Donald Trump’s senility takes a new turn for the worse
Donald Trump has reached a stage of cognitive decline where he routinely gets details randomly wrong, big and small. He appears to believe it’s the year 2012, Barack Obama is still President, and repealing Obamacare is the hot topic of the day. He’s that far gone.
So when Trump mistakenly referred to his criminal cases as lawsuits a few weeks ago, it initially felt like it was merely yet another instance of him not knowing what he’s trying to say. But ever since then, Trump has made a habit of consistently referring to his criminal cases as lawsuits. In his social media posts this weekend, he’s so adamant about Jack Smith’s criminal cases against him being “lawsuits” that he keeps using the word repeatedly.
It’s enough to make you wonder if Trump’s handlers have steered him toward this misnomer intentionally. If you’ve ever dealt with someone who’s suffering from dementia, you know that they eventually reach a stage where they become highly pliable. You can convince them of anything, no matter how false or implausible, simply by repeating it enough times.
Think about it. Trump’s life is being dismantled by both criminal cases and civil suits, and there’s nothing that anyone around him can do to help him. Worse, he’s succumbing to dementia even as he’s fighting these troubling legal battles, and he’s worried that he’s going to spend the rest of his life in prison. Wouldn’t the path of least resistance be to simply convince him that his criminal trials are mere civil cases? Then he wouldn’t be quite so panicked.
In any case, we’re dealing with one of two scenarios here. Either Trump is so far gone that he can no longer understand the difference between a criminal case and a lawsuit, or he’s so far gone that his handlers have been able to convince him that his criminal cases are lawsuits. Either way, he’s clearly reaching a more advanced stage of dementia.
No wonder Trump’s handlers seem to keep steering him toward using more and more Nazi-like rhetoric. Better, from his point of view, for the headlines to be about how monstrous he is than to be about how senile he is. After all, he’s always been a monster. The senility is new. And it’s the one thing that can end his political relevance even quicker than his criminal trials can. Let’s not forget that Trump’s senility is the story.
