Fading Donald Trump doesn’t appear to know that Barron Trump is his son

| 6:04 pm EDT September 11, 2019
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Donald Trump has been having a pretty embarrassing day so far, even by his standards. He brought up his desire to meet with Taliban terrorists at Camp David when he spoke at the Pentagon this morning for a 9/11 anniversary event. He had an incoherent Oval Office meltdown in which he couldn’t make up his mind whether John Bolton was amazing or horrible. Now he’s gone and made things even worse.

Donald Trump has decided to ban flavored e-cigarettes. Regardless of the merits or risks of the products in question, given Trump’s corrupt nature, it’s a given that he’s only doing this because his corporate campaign donors told him to. But Trump can’t just admit to that, so instead he decided to invoke Barron Trump as his reason – only he seems to think Barron is strictly Melania’s son.

We generally try to leave Barron Trump out of our political analysis whenever possible. The trouble is, when Donald Trump is leaving Barron out of his lineage altogether, it’s the kind of cognitive failure that we have to talk about. Here’s what Donald said about Melania today in front of the cameras: “She’s got a son together that is a beautiful young man and she feels very, very strongly about it.” Yep, he really said that.

Some observers are pointing to this as evidence that Donald Trump doesn’t care about the kid and is a terrible father. That’s surely true. But this is part of a larger and escalating pattern, in which Trump struggles to communicate even the most basic of thoughts most of the time. This isn’t like with Joe Biden, where he simply misspeaks in weird ways, and everyone knows what he was trying to say. Donald Trump doesn’t appear to have anything left in his head. Now he no longer appears to understand that Melania’s son is also his son. Trump needs immediate medical attention.