America’s Dangerous Delusion: Pretending Trump Is Fine
David Shuster exposes the fatigue, fury, and cognitive erosion the Trump team is desperately trying to hide.
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By David Shuster
The President of the United States increasingly resembles a decaying, crotchety old man wrestling not with his grievances or enemies, but with the betrayal of time and a mental erosion preventing any impulse control.
The New York Times recently reported what all of us with a functioning optic nerve have seen: Donald J. Trump, the once bombastic showman and snake oil salesman, has shrunk his public schedule and limited his appearances to a tight mid-day window.
Whereas previous U.S. Presidents embraced the burdens of office at dawn, Trump appears only after most of the nation has eaten lunch.
And when Trump does appear, reporters and staff keep seeing moments that look like fatigue overtaking leadership vigilance, the sort of slump that in most offices would prompt a supervisor to ask whether the employee needed time off or a medical check.
But instead of addressing concerns like an adult, the President keeps raging like a tyrannical toddler. He has denounced the reporting as unfair, sneered at journalists, and bellowed about his “perfect” tests — as if the nation were comprised only of other gullible children distracted by shiny objects.
Trump’s stain on our nation is no longer just financial corruption and governing incompetence. He is now a leader who lashes out with the reflexive hostility of a man in a dementia ward, cornered by his own limitations.
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Just in the past week, Trump’s language has become even more venomous and feral. His vocabulary has narrowed. His speeches have devolved into loops of resentment, sputtering hyperbole, and insults borrowed from the dullest middle school hooligan.
In a Thanksgiving post on social media, Trump called a sitting governor “seriously retarded,” a phrase rancid with cruelty and long rejected by civilized society.
This was not the eruption of a sharp mind. It was the yelp of an old lunatic whose rhetorical cupboard is empty except for slurs and stale anger.
No U.S. President has ever hurled public invective with such frequency, randomness, and sheer childishness. And Trump’s anti-social behavior keeps getting worse.
This month, he called a reporter “piggy” to her face. Last week, Trump claimed six Democratic lawmakers who urged soldiers to “refuse illegal orders” had committed sedition. Trump reposted a post stating “hang them.”
A few days ago, Trump ranted about Somalians after an Afghan national was arrested in connection with the shooting of West Virginia National Guard members in Washington, D.C.
This is where America needs a media that can cut through the threats and disinformation.
When Trump was asked during a Thanksgiving press conference in Mar-a-Lago if he would attend the funeral, he responded by bragging, “I won West Virginia by one of the biggest margins of any president anywhere.”
In the same news conference, Trump erupted at another female reporter who questioned his false claim that the shooter (who worked for the CIA during the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan) was an “unvetted refugee.” His puerile insult, sadly, was standard issue for him these days, as he barked, “You’re a stupid person.”
Trump seems more reliant than ever on bravado to mask his shrinking physical stamina, and on unhinged hostility to hide his accelerating cognitive decline.
This is a civic emergency. Because the danger is not that the President is aging — all men age. The danger is that the Presidency itself is aging under Trump and has been reduced to a twilight institution, limping through the motions, while the current occupant rants, naps, fumes, and forgets.
Our nation can withstand mismanagement and even malice. Our nation cannot withstand the normalization and sane-washing of such clear deterioration.
We have been asked and instructed by the Trump team to ignore the obvious: the dwindling public schedule, the withering attention span, the escalating verbal vitriol, the unmistakable signs of strain. We are told that any question is treason, any doubt a conspiracy, and any concern a malicious personal attack.
But what we are witnessing is not merely erratic conduct or bad temper. It is a presidency sinking under the deadweight of its lead performer, a spectacle of fatigue dressed up as defiance, and fury masquerading as vigor.
If this is the standard most Americans now accept, then our nation’s decline will not be sudden or dramatic. It will be slow, pathetic, and utterly preventable.
We are descending into a dangerous period of diminished expectations. And we are led, fittingly, by an old, demented narcissist who cannot handle his own decomposition.
25th Amendment? The Trump cabinet won’t go there. But the rest of us should.
So how does an average American enable the 25th Amendment?
With respects, I don’t think that the balance of informed observation thinks Trump is ‘fine.’ Obviously his handlers don’t, as they spend such time and effort to prop him up and display him when he is near enough to functionality as to be able to control his bodily functions. 'Shrinking Trump' ran for more than a year; and Lee's book went into two editions. Every news outlet to the left of Bannon has at one time or another suggested that perhaps Trump isn't 'quite right.'
The complexity emerges when one tries to sort out which of his behaviors come from his malignant personality disorder (I think most); which from his astronomical stupidity and ignorance; and which from the deteriorating impulse control, executive function, and common social filters that frontotemporal dementia causes. MRIs would begin –only begin—to sort this out; thorough neurophysiologic and neuropsychiatric testing would be better; and only an autopsy would definitively sort out FTD from the more common dementias and infections.
Regardless, though, this imitation of a human being, this golem, is no more able to manage statecraft than he is to be able to flap his arms and fly. Thirty years ago, when he was defiling New York, young girls, and the airwaves, he may have spoken in sentences, not fragments, and could swing a golf club; but he could not be trusted to manage a bodega, much less a country, because of his malign, stunted personality. This causes some dismay, as he has sole control of about 5, 000 nuclear weapons.