IANAD either but Trump’s problems don’t necessarily imply dementia. He’s an old man who has never been particularly intellectually rigorous at the best of times, who has spent the last few years in one of the most high pressure, mentally challenging jobs in the world. “Cracking under the pressure” would cover his behaviour.
I think that if you’re going to set qualifications for an office into law, they should be based on an objective, verifiable standard. The current qualifications for President are entirely objective and don’t require subjective evaluation of shifting criteria. So yes, ‘the backstory’ should be nice and tidy if you’re going to use ‘the backstory’ as a justification to overrule an election by disqualifying someone who’s been elected president - if it’s messy, then let the political process sort it out.
If we’re going to have Democrats give Trump a psych exam and possibly disqualify him from being president, Republicans are going to do the same thing to Obama, Biden, Bernie, or whoever you think is a good candidate in an attempt to disqualify them. Everyone who talks about psych exams (here and in other threads) seems to only be considering ‘we’ll give a psych exam to this guy I don’t like’, but not the converse of it. The lack of objective criteria makes a psych exam qualification for office an easy club to use to thwart the will of the electorate.
But this isn’t about specifics of what you’d want - you can handle ‘what you would want’ by voting for or against someone. This is about what criteria should be set as disqualifying someone from office, and they need to be objective because it’s not just going to be ‘you’ trying to disqualify someone, it’s going to be ‘the people you really don’t like trying to disqualify the person you really want’. Is their line for how recovered someone needs to be going to match up with yours? How about their line for ‘reasonable level of foot fetishism’, and are they maybe going to consider any gay activity at all the same way you consider out-of-control foot fetishism?
It’s not obvious at all that you’re talking about criminal violence if you don’t mention the ‘criminal’ part, and are explicitly talking about having a psychiatrist diagnose the behavior somehow rather than looking at a criminal record. Criminal violence runs into it’s own host of specific definitional problems, and the extreme racial bias of the criminal justice system, but that’s really a distraction from the core point here.
Oh, I wasn’t being exhaustive. What about gay conversion therapy, which the current vice president of the US strongly believes is a good thing? Or how about giving people icepick lobotomies for mild behavioral difficulties (including ‘women not being dutiful enough to me’)? These aren’t things that happened in far off countries in the distant past, gay conversion therapy was only disapproved of by the psychiatric establishment around 2010 and AFAICT still isn’t ‘automatically lose your license’ nationwide, and there are still people alive who were victims of ice pick lobotomies.
I don’t believe that psychiatry has objective criteria for diagnoses, and that it has a history of claiming opposition to whatever its current dogma is pathological, and that a large number of psychiatric conditions are ‘disagrees with the status quo’. And that because of these and the other factors that I’ve listed, it would be a bad idea to add a psych test qualifier to public office.
Whether there are psychiatrists doing good in the world is utterly irrelevant to whether there are psychiatrists who will diagnose an opposition party candidate into disqualification if given the opportunity. It’s the latter that I’m concerned about in this case.
It’s only high pressure and mentally challenging if you attempt to actually do the job. If you spend most of your time golfing, and the rest of the time tweeting and berating everyone around you, with time off for photo ops, then it’s not that hard.
I agree that he’s never been especially intelligent, but I seem to remember he used to be capable of speaking in whole sentences. He may not literally have dementia, I suppose; it could be he’s suffering from late-stage No One Ever Tells Me I’m Wrong and I Never Suffer Consequences disease.
He talked to Wall St. Journal and said among other things:
he made Juneteenth famous
testing is overrated
mask wearing is a political statement against him
China may have intentionally allowed the coronavirus to spread to hurt the US economy
that was great! next walking and chewing gum!
and
Sounds quite demented.
https://www.axios.com/trump-juneteenth-38ee6f09-5741-47ef-9c4b-3e0a35b8a267.html
and
Sounds quite demented.
https://www.axios.com/trump-juneteenth-38ee6f09-5741-47ef-9c4b-3e0a35b8a267.html
He looked pretty good at his speech yesterday in PA. But this video footage is at least four years old. My mom is 88. At 85, she had a cane, 86, a walker, 87 a Rollator and a arm lift to help her out of bed, at 88 a motorized scooter.
So a lot can happen in a short time. Just sayin’. I’m hoping and sending good vibes to keep him healthy!
I believe the point is that Biden was the same age then as Trump is now (Biden: 20 Nov 1942, Trump: 14 June 1946). Not sure how much of a point it actually is.
Currently the only standards we have is “born a citizen, over 35, still breathing and able to operate eyeballs”. Fortunately, we haven’t had to face a lot of truly incapable/incompetent high office holders.
There are job duties. Evaluate a person to see if they’re capable of those jobs duties. Except we’ve never defined those in relation to a PotUS. The assumption was always that the voters wouldn’t be stupid enough to vote in an incompetent. I’m not so sure that’s a safe assumption.
Yeah, but they set such a low bar an earthworm couldn’t limbo under it.
Eh, wouldn’t mind weeding them out before they’re elected, as part of the primary process, but haven’t thought that out in great detail.
Or on the flip side Republicans are going to get Republican candidates rubber stamped, and likewise the Democrats.
It’s not so much I think we should use a psych exam as a screening tool as an evaluation tool when someone is having some sort of problem (like drinking water and/or walking down a ramp) along with a comprehensive physical exam. A real one, not a rubber-stamp. Probably after some process so it’s not being asked every other week.
I think we’re all dreaming of an objective exam - something that can be difficult to manage.
But also, it’s not like physical exams are completely objective, either. Many diseases have a range of manifestations, degrees of severity, some are progressive, some are not. Some carry a risk of sudden death, some do not. At what point should someone be disqualified from a vital role for physical reasons?
Yeah, I’m familiar with the anti-gay crowd - I lived with Pence as governor of my state for four years. I acknowledge it’s a potential problem and that I haven’t an iron-clad suggestion for dealing with it. But if we waited for the perfect government we’d still be living in anarchy. All governing systems are works in progress (we hope it’s progress - sometimes they regress).
Operable eyeballs aren’t required.
Conceded.
New debate strategy: Whenever Trump is talking, Biden does jumping jacks and deep knee bends.
If you look up the original footage from which the political ad was edited you’ll find the original is clearly a promotional piece, very edited, staged, and not intended in any sense as real. But it does exactly what the political ad intends: It shows that four years ago Biden could walk and drink water.
A lot can change in a short period of time but then Biden was on the campaign trail not long ago, and that’s pretty grueling.
Also, Biden’s brain isn’t an evil rice pudding (1st ed Monster Manual, pp 232-233).
Already mentioned a few posts above yours, and immediately brushed aside dismissively.
Someone on another board asked if anyone else had noticed that Trump looked slimmer, and most of the responses were along the lines of “No, but then again, I try to avoid looking at him as much as possible.” 
However, I addressed the balance issues that seem to have cropped up lately, and wondered if maybe he’s gotten elevator shoes with higher lifts.
Jeesh, this all sounds like people watching Kremlin leaders on May Day. Maybe we could get a guy that looks like one of those shirtless Putin photos.
In my recollection, that amounts to a small understatement. If the coverage was accurate, the fall separated the heel from one of his shoes. Which might seem minor for a woman wearing stilettos, but Ford wore men’s dress shoes, which have those broad, flat heels. Granted, those steps are not to be trifled with. But they do have rails.
A proper game of golf involves a walk through the park that adds up to on the order of one-and-a-half to two miles. Individual-ONE does not do that. He uses a little brodie machine for most of that distance, rarely taking more than five or ten steps to the ball. So he really plays a parody of golf. Also, he claims to be a teetotaler, which does not fit well at all with the concept of golf.
The thing with Trump’s weight is overblown. He’s overweight, yeah; maybe he fits the technical definition of “obese.” But he’s still relatively height-weight proportional. His bulk is fairly evenly distributed and his height helps him carry it off. He doesn’t look like J.B. Pritzker or Chris Christie. Those are examples of obese individuals who are NOT height-weight proportional, and to my eyes they look unambiguously unhealthy. And that’s despite the fact that they’re both decades younger than Trump.