An 80-year-old man held up a poster that looked like it was created for a fourth-grade science fair. It read, “Our Pool is Bigger Than Skyscrapers.” Under normal circumstances, the old fellow would be the subject of concerned sympathy from family and friends.
“Such a pity,” they’d say. “But you know, David’s just not really himself anymore. And poor Margaret! It must be hell to live with him like that day after day, to see the man you love losing his mind. They were soul mates.”
“It happened at Rotary Club. He was trying to make a presentation of some sort, but no one could figure out what he was going on about. Everyone tried to be polite, but he was in his own world. And after he stopped talking, he just fell asleep on stage, tilted over in his chair, totally out of it.”
“Poor Margaret.”
Most of us who’ve lived to a certain age have friends and family members who have developed dementia. It’s not an uncommon occurrence. I have a friend whose wife has been leaving the land of sentience for three years, getting progressively worse with each passing month. He calls it “the long goodbye.”
Now, the whole world is watching as the president of the United States makes that long goodbye, very publicly losing what’s left of his golden marbles. They watch as he makes up fantastic stories and tells them like he really believes them. Did you know, for instance, that “Democrats sent a man to jail for seven years because he fixed his own car”?
They watch as the president loses his train of thought, forgets some words, mispronounces others, digresses endlessly, and forgets his point, if there ever was one. They watch him tell the same tired stories over and over: Windmills cause cancer; electric batteries sink boats; water won’t come out of faucets; gas prices are down; the war with Iran is over. Oh wait, no, we’re going to blow them to hell.
He spends all hours of the night posting bizarre AI images on social media: Trump on Mt. Rushmore; Trump as a brave knight; Trump as an astronaut; Trump sunbathing in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool; Trump paragliding; Trump posed as a gladiator; Trump as the Pope; Trump as Jesus. All of them send the same unintended message: Trump is delusional.
In my experience, this is the point when children take away a parent’s car keys, deny them social media access, and keep them from answering phone calls for fear they’ll get scammed out of their life savings. They know that someone with dementia is easily manipulated.
It’s become obvious how this will end. There will come a point where Trump’s condition is no longer ignorable, where he will say or do something completely and dangerously nuts, something that forces even the toadiest of his toadies to admit the jig is up, the long grift is over, the president really is losing his mind.
There’s now a subculture of social media posters — doctors, therapists, psychoanalysts — who analyze the president’s appearance and actions each day and declare him medically unfit for office. Their posts draw millions of views, a fact that has not gone unnoticed by many former Trump-fluffers seeking to keep their own hustle going, including Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Laura Loomer, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones. Even Trump’s dementia is a grift for somebody.
It would all be so terribly sad if it were happening to almost any other person — a friend’s brother, your mother. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine any other American president who wouldn’t be getting some measure of sympathy in this situation. But this is Donald Trump, a man who has never, as far as I’m aware, demonstrated an ounce of genuine compassion for another person. Can you imagine Trump shedding a sympathetic tear for someone? Hell, I can’t even imagine him loving a dog. And he’s never held back from disparaging the recently deceased if they’d ever dared to cross him. He’s a relentlessly self-centered man with no discernible moral principles.
One thing is sure: In his inevitable descent into senility, Trump will continue doing the one thing he does better than anyone else: dividing us. There will be those who mourn his inevitable exit. And many more who will do the opposite.
