Trump Physical Ailment Reminds Us to Check Mental Acuity, Too

The President's chronic venous insufficiency results in swelling at the extremities that owes to the body's circulatory system's difficulty in overcoming gravity to send the
From Marine One into golf carts. Might exercise have done some good to prevent his venous insufficiency?.

pooling blood on its return trip to the heart. The President's doctor deems it non-serious and treatable with medication that stimulates circulation.

We've been through four years of President Biden's diminishing mental status only to learn of the accusation that the White House kept the seriousness of his condition from the public. In a time of mounting precarity, we need to be wary of that being the case again.

Donald Trump is a few months older than when Joe Biden began his presidency, yet you can bet that the loyalty-chosen crew at the current White House will do its utmost to keep slippage in Trump's mental acuity from our learning of it. So it's up to us to be vigilant, and a few incidents lately give cause for worry.

In Pittsburgh, speaking at an “Energy and Innovation” event, Mr. Trump said,

“I want to introduce Dan Meuser. Dan Meuser is here. Where’s Dan?”

He had to be told that Meuser had not been on the plane, had stayed behind in Washington.

He then launched into a story about his uncle, John Trump, a professor at MIT, having taught Ted Kaczynski, who would become the Unabomber who sent explosive packages through the postal system that murdered three people and injured 23 others. "Kaczynski was one of his students", Trump said. He told the audience that he had asked his uncle what kind of a student Kaczynski was, and that the professor had said, "Seriously good..he'd go around correcting everybody".

Except, Kaczynski's undergraduate degree was from Harvard and his Master’s and Doctoral degrees in mathematics were from the University of Michigan. He never attended MIT.

More serious, Trump's uncle died in 1985. Not until eleven years later was Kaczynski found to be the perpetrator of the bomb attacks. So Trump could not have known of a Ted Kaczynski to ask his uncle about while his uncle was alive.

It's a strange and hallucinatory story that leads to wondering what is amiss with the president.

Trump has been railing against Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell for months. At the same time that he intends to raise tariffs against countries the world wide, he wants the Fed to lower interest rates, which are the agency's go-to weapon against the inflation steep tariffs will inevitably bring. Just days ago he said,

"He's a terrible Fed chief. I was surprised he was appointed. I was surprised, frankly, that Biden put him in."

Biden didn't "put him in". Trump did. He appointed Powell — in 2017.

To counter right-wing media's constant ridiculing of Joe Biden for his mental lapses, the left-wing finally began picking away at Trump's slip-ups around mid-2024. This page ran “America in Trouble: Trump Showing Heightened Levels of Incoherence” last September. It is ten months later, so it is reasonable to bring this subject up again.

In Trump's case, it was not so much slurring words and mixing up country names as it was Trump's on-and-on incoherent ramblings. That hasn't been in daily evidence as he sits in the Oval Office saying a sentence or two that we get to hear on news programs. What we don't know is whether there is more we should hear that the media blocks in fear that Trump will take action against them, as he already has against several news outlets.

Anyway, here's one example we tediously transcripted when the open mic stayed open. A couple of commentators picked up on it but, as usual, they quote just a sentence or so of what Trump says, which serves to smother any persuasive point that he's "not all there".

Trump went down for the opening of Alligator Alcatraz, which celebratory move itself says a lot, but here's how he responded to a Fox reporter's question even after the question was repeated, worth taking notice of both for his not grasping the very clearly enunciated question, but for his then wandering off incomprehensibly. Only if you spend a little time to read to the end will you appreciate that Mr. Trump is not all there:

Reporter Danamarie McNicholl from Fox News Channel: "Mr. President, is there an expected time-frame that detainees will spend here — days, weeks, months — and does that have anything to do with the immigration judges you just spoke about being trained and staffed here?"

The President asked for the first part of the question to be repeated.

McNicholl: "Is there a specific time-frame you expect the detainees to spend here — days, weeks, months.”

Trump: “In Florida?"

McNicholl: “Yes”

Trump: "I'm going to spend, I'm going to spend a lot — okay, this is my home state. I love it. I love your government, I love all the people around, these are all friends of mine, they know 'em very well. I mean I'm not surprised that they do so well. They're great people. Ron has been a friend of mine for a long time. I feel very comfortable in this state. I'll spend a lot of time here. I want to, you know, for four years I've gotta be in Washington. I'm OK with it because I love the White House. I even fixed up the little Oval Office. I made it, it's like a diamond, it's beautiful, it's so beautiful. It wasn't maintained properly, I will tell you that, but even when it wasn't, it was still the Oval Office, so it meant a lot, but I'll spend as much time as I can here, you know. My vacation is generally here because it's convenient. I live in Palm Beach. It's my home, and I have a very nice little place, nice little cottage to stay at, right? But we have a lot of fun and I'm a big contributor to Florida, you know, I pay a lotta tax*, and a lot of people moved from New York and I don't know what New York is gonna do. A lot of people moved to Florida from New York and it was for a lot of reasons, but one of them was taxes. The taxes are so high in New York, they're leaving. I don't know what New York is gonna do about that because some of the biggest, wealthiest people, and some of the people who pay the most taxes than anyone in the world, for that matter, they're moving to Florida and other places so we're going to have to help some of these states out, I think, but thank you very much. I'll be here as much as I can. Very nice question."