Interesting. To my mind, he has been doing this for a while, but it is very hard for me to parse relative levels of absurdity coming from the White House. Six months ago, proposing Canada as the 51st state would have been considered absurd, and other examples abound. Is he getting worse, or remaining constant? He’s certainly worse than 2020 but I’m not sure if that’s cognitive decline or having been emboldened.
If you want to see Donald Trumnp’s mental decline, watch this interview Trump did with Tim Russert on Meet the press in 1999.
Trump noew is far less rational and coherent than he was in 1999, when he was 53 years old. He also was smart enough to hide his racism.
Or Barron.
“Joe Biden is dead, and is now a robot”. Things like that?
He’s repeating and amplifying increasingly absurd things, and in even higher quantity. The Biden robot / clone CT; the “South African white genocide CT”, complete with pictures of supposed mass graves that have been debunked; the yelling at an interviewer to accept the truth of a pic of Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s hand with ‘MS13’ supposedly tattooed on his knuckles, which was a ridiculously bad, obvious photoshop job.
I’ve wondered…trump has access to some of the world’s best intelligence gathering agencies in the world (what remains of them, anyway). Is he really dementia-ridden and gullible enough to actually believe all this BS he’s peddling? Or is he trying to convince his gullible supporters? Is he trolling his enemies? Some combination of the three?
Primarilly he loves rattling his opponents and whipping up his cheering mobs, in both cases with no regard for truth OR consequences or anything other than having everyone talking about him. But he’s also been losing the filter on wanting or caring to be seen by others as making sense or behaving properly.
In order for TACO to get under Trump’s skin, all of these would need to be true:
- It would have to get past his media filters (i.e. he’d have to hear it on Fox or via an aide)
- He would need to be curious enough to ask what it means
- Someone would need to give an accurate explanation
- He would need to understand the explanation and remember it
As awesome it would be to think that every sick burn on social media made Trump curl up into the fetal position and question his life choices, most likely this is not happening.