It’s time to talk about Donald Trump, dementia and Alzheimer’s disease
If you’ve ever watched a loved one suffer through a disease that caused severely diminished mental capacity, you know how tragic and devastating it can be. For that reason, diseases such as Alzheimer’s and dementia are generally spoken about with great care. They’re also arguably not spoken about often enough, out of rightful fear of being offensive. But when it comes to the ongoing and evolving conversation about Donald Trump, it’s well past time to acknowledge the obvious.
It would be counterproductive, not to mention grossly unfair to those who do suffer from these diseases, for us to arbitrarily accuse someone like Donald Trump of suffering from a disease like Alzheimer’s and dementia simply because we have a low opinion of him to begin with. But based on the rapidly deteriorating cognitive function that Trump has begun displaying in recent months, the average layperson who’s been paying close attention has been able to see that he’s clearly suffering from some type of rapidly worsening condition.
Trump often doesn’t appear to know where he’s at or to whom he’s speaking. He blankly wanders out of the room in the middle of press conferences and bill signings, seemingly with no idea of why he was supposed to have been there. He blankly wanders away from his own motorcade. He can’t be trusted to speak to groups of children. His spoken vocabulary is shrinking. He no longer appears to be writing his own tweets. His staff seems to be having a harder time covering for him by the day.
So in addition to the numerous political arguments for why Trump isn’t fit for the job, based on everything from his extremism, to his lack of decency, to his election rigging, to his lifetime of financial crimes, to his obstruction of justice, we now have this more fundamental issue. Even if Trump had been doing a suitable job as president up to this point, his collapsing cognitive condition alone is enough to make the case for his removal by the 25th Amendment.
It’s time for us to begin talking out loud about the fact that Donald Trump is clearly suffering from Alzheimer’s and dementia or a similar condition. It’s time to get doctors, and those who have witnessed these diseases up close, to back us up on it. And we must do it in a respectful enough manner such that moderates will come around to seeing his deteriorating condition for themselves, rather than merely assuming that we’re trying to be mean to Trump because we don’t like him. After all, if President Obama had begun demonstrating these kinds of symptoms of rapidly collapsing cognitive function, we’d have had no choice but to call for his removal as well.
