Anyone undecided whether or not Donald Trump is all there cognitively got quite the lifeline recently at a Trump rally outside Philadelphia when what started as a town hall turned into a new television special: Donald Trump Dancing With Himself.
Midway through an event in which South Dakota governor and famed puppy executioner Kristi Noem was supposed to be “moderating” friendly questions from audience members, Trump paused when two people fainted.
So far so good, relatively speaking.
What followed, however, was less good if you’re hoping for a president in full control of his faculties. “Let’s not do any more questions, let’s just listen to music,” Trump announced. “Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?” For the next 40 minutes, Trump stood there listening to music, inviting viewers to watch him standing there listening to music.
As Gov. Noem bravely tried to look as though this was really quite normal, the once and future possessor of our nuclear codes bobbed and swayed silently to an eclectic selection of tunes, from “Ave Maria” to “Y.M.C.A.” before exiting the stage. As former President Obama put it with considerable restraint “You would be worried if your grandpa was acting” like Trump.
Team Trump sure seems to know that something is seriously awry with him. Kamala Harris, whom Trump derides as “stupid,” handed him his head during their debate last month. This led Trump to announce that since he had “won,” he would debate her again when pigs flew.
In the past Trump has been serviced by physicians willing to say whatever he wanted. These include the fellow who certified that young Trump, eager as he was to serve his country in Vietnam, unfortunately suffered from disqualifying bone spurs, and the New York gastroenterologist whose 2015 letter about the meaningfully overweight candidate drew some guffaws. “If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency,” wrote the good doctor.
But Trump seems to be having more difficulty lately finding a suitably pliant doctor to endorse his health, and refuses to disclose his medical records. Some 230 medical providers just called on him to come clean. “Trump is falling concerningly short of any standard of fitness for office and displaying alarming characteristics of declining acuity,” they wrote. “In the limited opportunities [in which] we can examine his behavior, he’s providing a deeply concerning snapshot.”
That snapshot is getting worse by the day, which is why he not only backed out of a second debate but has refused to be interviewed by 60 Minutes and rejected CNN’s invitation to do a public town hall.
Here was Trump recently in Detroit: “Jill, get your fat husband off the couch. Get that, get that fat pig off the couch. Tell him to go vote for Trump, he’s going to save our country. Get that guy the hell of our…..get him up, Jill! Slap him around! Get him up!”
Here he was in Philadelphia about a deceased golfer: “Arnold Palmer is all man. I mean no disrespect to women. I love women, but he was all man. When he took showers with the other pros they came out saying ‘Oh, my God.’ I had to say it….I had to tell you the shower part because it’s true.”
On Fox News this past weekend he was asked about his untethered and oft-repeated assertion that immigrants in Ohio were eating peoples’ pets. The host asked “You said ‘They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats.’ That turned out not to be true.” Replied Trump: “I don’t know if it’s true or not.” The host: “I don’t know? It’s been debunked.” Responded the Republican nominee for President of the United States: “What about the goose? The geese. What about the geese? What happened there? They were all missing.”
If it looks like cognitive decline and sounds like cognitive decline, chances are it’s cognitive decline. Pick whatever euphemism you want for the doddering, the dissembling and the incoherence.
Donald Trump is not healthy in the head.
Jeff Robbins’ latest book, “Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad,” is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment, he is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.
