The Trump supporters I know have basically now formed their sense of self-identity around him. To attack Trump’s words, policies or actions is no different than to attack them personally.
In fact if you engage them you can see that they can no longer conceive of any political or moral ideology that is not based on personal loyalty to a cult of personality. For example, one of my Trumpist aunts’ reaction to the horror surrounding the tear gas church photo op thing was “oh, if Obama posed with a Bible you idiots would love it!!”
And remember Reagan was still (just) under 70 when he started his first term. Trump and Biden are 74 and 77, respectively. If either of them even survive to the end of the next Presidential term then they will have exceeded the average life expectancy for an American male. Keeping all their marbles for the next 4-8 years is a long shot at best.
This feels like it’s been a thing for a while. You say you believe in evolution, but did you ever realize that…Charles Darwin was kind of racist? Makes you feel silly for looking at evidence from taxonomic patterns and developmental biology and the fossil record now, doesn’t it?
Trump is just the latest person to take advantage of it.
During an Oval Office visit with her family as she was ending her time as a White House correspondent in 1986, Stahl wrote that “Reagan didn’t seem to know who I was. He gave me a distant look with those milky eyes and shook my hand weakly. Oh, my, he’s gonzo, I thought. I have to go out on the lawn tonight and tell my countrymen that the president of the United States is a doddering space cadet.”
As their meeting wore on, Reagan became more animated and aware, Stahl wrote, which is one of the reasons she decided not to report on his apparent condition.
However, she eventually concluded that he must have had Alzheimer’s in office. In an email exchange with Mother Jones, she wrote: “Later, when I would ask White House officials if they had ever seen him float away like that, they’d say yes, but that, as with me, he always pulled himself together. It was confusing for everyone.”
In her memoir, Stahl concluded: “I now believe [Reagan aides and his wife Nancy] covered up his condition, and many continued to as they wrote their memoirs. But then, the public knew something wasn’t right. There were all sorts of signs. We all looked the other way.”
But even if few said the words “dementia” or “Alzheimer’s” out loud, people were concerned about Reagan’s brain, at least in part because at 69 he was the oldest person to ever be president. According to a 1993 Washington Post story campaign, staffers curtailed reporters’s access to Reagan as early as 1980 and did so again three years into his presidency. They reported that the president “mangled facts and sentences,” and gave “rambling, sometimes confusing” answers, while expressing concerns about his age and health. This gels with what Richard Abrams, a history professor and Reagan expert at the University of California Berkeley, remembers about his subject of study. He told me that several memoirs published even before the end of Reagan’s first term mentioned his eyes glazing over at meetings and his habit of repeating anecdotes over and over.
“Reporters did not fail to notice occasions when Nancy Reagan, standing behind her husband, would quietly prompt him when he was speaking or responding to questions,” he said. “It generally understood that Reagan was largely a hands-off president.”
Still, the closest anyone came to making that a mental health issue was a New Republic story from 1987 by Gail Sheehy which asked of the Iran-Contra scandal, “What did the President forget and when did he forget it?” Although the cover asked “Is Reagan Senile?,” the actual copy of the column doesn’t get into the s-word.
So if everyone doing it that’s make it okay ?
That’s a really weak defence.
I don’t like this guy. But that doesn’t make it okay to speculate on his mental health and trying to diagnose him with some jpeg you found on internet.
I don’t need a “defence” for what I post. May I suggest you either don’t read posts that may offend your sensibilities or perhaps you can use the “block” feature on your account to block offending posters.
They probably do cause him to lean forward, but I was always under the impression that if it looks like a duck, sounds like a duck and walks like a duck, its probably a sure bet that its a duck.
The symptoms like in the center of my original post are what really convinced me. They match him perfectly. Additionally, the Lincoln Project (repubs) came out with a new ad -
Not directly relevant, but Margaret Thatcher used to fall asleep in one on one meetings. Her secretary wrote down what the other person said and she read it later. No one mentioned it.
I frequently don’t sleep a lot at night but it just means I’m dragged out during the following day. As far as people working a huge number of hours in a week, it just means they don’t have the best decision making capability each day as the week wears on.
