Donald Trump’s collapsing mental capacity on full display during Puerto Rico trip
For months, it’s been clear that Donald Trump’s cognitive ability and mental capacity – whatever you want to call it – has been in swift and alarming decline. He repeatedly gets confused and wanders off. He tells the wrong stories to the wrong audiences. He can’t complete a coherent sentence without a teleprompter. The signs have been getting worse and more frequent. During his trip to Puerto Rico today, Trump’s collapsing mental capacity was on full display.
At one point while giving a speech in Puerto Rico today, Trump went off-teleprompter and complained to the people in the audience that the hurricane relief was going to blow up his federal budget. These were hurricane victims who showed up to his speech desperate for leadership and inspiration. While it might have been logical for Trump to have been privately fretting what the storm relief might do to his upcoming budget, it’s not the kind of thing that any mentally competent person would say out loud to the victims. But that was just the start of what went wrong with him today.
Trump made an appearance at a church in Puerto Rico where emergency supplies were being handed out. He decided to hand a few of the items directly to the victims, which would have been a good move if he’d stopped there. Instead, he began taking rolls of paper towels and tossing them into the audience as if they were prizes to be fetched. This was the guy who had just finished failing to deliver adequate relief to flood victims, and now he was literally throwing paper towels at them. Any mentally competent person would have understood how awful that moment played.
While speaking directly to one of the hurricane victims today, Donald Trump said “Have a good time!” On its own, one could view this as simply a very inappropriate choice of words. But when placed within the context of his overall behavior today, and his behavior over the past months, it’s yet more evidence that there’s truly something wrong with the guy. In addition to malignant narcissism or whatever it is that drives his psychological defects, Trump is also rather clearly heading into some kind of rapidly advancing senility. It’ll only get worse.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report