Now we’re getting somewhere

| 8:00 pm EDT October 13, 2024
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Last week the New York Times took a surprising moment away from its usual Trump-slanted articles to address Donald Trump’s deteriorating cognitive abilities. Of course the article still went no further than accusing him of rambling and being unable to stay on topic, as if it were merely something eccentric. Aside from that, the major media outlets are still uniformly refusing to call out Trump’s dementia symptoms as being dementia symptoms.

But over the weekend, as so often ends up being the case, it was a comedy show that finally spoke an important political truth that the “serious” media has been afraid to broach. During a Saturday Night Live sketch, a fictional Trump spoke a bunch of senile gibberish, which a fictional Steve Harvey then referred to as “dementia.” That’s right, we’re in such an upside down world that a comedy sketch show is coming to the rescue. But at least it happened.

I’ve been saying all year that the biggest story of the 2024 election was Donald Trump’s dementia. He’s been worse, and worse, and worse, and he’s now reached a point where his rally “speeches” are 100% confused gibberish. Trump is now at a point where if he were asked to repeat “person woman man camera TV” he’d respond with random words about a cannibal, and the psychiatrist would tell his family to prepare for the worst.

But the media just isn’t willing to go there. The major political media outlets are all still way too afraid of looking biased against Trump, so they’re unwilling to factually refer to his dementia symptoms as dementia symptoms. Instead the media inaccurately waters down Trump’s symptoms as mere “rambling.” Anyone can get nervous and ramble. Trump’s addled word salad is something different entirely.

The good news is that we may finally be turning a corner here. It’s not just that the NY Times almost went there, or that SNL did go there. It’s that Kamala Harris made a well timed decision to release her medical records the other day, and now she’s clearly planning to spend the final month of the election hitting Trump for refusing to release his own. She’s going to make this all about his medical incompetence, and as long as he doesn’t release his medical records – which he can’t – she can plant the seed that he must be hiding all kinds of medical problems. She doesn’t have to say it outright, but the obvious implication is that Trump is hiding a dementia diagnosis.

In so doing, Kamala Harris is doing what smart political candidates always do: she’s handing the media a narrative to run with. The media doesn’t want to be seen as raising the question of whether Trump is mentally and cognitively incompetent. But Kamala is putting the narrative out there, which allows the media to run with it in her words instead of the media’s own words.

And so now this election is, finally, going to be a referendum on Donald Trump’s worsening dementia symptoms. This election is also about a lot of other things, and at this point most of those things at least slightly favor Kamala Harris. But Trump’s dementia is the one issue that 100% favors Harris, for reasons that are obvious. And we’re finally getting there.