Senile Donald Trump thinks two different reporters sitting next to each other are the same person
Donald Trump held a joint press conference with the President of Finland today, and several things went embarrassingly for him. For one thing, he spent the entire time trying to dance around the fact that he didn’t know the name of the President of Finland. He also incoherently bragged about the “ratings” that he got by pardoning Joe Arpaio during a hurricane. But his most senile moment involved two different journalists who were sitting next to each other.
Two reporters from Finland, both blonde and female but otherwise not looking much like each other, and dressed in entirely different colors, were sitting next to each other during the press conference. The President of Finland called on one of them to ask a question, and then later called on the other. At that point Trump interjected and asked why the same reporter was being allowed to ask a question again. Again, it’s not that he got one confused for the other. It’s that they were sitting next to each other and he still couldn’t figure out that there were two of them.
The moment was so bizarre that PBS reporter Lisa Desjardins got the two Finnish reporters, Maria Annala and Paula Vilén, together for a photo afterward just to document the absurdity of Trump’s inability to decipher that they were in fact two different people:
If this were a one-off error on Donald Trump’s part, it might not be noteworthy. But this has become part of an ongoing and escalating series of examples of Trump’s failing mental cognitive abilities. He wandered out of a joint press conference with the Prime Minister of Israel while it was still going on. He wandered out of a bill signing without signing the bill. He wandered off from his own motorcade on the tarmac. And his public speeches are rambling incoherent messes that often suggest he doesn’t know where he’s at or to whom he’s addressing, such as telling a group of Boy Scouts about his friend’s escapades on a yacht. Trump is losing it by the day.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report