While for many it’s obvious how serious Trump’s declining mental capacity has become, for too many Americans that reality has not yet broken through. The media continues to treat Trump like a normal candidate; many Americans have baked Trump’s bizarre behavior into their perceptions of him; and many take right-wing lies about Joe Biden’s mental fitness at face value.
Given this, we wanted to hear from John Gartner, founder of Duty To Warn, a group of mental health professionals who have been raising the alarm about Trump’s increasingly sociopathic behavior since 2017. Now in 2024, Gartner has an even more dire warning about Trump: that there are increasing signs the former president is heading fast down the road toward dementia.
Here's the thing - Trump has always been a high extroversion, low agreeableness, reward-seeking narcissist (that article is from 2016). Here's magician Penn Jillette talking about his experience with Trump on 2 seasons of Celebrity Apprentice (in 2012) and why he thinks Trump's personality makes him a terrible choice for President (definitely watch it, it's 90 seconds of Penn slaying Trump). So sometimes it's hard to tell if Trump is being combative and illogical because he's progressing towards dementia or if it's just his personality which has been awful for as long as it's been recorded. He's the real-world embodiment of the quote by Douglas Adams:
“In other words - and this is the rock-solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation's Galaxywide success is founded - their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws.” ― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
Obviously. I don't even wanna know what his sick bastard of father did to him. Don't get me wrong, no empathy here, just emphasising that some shit must have happened down the line. His parents weren't mentally same either.
I think the most remarkable thing about this is how both sides are so unable to see that their own guy is clearly experiencing extreme mental collapse. Believe it or not, it is possible for two people to simultaneously be losing their shit. The cognitive dissonance is so thick that it seems like nobody on either side can see their own hand when it's an inch in front of their noses.
Look, if I had to pick a team, I'd be on team blue, but by no stretch of the imagination is Biden an exemplar of mental acuity. It isn't exactly hard to find countless examples of him tripping all over himself. Trust me, I wish there was a chance that we were not about to put someone who should probably be in assisted living into office. If you take a step back for a second and look at him with an open mind, its not hard to see. Just as an experiment, watch some videos of him and pretend like it's trump saying that stuff. If you can do that, then you will get a glimpse of what any rational person has been seeing for quite some time.
The President of the United States shouldn't be praised because there was a speech that can be found that they were able to make it through. The bar should be higher than that. It used to be that people heard presidential speeches and they said "I'm inspired! That was moving!" Not just, "Hey! I found a speech where he made it to the end without embarrassing himself!". The bar has moved, it's no longer a pull-up bar, it's a limbo bar.
The two major parties should try to find candidates below 75 years of age. These two are the very best politicians available in a country of over 330 million people?
Believe it or not, it is perfectly reasonable to point out that when the president forgets that Mexico isn't next to Gaza, it is a sign that he's not exactly at the prime of his life. Not everything is a big conspiracy. Sometimes, it's just normal people pointing out that it sucks that this is the best the dems could find. Can we please just try to be able to speak honestly without feeling like we are terrible team members if we say what we think? Honest discourse is your friend, no matter which side you are on.