Donald Trump just had the ultimate senile moment we’ve all been waiting for

| 9:09 am EST January 20, 2024
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Ever since Donald Trump left the hospital and returned to the 2020 campaign trail (reportedly with the aid of powerful steroid injections) while still very ill with COVID, he’s never been the same cognitively. He’s been in decline ever since. But what was a long slow decline has begun accelerating of late, and he now comes off as more senile with every public appearance. I’ve said that it was a matter of time before he ended up saying something so senile that the media would be forced to stop tiptoeing around it and finally acknowledge that Trump is deep into dementia. And it may have just happened.

We came close last month when Trump didn’t appear to remember anything about his son Barron during an interview, and when Trump kept saying that Barack Obama was the current President. And we knew we were on the verge of something this past week when Trump was asked a question about the New Hampshire primary but responded with a confused answer about his criminal trial. But yesterday may have taken the cake.

During a political speech, Trump went on a bender about how the January 6th Capitol attack wasn’t his fault because Nikki Haley failed to put the proper security forces in place. That’s right, Nikki Haley. We’ve all previously heard Trump push his false claims about Nancy Pelosi having failed to secure the Capitol. That a was a lie, but at least it was a coherent lie. Now Trump seems to think that Nikki Haley was Speaker of the House in 2021, or that Nikki Haley is Nancy Pelosi.

Lest you think this might have been a random slip of the tongue, Trump ended up saying Nikki Haley’s name four different times during this rant. If he’d randomly misspoken, he had multiple opportunities to correct it. Instead he doubled down, actually quadrupled down, and ended his rant by saying “Nikki Haley was in charge of security.”

It’s even worse for Trump when you place this within the context of all the other cognitive failures he’s had. He doesn’t know who the current President is. He doesn’t seem to know what decade it is. He gets a question about one topic and gives an answer about a completely different topic. And now he no longer seems to understand that Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi are two different people.

Donald Trump’s senility has already been firmly and repeatedly established for anyone who’s been paying attention. But sometimes it takes a viral soundbite to finally drive such things home to the media and the general public. Trump repeatedly blaming January 6th on Nikki Haley should be that viral moment. This should be what pushes the media to finally admit that Trump’s brain is a bag of jello.

Donald Trump is senile. He’s plainly, severely, jarringly senile. His senility has the potential to end his political viability before his criminal trials even can. Trump’s senility is the biggest story in all of politics. Maybe now the media will finally treat it as such.