Trump’s mental decline is undeniable — so what now?

 https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/5429516-trump-confabulation-dementia-signs

For Trump, the day we could no longer pretend everything is fine came on July 15, when he told a lengthy story about his uncle, John Trump, who he claimed taught at MIT and held three degrees in “nuclear, chemical, and math.” His uncle, according to Trump, once told him how he had taught Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, and how very smart Kaczynski was.

Trump’s uncle was indeed a professor at MIT, but everything else in this story is pure confabulation. Trump’s uncle didn’t have degrees in “nuclear, chemical, and math” — he had degrees in electrical engineering and physics. And Kaczynski did not go to MIT at all — he went to Harvard.

Difficulty with mathematical concepts is another early warning sign of dementia. 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. Certainly, someone who got a business degree from Wharton and has spent his life running a company would know how percentages work.

Or take his insistence that former President Obama and his FBI director, James Comey, made up the Epstein files, even though they were long out of office by the time Epstein was most recently arrested in 2019. Again, that’s very troubling, because being unable to correctly process when past events took place is a common feature in confabulation. The same goes for being unable to remember that he himself appointed Jerome Powell as the chair of the federal reserve. And then, of course, there are all the little lapses in judgment that Trump has been displaying recently. 

Donald Trump is showing all the signs of suffering from dementia. If this were a neighbor, a parent, or a family friend, you would have no trouble seeing it. We should not turn our heads just because it is the president.