When I was in grade school, it was very common to have someone call you a name, like a poopy head. The response was swift. “I’m not a poopy head. You’re a poopy head.” The Hill just did that. Clearly troubled by increasing evidence that Joe Biden was seriously demented during his time in office, it dug up a McCain supporter (i.e., someone who hates the MAGA movement) and ran an entire opinion piece insisting that the real problem is that Trump is demented. The only problem is that, in my humble estimation, the “proof” in the essay falls woefully short of reality.
The essay, entitled “Trump’s mental decline is undeniable – so now what?” comes from the keyboard of Chris Truax, who is identified as “an appellate attorney who served as Southern California chair for John McCain’s primary campaign in 2008,” and someone who opposed Trump from 2015 on. Regarding McCain, I’ll just remind you that, because Trump hurt his feelings, he blocked Obamacare’s repeal. McCain was a very brave POW, but at the end of the day, he put his personal pique ahead of the good of the country, and I’ve never forgiven him for that.
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Anyway, Truax is very worried. Trump, he says, is demented. Completely and totally demented. And Truax has got the proof. And therein lies the problem, for it turns out that one man’s proof is another man’s “you’re a poopy head.”
The first “proof” is that Donald Trump misstated his Uncle John’s degrees and academic relationship to Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Thus, Trump said Uncle John had degrees in “nuclear, chemical, and math” when his degrees were actually in electrical engineering and physics. Trump also claimed his uncle had taught Kaczynski and said the guy was smart. In fact, Kaczynski went to Harvard, not MIT, where Uncle John taught, and was arrested in 1996, more than a decade after Trump’s uncle died.
According to Truax, these misstatements go beyond lying and are, instead, “confabulation”—that is, the stories we tell when our brains no longer work right. This, he says, is a clear and early sign of dementia. But does Trump’s “Uncle John narrative” really fall into that category?
If Trump had misremembered his own degrees, that would be concerning. However, how many of us remember with precision the details of other people’s lives, especially those who have been gone for a long time? Biden, by contrast, told endless stories about himself that were manifestly untrue. Trump got his long-dead uncle’s scientific degrees wrong. Big whoop!
As for the claim that Uncle John said Kaczynski was a smart guy, I’m betting that Trump heard that from someone who had, indeed, taught Kaczynski. The nub of the story was true, but he misremembered the narrator. Again, how many of us commonly make the error without being demented?
But that’s one thing. What about Trump’s struggle with mathematics? That’s a sign of dementia, too, writes Truax, and Trump has it:
Now watch Trump attempting to explain how he is going to make drug prices go down by “1,000 percent, 600 percent, 500 percent, 1,500 percent.” That’s complete nonsense, unless drug companies will be paying patients to accept prescriptions, since reducing drug prices by 100 percent would mean they were free.
What you’re seeing in those words, if you’ve been paying attention to Trump’s rhetorical style for the last three or four decades, is puffery, flourishes, and dramatic exaggeration. He’s always done that. It’s part of his “yuuuge” way of selling things.
Truax is falling into the same trap in which all Trump haters find themselves. Salena Zito perfectly described it in 2016: “The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”
One of the reasons Trump runs rings around his opponents, when he’s not temporarily handicapped by their committing criminal fraud against him, is that they’re willfully blind to what he’s saying. It’s like going into a medieval sword fight with your helmet pulled over your eyes.
Truax also contends that Trump is confabulating when he suggests that Obama and Comey corrupted the Epstein evidence then in their possession. Truax’s point is that Epstein’s “big” arrest came in 2019, when Obama and Comey were already out of power. However, Epstein has been in the public eye as a despoiler of girls for a lot longer than that.
Given the revelations about Obama and Comey, it’s easy to believe that they would have begun stealth opposition behavior at the earliest possible opportunity. I’m not saying that they did; I’m just saying that the 2019 arrest cut-off is meaningless in terms of suspecting them of evil deeds.
Unlike the senile fossil who recently vacated the White House, Donald Trump is a dynamo who is clearly completely compos mentis. A man who can negotiate cut-throat trade deals with world leaders, preside over the most daring attack in modern history against Iran, and revamp our border, our economy, and our woke institutions, all while freely informing and sparring with the media, is not demented.
The fact that Trump forgets or muddles a few ancient facts, that he engages in ridiculous hyperbole, or that he’s justifiably paranoid about prior administrations’ possible actions against him proves only that he’s a brilliant, energetic eccentric with a lot of years under his belt. And he’s definitely not a poopy head.