Donald Trump’s week from hell ends on a particularly sour note
After an utterly brutal week for the stock market, it bounced back a little on Friday – perhaps only because Donald Trump shut up about the economy for a moment. Trump’s overall abilities are declining in every sense of the word: cognitive, physical, psychological, you name it. But he has managed to retain and even sharpen one skill. All he has to do is open his mouth about a topic in order to make it worse.
Trump has been wrecking the stock market over the past few weeks simply by speaking. Trump keeps announcing more tariffs, then pulling back his tariffs, then in the next breath announcing even more tariffs, like a dementia patient who only knows one word and can’t remember how he used it last time. The economy doesn’t want to collapse. Wall Street doesn’t want to give up. But Trump’s reckless, inconsistent, and incoherent mouth is a wrecking ball.
That was also true when Trump shifted his focus on Friday from domestic damage back to international damage. A couple weeks ago Trump publicly lambasted Ukrainian President Zelensky for admitting that the war could go on for a long time. Trump said it showed weakness. But now Trump is going directly against his own former position, by claiming that Ukrainian solders are backed into a corner. Trump also claims he’s begging Vladimir Putin to let these Ukrainian troops live. Talk about showing weakness.
But for all that Trump has forgotten, he certainly remembers (most days) that he works for Putin. There was that one day a few weeks ago when Trump apparently forgot the script and announced major new tariffs against Russia. But now he’s right back to being Putin’s puppet, because of course he is.
Of course Trump is also going through some of the motions of pretending to do the job of President, but he’s not capable of that either. He tried reading a script during a speech about Ireland, but even with the words in front of him, he thought “patron saint” was “patriot saint.” He’s either giving speeches that he’s never read before, or he’s forgetting what he just read, or he can’t read. Or perhaps, in the words of the late George Carlin, it’s all three.
It’s all a reminder that if psychiatrists and historians weren’t busy studying Donald Trump for his sociopathic malignant narcissism, they’d be studying him for his cognitive collapse. It’s been a long time since we’ve had a major world leader as unhinged as Trump. It’s possible we’ve never had a world leader who was this deep into dementia.
