More likely related to foot drop, which has a number of causes, most commonly related to nerve compression/damage or muscular issues.
There have been (?scurrilous?) posts on Twitter in the past couple of days, showing video of a White House ceremony where a woman standing behind the seated Trump starts fingering her nose repeatedly, with staff/handlers subsequently rushing press out of the room. Supposedly she was signifying that Trump had dropped a load in his drawers and they were shooing out reporters before they could detect the stink.
After Trump’s meeting with Putin in Alaska, much was made of his inability to walk in a straight line. There was an article in which a doctor analysed the video of Trump wandering from side to side of the red carpet. He said that dementia patients often display a circular movement of one leg that causes them to veer off course. Then they overcompensate in the other direction. The video in the article was slowed down, and you could clearly see the circular motion of Trump’s right leg.
If anyone remembers that article, I’d love to read it again.
I have heard Dr. John Gartner talk about that numerous times although mostly in videos. Here’s a Salon article from March of 2024 where a different doctor (Dr. Elisabeth Zoffman) also talks about Trump’s weird gait:
That’s a 2-year-old article, written before Biden’s disastrous debate performance, and IMO it hasn’t aged particularly well. I would count it as evidence against the idea that there’s anything seriously wrong with Trump, at this point. (A lot of the evidence cited – poor vocabulary, lack of inhibition, socially inappropriate behavior, lack of self-awareness – just seems to be part of his natural personality, as far as I can tell. He’s immature, not terribly bright, and probably has some age-related cognitive decline, but none of that means he’s ill or that he’s declining particularly fast.)
Case in point:Trump endorses a TX state senate candidate who gets clobbered in a special election by a Democrat, and less than 24 hours later “forgets” he had any interest in or knowledge of the race.
Seems more like his usual blatant lying than dementia though it’s being viewed as the latter.
Before his term ends though, signs of serious mental decline will be commonplace and undeniable.
I believe that too, though in 2016 I predicted he’d die in jail.
There’s really no way that his mind wanders far away, that he won’t be tugged away. And always plausible deniability/
That we have to wait till he cannot recognise his press secretary or VP is very sad. Reagan, with Alzheimer’s, wasn’t in a place to do any more than Casper Weinberger and others, and be “not recall” stuff like the Iran-Contra.
Let Vance or Rubio answer to the "I didn’t know he was THAT demetia’s when many doctors diagnosed it in 2015
I spent about 3 decades working as a clinical and public health nurse.
When I look at and listen toTrump these days, I see an old man whose physical and mental functions are degrading before our eyes.
I think he’ll be propped up as aggressively as possible for as long as possible for the duration of his term because MAGA popularirity is all about him….Vance is widely unlikable even throughout MAGA land.
Without Trump, there is no MAGA. Now that the GOP has allowed itself to be completely subsumed by Trump, without him, the party will dissolve….along with MAGA.
The MAGA people will still be there, with their same ignorance, racism and hatred. Trump did not create them; he harnessed them. They’ll just crawl back under their rocks, waiting for their next chance to come out and attempt another takeover. Rinse and repeat.
Sure. The people will still be here, just as they’ve always been here. My point is that without Trump, the movement, such as it is, will lose it’s leader and therefore it’s relative cohesion. Without Trump, they will dissolve back into the hateful and fearful amorphous little tribes they were before he encouraged them to come out in public.
Yes, the main argument against MAGA voting for Vance, and this applies to any and all crown princes, is simply that he isn’t Trump, and he doesn’t have the ability to become Trump. Nothing else will really matter.
