Moderator Note
Let’s keep discussions of Trump out of this thread, please. If you wish to discuss our current president’s mental state or abilities, please do so in another thread/forum.
Well, he was always portrayed as a dottering old man while President, which would mask a dementia diagnosis, but I do not recall anything specific about it. I remember some incredulity about his not being able to remember anything during Iran Contra, so I don’t think everybody thought he had dementia. When it was officially announced I don’t think it surprised too many people.
It’s not an intelligence test. People with cognitive decline have been proven to be unable to do all of this test successfully because their brains are literally breaking down.
The quoted passage from Reagan is from 1987 and a live interview, it’s not demonstrating he’s a potential Nobel winner—it’s saying there’s no way he was in a Woodrow Wilson/Edith Wilson situation as some people in this thread are asserting, claiming that Reagan’s “mind was gone” as early as his first term.
Reagan wasn’t President in the 1910s, he had to appear on TV regularly, he had medical assessments regularly. There’s no way he had any serious cognitive decline like people are suggesting. People are mixing in partisan bias + a non-wonk President that deliberately affected folksy plainspokenness as far back as the 60s + normal age related memory loss with Alzheimer’s.
This kind of thing goes on all the time in US presidential “debates”. It is all about performance, and the people eat it up. I recall thinking before the “debates” between Gore and Bush that Gore would make Bush look like the empty suit he was, and in a real debate, he would have, but no, Bush “won” at least one of those. It is all theater. So it was with Trump/Clinton. All theater; no substance.