of whom, like Trump, do not have the education, experience or temperament to be able to perform the duties they have been given. (An even greater source of unqualified personnel are two dozen alumni of Fox News.) This is not an indulgence or a mistake, it is purposeful. Kristi Noam, Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, Tulsi Gabbard are demonstrably unqualified to perform the jobs assigned to them, so as to give Trump the widest possible sphere of action. They will never say no, refuse an order or contradict their “Dear Leader.” There is no one in his cabal of advisors to constrain his most juvenile impulses and indulgences. Most importantly, his cabinet was selected for loyalty, to make sure the 25th amendment would not be used to remove a mentally incapacitated president.
We can see with our own eyes and ears how Trump speaks and operates. He may not be the first president to display mental impairment, but he is the one who is doing so right now. Biden can be mourned and blamed for not resigning his office and passing the torch to his vice president sooner. But Trump’s trademark rambling incoherence is an immediate problem in a way that rehashing Biden’s decisions is not. Trump’s malignant narcissism runs wild, damaging or destroying a democratic system of checks and balances built over more than two centuries. He was elected to run the government, not destroy it and implement a new form of government. He did not propose we end the republic, and no one voted for it. Trump is demonstrably and unequivocally incomprehensible. He is mentally unwell and this is reflected in his chaotic, random, senseless and endlessly repetitive speech. Biden’s cognitive decline did not bring about the nation’s decline. Trump’s, on the other hand, could not possibly be more dangerous for America and the world.
Right now, there is a five-alarm fire set by a gang of gleeful arsonists, but you’re writing about a house that burned down last year.
You will examine and write about this unfolding cataclysm next, right? Or will the whole of the journalistic profession take up Trump’s relentless bashing of Biden, reinforcing Trump’s lunacy and leaving his own mental decline unexamined? Might you write a book about that?
