Donald Trump just packed it in

| 5:47 pm EST January 12, 2020
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We’ve all spent the past week watching Donald Trump’s cognitive abilities and mental health declining at an accelerating rate. The guy can no longer even get through a brief scripted speech without mangling every third word, confessing to weird (scandalous) things like Saudi bribes, and confessing to weird (nonsensical) things like how his entire paycheck is going to drugs.

The trouble for Donald Trump and his handlers right now is that they can’t win no matter how they play this right now. Each time Trump makes a public appearance, he behaves more incompetently, and raises more questions about what’s wrong with him. But if his handlers work too hard to hide him from the public, it raises questions about what’s being hidden.

So it’s notable that at 10:35 this morning, the Trump White House announced a full lid on press coverage. This meant that Trump was effectively being shut down for the rest of the day. No official business. No meetings. No public appearances. Nothing worth covering. Yes, it’s a Sunday. But Trump’s handlers decided at the beginning of the day to have him pack it in.

Of course Donald Trump has still spent all day tweeting nonsense. But everyone expects his tweets to be deranged, incoherent, and mentally incompetent. Twitter is the one place where expectations are so low for him, he really can’t lower the bar any further. So perhaps his handlers have simply decided that hiding him from the public and letting him tweet gibberish all day is the best strategy for trying to hide his rapidly worsening condition.