Trump just stood on his feet for two hours, read a long text from the teleprompter, and spoke coherently.
So it seems that the reports of his imminent demise have been premature.
We’ve had a lot of threads here speculating about Trump’s health. People have analyzed pictures of his bruises, discussed his unstable walking on ramps, and of course his mental deterioration and inability to concentrate. People love to predict that he won’t survive his term in office.
But last night he showed us a surprisingly good performance.
So, folks, we’re stuck with him for the next three years.
And maybe more.
.
.
Disclaimer: I didn’t watch the State of the Union speech*. I just fast-forwarded through it, stopping to watch random 30-second clips
The fact that they were able to dope him up sufficiently that he was capable of being semi-coherent for 2 hours while slurring his words and being an absolute gutter racist without visibly shitting himself or collapsing onstage does not disprove the hypothesis that he is suffering from frontotemporal dementia, has probably had a stroke, is not sleeping well, and will probably not live to see his successor’s inauguration.
I watched it. See my comments in the Pit thread, that turned into a watchalong.
I’ll grant that he appeared to be perfectly healthy. Whether that was drugs, or Trump himself, remains to be seen. Regardless, he mostly followed the script. Oh, he went off-script a few times, but always seemed to come back.
My own thoughts are that his handlers and script writers put in so many people in the gallery that needed to be recognized somehow (Presidential Medals of Freedom, Purple Hearts, Congressional Medals of Honor, etc.) that he couldn’t go too far astray. He had to stick to the script, if he was to recognize everybody who was to be recognized. That’s what kept him on track.
I was truly surprised at how good he looked. Before I couldn’t take it anymore and had to turn to something else. But his skin is so smooth, his color is good. Compare him to RFK Jr whose face looks like old shoe leather that’s been out in the sun. Trump spends a lot of time golfing and he must wear a ton of sunscreen because his face looks really good. I never watch him on TV. I only ever see still photographs of him online.
For the short time that I watched him, I had the sound off, so I can’t comment on how he sounded.
Of course that hair… It was sort of white with pink highlights. Some of the ladies here at The Home have that, but that’s a different discussion.
Never mind his hand. I was intrigued when one Doper (perhaps @Monty) asked in the Pit thread, “when did he get a vagina neck?”
And I think that’s a good question. My father developed one when he was about Trump’s age. I’d say that’s normal for a 79-year-old man, and no amount of makeup will be able to cover it.
Let’s face it: Trump is old, and he hates to admit it. But his body is giving it away..
Maybe RFK Jr has found something to alleviate the symptoms of advanced syphilis. Or, like two negatives making a positive, his syphilis and dementia are cancelling each other out.
I’ve always seen all the “Trump’s dying!”, “Trump shits his pants!” kind of lurid headlines as more along the lines of sympathetic magic by a lot of people on the Left. If they say it enough, his health and competency will constantly be under scrutiny, and maybe it’ll be found out to be true.
Personally, I think he’s probably a reasonably healthy 78 year old man, which in normal terms means not particularly healthy. And as someone who has a parent with Alzheimer’s, if he’s got dementia, it’s very early on. Like he’s not even in the “The maid is stealing from me; I can’t find , and I always put in its place.” stage, where their own memories are unreliable narrators.
We also don’t know just how wiped out he is today from having had to stand there and do all that stuff and whatever parties or receptions happen afterward. I know that my elderly parents were able to do stuff like attend weddings and have the grandkids visit, but after those events, they were just demolished, and it took them a good while to get back to normal.
And really… why is everyone so eager to pin a dementia diagnosis on him, if not to try and somehow demonstrate his unfitness for office? It’s not hard to believe that he could be that much of an asshole and that dismissive of things without it.
His jaw movements surely indicate amphetamine use at least for the SOTU speech. He’s been known in the past to (allegedly) abuse adderall and pseudoephedrine. But I imagine now he can just get a prescription for anything he wants.
This “Trump is doing so bad he’ll never last the term” bullshit is being swallowed by what I like to call “Lazy Protesters”. They put down any active revolt in favor of just standing by and letting the problem solve itself, and we have heard it since he first entered the political field.
Indeed, it does not. Neither do any of the things about his appearance or behavior prove any of those hypotheses. What evidence exists (and available to us) is far from conclusive either way.
I repeat, it’s wishful thinking. I don’t believe in magic, sympathetic or otherwise.
“Prescription”? After his first term, it came out that the Trump White House had maintained a fully stocked pharmacy and was handing out drugs like candy on Halloween to anyone who wanted anything.
