Donald Trump’s cognitive failure has hit a new low – and it’s time we start playing up his senility instead of helping him explain it away

There are still a lot of anti-Trump people who adamantly don’t want Trump to be senile. No matter how obviously dementia riddled his behavior becomes, they make up alternate explanations for it.

I get why some anti-Trump folks don’t want him to be senile. They’re afraid it’ll get him off the legal hook (though it doesn’t work that way). They’re afraid it’ll make him more sympathetic to voters (it won’t). Or they’re afraid that if they admit how pitiful he’s become, they’ll have a harder time hating him.

But this is a huge mistake. If Trump becomes widely seen as senile, that would be the end of him. He’d lose all support outside of his own too-small base. He wouldn’t have a chance in 2024. Politically speaking, he wouldn’t even make it to 2024. Being seen as senile would finish Trump off politically before his criminal trials can.

Yet for reasons that are totally invalid, a large chunk of the biggest anti-Trump folks out there are frantically explaining away Trump’s every senile moment.

Trump keeps saying that Obama is the current President, a clear sign that his mind has receded by a decade. Yet anti-Trump folks who don’t want him to be senile are helping him by pushing stories about how he’s trying to accuse Biden of being an Obama puppet – an absurd explanation for what is instead obvious senility.

Now Trump is struggling in interviews to describe his own son Barron, beyond saying that he’s tall – a clear sign that Trump is starting to lose track of who the people in his personal life even are. Yet the anti-Trump folks who don’t want him to be senile are helping him by suggesting that he’s just a bad father who never knew anything about Barron – another absurd explanation. Even the worst father would know more about his seventeen year old son, who lives with him at least part of the time, than just the fact that he’s tall. What we’re seeing is that Trump can’t remember whatever he did know about Barron. It’s obvious, obvious senility.

What’s bizarre is that Trump’s apologists, and the anti-Trump people who don’t want him to be senile, are pushing a lot of the same excuses. People who support Trump don’t want to have to admit he’s senile, because then they’d have to admit it’s over. But a lot of anti-Trump people don’t want to have to admit he’s senile either, because then they’d also have to admit it’s over – and they don’t want their years long battle with Trump to be over.

I think there are far too many people on the anti-Trump side who are now suffering from a sort of PTSD and don’t want the battle to be over. They don’t want to accept that Trump could be going senile, and that this years-long war could end with such a whimper. So each time Trump’s behavior becomes more obviously senile, they try to explain it away as being something else. But that’s only helping give Trump cover for his senility.

Donald Trump’s worsening senility is the closest thing that the anti-Trump side has to a magic wand for finishing him off. I often like to say that magic wands don’t exist in politics, but this is about as close as you can get to there being one. Trump’s senility is becoming more and more obvious. But the media doesn’t seem to want to talk about it much, because so many folks on the anti-Trump side are shouting them down each time the topic is brought up.

In reality we need to be talking about Trump’s worsening senility constantly. We need to be pushing the media to cover the topic more, not less. Trump and his handlers are already so on the defensive about this, they recently posted a doctor’s note claiming that Trump is in fantastic cognitive health. Trump’s people understand that his cognitive collapse is a problem, and they’re trying to push back against it. That alone is all the more reason why we should be amplifying Trump’s senile moments every time they happen – not make excuses to explain away his senility.