Pull the plug

I’ve been harping on Donald Trump’s worsening senility for years now. Trump was mostly hidden from public view back in 2021 and 2022, and then he’d occasionally surface and come off as moderately senile before disappearing. It was obvious that his people were trying to hide him from public view as much as possible, so that the general public wouldn’t catch on that he was going senile.

Early on a lot of people, even on my own political side, told me that I was harping on Trump’s senility a little too much. But I stuck with it because I knew that it was going to end up being the story of the 2024 election cycle.

For one thing, Trump wasn’t going to be able to stay hidden forever. Once he got closer to the 2024 election cycle, and closer to his criminal trials, he was going to have to start regularly putting himself out there again. And because dementia gets worse over time, he was likely going to be even worse off by the time he did put himself out there. Sure enough, that’s what’s now happening.

Donald Trump is now out there trying to convince everyone that he’s a presidential candidate and not a criminal defendant, and instead he’s convincing everyone that (in all seriousness) he belongs in an assisted living facility. It’s not just that Trump thinks Pelosi and Haley are the same person, or that Biden and Obama are the same person, or that he seems to think the current year is either 2012 or 1992. It’s that he keeps seeing his own name on the teleprompter and failing to understand that he’s “Donald Trump.”

Trump also claimed during a speech last night that he could only see the Black people in the audience. No cognitively competent person says something like that. And oh by the way, Trump claimed he could only see Black people because the lights were so bright. He keeps complaining about the bright lights in speech after speech – and sensitivity to light is one of the most common symptoms of dementia.

However senile Donald Trump was a month or two ago, he’s even more senile now. He’s getting worse. Quickly. And no, it’s not some act to get him out of his criminal trials. Trump isn’t that good of an actor, and the criminal justice system doesn’t work that way anyway.

More to the point, as I’ve been saying repeatedly for some time now, Trump’s worsening senility is the proverbial death knell for his remaining political ambitions. When a presidential “candidate” is out there getting everyone in his life confused for each other, and even routinely failing to recognize his own name, it’s a huge vote swing. People on the fence about voting for Trump will be far less likely to do so as they see how senile he is. People on the fence about voting for Biden will be more likely to do so as they see how senile Trump is.

That’s if an increasingly senile Trump can even come out of his own Republican National Convention with the nomination. What if he gets up on stage and takes his pants off and starts defecating? Sorry for the imagery, but there’s now a realistic chance that something like this will happen. And while Trump’s lunatic base might stand by him, he’s already only polling at around 50% in the Republican primary race. It suggests that his base might only make up one-third of the Republican primary voting base.

In any case Donald Trump’s worsening senility has indeed become the story of the 2024 election cycle. This is one of those things that if you’ve been paying close attention, you’ve seen coming for quite some time now. And it’s a story that’s just going to keep getting bigger as Trump’s cognitive abilities continue to fully disappear in rapid fashion.

If anyone around Trump cared about him, they’d be convincing him to pull the plug on this faux “campaign” and instead focus on fighting his criminal trials while out of the public eye. It’s easy enough to convince a severe dementia patient, through repetition, to do what you want them to do. But then how would Trump raise money to pay his legal bills?

It’s a catch-22 where Trump almost has to stay out there, completely humiliating himself with one senile moment after another on an imaginary campaign trail, hawking sneakers for a few bucks while the audience boos him off the stage, just to try to stave off financial ruin. Of course the courts have now ruined him financially anyway, so why is he still out there? Does no one around Trump give a damn about him? Perhaps not.