Trump’s Brain Is Not Okay

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The evidence for Trump’s dementia is this: Trump shows an overall decline from his own cognitive baseline, with marked progressive deterioration in 4 areas: memory, ability to use language, behavior, and gross and fine motor skills.

Let’s take these one by one:

1) Decline from baseline:

Overall, he shows a shocking decline in verbal fluency from his previous baseline. Trump was once highly articulate. He spoke in polished paragraphs with a sophisticated vocabulary. Now, his vocabulary is impoverished, and he often can’t finish a sentence or even a word. Typical of dementia patients, he repeats himself and overuses superlatives and filler words.
…

2) Memory:

Forgetting names and dates is normal for people who are aging, like Joe Biden, and me, and millions of others. By stark contrast, the Dementia Care Society says “confusing people and generations” is a sign of advanced dementia. And this is the type of profound memory disturbance we’re seeing in Trump.

Recently, Trump confused Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi. You can kind of intuit how the demented thought process works in Trump’s mind to combine people. There’s an archetype in his head of a hated powerful female politician he is fighting. Fragments of Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi stick to this miasma of ill-defined thought and feeling, and combine in his imagination to form a new combined person who doesn’t really exist: Bad, bad, Nikki-Pelosi woman. Me hate her.

8 times he’s said he’s running against Obama. How often does he say and think it in private? I think this suggests that Trump has also combined Obama and Biden into one imaginary hated Joe-Obama person. The Trump campaign is trying to spin it as if Trump was either joking or suggesting Biden is an Obama puppet or some such thing. Nice try. Trump said it plainly, over and over. He didn’t look like he was joking (does he ever?) and said literally nothing to suggest he was referring to some Biden-Obama cabal.

The more plausible explanation is that once again we are watching the workings of his demented mind in real time. Obama and Biden have something very important in common in Trump’s brain that can allow them to be fused in his molten mind: two Democratic presidents who bested and humiliated him have become one imaginary super-villain.

What happens to a nation when its chief executive has lost his capacity for executive functioning? Michael Wolff wrote that Trump not infrequently failed to recognize old friends. I don’t mean he forgot their names. He acted as if he’d never seen them before in his life. If you’ve ever had a relative with dementia you know how heartbreaking that stage of decline can be-- to have to remind a loved one of who you are.

Trump is almost there.

3) Language

Trump shows formal signs of disordered speech we typically see only in organically impaired dementia patients:

A) “phonemic aphasia”

Trump uses non-words in place of real words, that usually include a fragment of the actual word. For example saying “mishuz” instead of missile, or “Chrishus” instead of Christmas. You can look at supercut reels assembled by Ron Filipkowski on Twitter, The Daily Show, and now by the Democratic House Judiciary Committee, as well. Both Chairman Nadler and Rep. Swalwell showed their own supercuts of Trump’s cognitive decline at the Hur hearings, to counteract Hur’s partisan slur about Biden’s “poor memory.”

To demonstrate how pervasive these errors are, I present this long but far from exhaustive list of Trump’s phonemic aphasias:
 

“President U-licious S Grant” (For Ulysses S. Grant)
“space-capsicle” (for space capsule)
“combat infantroopen”(for combat infantry)
“sahhven country”(for sovereign country)
“renoversh” (For renovations)
“Anonmmiss” (for anonymous).
“transpants” (for transplants)
“lawmarkers” (for lawmakers)
“supply churn” (for supply chain)
“Rusher” (for Russia)
“raydoh” (for radio)
“Liberal-ation (for liberation”)
“benefishers” (for benificiaries)
“con-ducking” (for conducting)
“stat-tics, suh-tic-six” (for statistics)
“crimakle” (for criminal)
“armed forsiva” (for armed forces)
“internate” (for Internet)
“transjija” (for transition)
“stanktuary” (for sanctuary)

That last example took place during Trump’s State of the Union Address, just to contrast that with the SOTU we just witnessed. In recent rallies in GA, NC, and VA over the course of just a few days Trump evidenced more examples:
 

“We have becrumb a nation”
“All comp-ply-ments” to Joe Biden.
“I know Poten.”
“He can’t cam-pay. He can’t campaign.”
“We will expel the wald-mongers.”

But of course, this is exactly what we should expect. As he deteriorates, these deficits will make themselves apparent more and more often. Now he can’t get through a rally without an example. Cornell psychologist Harry Segal speculated Trump may be “sundowning” and hence most vulnerable to going off the rails at night-time rallies.

Some have argued that Trump’s impaired speech could be an articulation problem, rather than a brain problem. Some have argued he could be slurring from a variety of causes, from loose dentures to drug toxicity (indeed many have speculated that Trump might be abusing or even snorting Adderall or some other stimulant.)

But all those competing explanations are disproven by one fact. Trump commits these aphasic errors in his written posts, as well, proving the problem is in his brain, not his articulation.

For example, he recently posted:
 

“Joe Buden DISINFORMATES AND MISINFORMATES”

“Semantic aphasia”

Semantic aphasia is using a real word, but in a way that doesn’t correspond to its meaning. For example, when Trump referred to the “oranges of the investigation.” Another example would be “midtown and midturn elections.” Recently, when apparently trying to say “three years later,” Trump said:

 

 

“Three years, lady, lady, lady.”

More recently Trump said at a rally:

 

 

“We’re going to protect pro-God…”

In mid-sentence he goes blank and looks at the ceiling. When he reboots, the words he uses to complete the sentence don’t make sense:

 

 

“…context and content.”

C) Complete loss of all verbal language

Like an infant sometimes, Trump just makes sounds:

 

 

“Gang boong. This is me. I hear bing.”

Until finally, he is reduced to silence.

 

 

“Saudi Arabia and Russia will re-ve-du. Ohhh…”

Trump’s face went blank, followed by a sigh, and a silent pause while he looked at the ceiling.

D) Tangential Thinking

Trump evidences “tangential thinking” where he drifts from one unrelated thought fragment to another, and sometimes tries to “confabulate” them into a story. But the narrative is literally incoherent. When the press describes Trump’s speeches as “rambling,” they are gaslighting us with a euphemistic word that normalizes the grossly abnormal. Trump regularly degenerates into incomprehensible strings of words.

Just recently outside a New York courtroom, Trump declared:

 

 

“We can’t have an election in the middle of a political season. We just had Super Tuesday. And we had a Tuesday after Tuesday already.”

Other examples would be:

 

 

“We are an institute in a powerful death penalty. We will put this on.”

“I could tell you about aircraft carriers, where they use electric catapults. They couldn’t go to the steam, which works better for about 1/100th the price, you know? The electric catapult, you know that story? I could tell you about the elevators on a tremendous carrier, the Gerald Ford, and they decided not to use hydraulic like the John Deere tractor, they decided to use magnets, ‘we’re gonna use magnets!’ to lift up the elevators with seven planes.”

In a recent string of rallies in GA, SC, and VA he said:
 

“They say I’m cognitively impaired. I’m not cognitively.”

“They don’t want illegal immigrants knocking on their front door and saying I’m going to use your kitchen. And I’m going to use your bedroom and there’s not a damn thing. And that’s the nice ones, okay?”

“They raided my house in Florida, Mar-a-Lago, they raided. With no raid, they had no reason to do so.”

Some of his utterances are incomprehensible for a different reason. They suggest Trump is so disoriented he’s occupying a different reality than everyone else.

For example:
 

“They’re weaponizing law enforcement for high-level interference against Joe Biden’s top and only political appointment. A guy named me. A guy named me.”

At a recent rally, he said:
 

“Biden beat Barack Hussein Obama. Ever heard of him?”

Biden never beat Obama. So we have to conclude that Trump is confused about basic reality, and living in a different reality that changes unpredictably. When a confused patient is evaluated in an emergency room, a standard psychiatric question to determine if a patient is disoriented is:
 

“Who is President of the United States?”

If you get that wrong the most probable explanations are dementia, psychosis or drug toxicity, and most probably you’d be admitted for observation in any case.

4) Motor Performance:

Dementia expert Elisabeth Zoffmann, assistant professor of Forensic Psychiatry at the

University of British Columbia, told Salon that Trump evidences a “wide-based gait, commonly found among patients with dementia. Video online shows that he swings his right leg in a semi-circle as if it were dragging a dead weight. He has also shown deterioration in his fine motor coordination, for example having difficulty drinking a bottle or a glass of water without two hands.

Some doctors have also pointed out the peculiar way he leans forward as a typical sign of a type of dementia known as frontotemporal dementia. It could be frontotemporal, or it could be Alzheimer’s like his father had. There’s more than one cause of dementia and that’s where a brain scan would be helpful, but we’re never going to get to see that.

5) Behavior:

He is showing marked deterioration in impulse control and judgment, becoming ever more paranoid, aggressive and confused. Even the judges in his cases are throwing up their hands because they see Trump actually can’t control his outbursts at this point, it’s like a Tourette’s tic.

What are the real risks to our nation of a president who is exhibiting signs of dementia? I can imagine a list of horribles, but what are some of the ones that spring foremost to mind?

It’s an axiom that when a patient with a personality disorder becomes demented, everything about their personality-disordered behavior gets exponentially worse. Trump will become more horribly Trumpian, if you can believe it. Everything evil and destructive about him will become even more exaggerated in an unbound, and even more erratic way, until he is nothing but rageful id, with no rational control or inhibitions. It will be pure chaos. From that point, there’s simply no bad outcome that you can think of that’s inconceivable.

People need to understand dementia is a progressive illness, which means the Trump you see today is the best Trump you’re ever going to see. It’s all downhill from here. Trump’s rate of decline is accelerating, and if he’s typical, at some point, he will “fall off a cognitive cliff” and become completely disabled.

Trump could be found wandering the lawn of the White House in his pajamas confused about where he is. I’m not joking. I honestly believe that will happen if he’s reelected. At the rate that he’s deteriorating, I don’t believe it would be possible for him to get through the next 4 and a half years without becoming incapacitated while in office.

Had to tweak and edit -- had too many CP in play 😛

 

As I said earlier, GM doesn't want the Desolid always on, so that's why she can't stay Desolid 24/7...

I totally expect Belkar to gripe about V not doing that sooner...

New one up!

https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1301.html

Explosive device found at Satanic Temple in Salem, Massachusetts

One, IC she's still "learning how to ghost".

Two, OOC it's a concession to the GM that the desolid isn't always on.

Well, I've designed her if anyone wants to give her a peek or so...

10 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

 

Animals usually have 'way better camouflage.

It wasn't camouflage -- it was caMOOflage!

Watch rare pink volcanic vortex bubbles spew out of Italy's Mount Etna