Quit “sane-washing” Donald Trump

Donald Trump lost it again Wednesday Perhaps he never had it He certainly can t find it But MAGA supporters shouldn t worry Trump losing his mind may be his best defense yet for the gathering political storm that is Hurricane Jeff By Wednesday night after congressional Democrats disclosed various of Jeffrey Epstein s emails the world knew the president had spent hours with an Epstein victim at the convicted sex offender s home Presidential Pep Secretary Karoline Leavitt publicly identified the victim as the late Virginia Giuffre and accused Democrats of a politically motivated smear campaign Giuffre who died by suicide earlier this year at her home in Australia was allegedly recruited by Epstein s accomplice and convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell while employed as a spa attendant at the Mar-a-Lago Club in In July Trump disclosed Epstein stole people that worked for me and a day later he revealed Giuffre was one of the employees the financier stole Maybe he did know the real Epstein Of discipline Epstein knew the real Trump too In a email Epstein disclosed he knew particular very bad people none as bad as Trump who didn t have one decent cell in his body Epstein called him borderline insane On Wednesday Trump responded on Truth Social that Democrats were bringing up the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax again because wait for it they caved on the governing body shutdown According to the president it had nothing to do with his relationship to an alleged sex trafficker or any underage female casualties It was just another precision political hit conducted by the evil Democrats Related I ve covered Trump for years and I ve never seen him this scared He promised to release the files Now he s upset someone is starting to leak the information a source close to Sen Mitch McConnell R-Ky explained to me Others explained it s what you d expect from a man no longer able to read the room Another indicated the president is mentally unaware of his surroundings It s funny watching people come to the conclusion that Trump appears diminished At the end of his first administration I noticed him slipping and I thought I was late to the meeting In July I wrote Evidence points to major concerns about Trump s cognitive abilities in addition to ongoing concerns about his ability to tell the truth leading to the inevitable question How screwed is this country if Trump is reelected Along with others I noticed his unsteady gait The president s hands were shaking at times He often seemed listless tired Sometimes he babbled like a cicada Now five years later it s so bad even Trump s fans are grasping the obvious Trump II is not Trump I Pep Secretary Leavitt addressed that fact Wednesday during her weekly appearance in the Brady Briefing Room With the precision of a trained seal she accused Democrats of victimizing the president before pivoting to praise Trump when sought about his latest trip to Washington s Walter Reed Hospital for an MRI Never fear she declared The doctors all agreed that President Trump remains in exceptional physical medical which you will all see with your own eyes She never mentioned a word about his mental soundness She literally turned and left us hanging We have seen the president s physical and mental decline with our own eyes and it seems to be going from bad to worse at an increasing pace Trump s speeches often don t make sense He sleeps in masses meetings and afterward his staff denies it happened We have seen the president s physical and mental decline with our own eyes and it seems to be going from bad to worse at an increasing pace Trump s speeches often don t make sense He seems to nod off in populace meetings and afterward his staff denies it happened At a new Oval Office event he appeared to fall asleep intermittently for almost minutes until a guest passed out and hit the floor Sometimes it s noon before we see the Marine Guard outside the Oval Office indicating he s at work In his remarks he hangs on the word uh far too long and often The American community deserves to know the state of the president s wellness before we see Jake Tapper pushing his new book I Knew It Before Anyone Else a tome outlining how everybody but Tapper missed the warning signs Everything Trump does is seemingly the upshot of an extremely unhealthy combination of greed fear and mental aging Earlier this week if you waded through the denture and chewing tobacco ads on Truth Social you would have unveiled this little gem from Trump about the Miracle Mile Shopping Center in Chicago a place that doesn t even exist He the greater part likely meant the Magnificent Mile and it s a shopping district He claimed it now has a more than vacancy factor and is ready to call it quits unless something is done about the murder and crime which is prevalent throughout the City CALL IN THE TROOPS FAST BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE Just the News Yes call in the military to attack a fictional shopping center That sounds sane What kind of convincing do you need How about the funniest example Last Sunday on Truth Social Trump posted an image with one word Wow as a comment to a post that former President Barack Obama had been collecting millions in taxpayer dollars from royalties linked to Obamacare The funny part It was a satirical post attributed to the Dunning-Kruger Times That s a reference to the Dunning-Kruger effect you know the tendency of those willfully or unalterably ignorant to vastly overestimate their abilities and or intelligence If the president isn t napping in the Oval Office during a citizens meeting or if his guests aren t passing out while he stands awkwardly nearby then Trump is increasingly incoherent when he authentically speaks I m tired of trying to guess what he is saying and I know a insufficient others in the White House press pool who feel the same way Try to make sense of this gibberish from a latest appearance at the American Business Forum on Nov For generations he announced Miami has been a haven for those fleeing communist tyranny in South Africa Later he corrected himself to say South America which isn t a country but a continent South Africa has never been a communist country but there was apartheid and Elon Musk Then Trump insulted New York but declared the city was good when he came to Washington and then someone got their hair done very expensively and is now teaching at Harvard There was also this tangent during his speech to military leaders at Quantico on Sept That you couldn t get people to join the armed forces and by the way the police also fire department and I inevitably put the fire department because they re great They re great And I got of their vote and they re great in our inner cities It s a big part of war now It s a big part of war And the fire department goes up in ladders and you know people shooting at them they re up on these ladders It goes way up to the sky It s all stream of consciousness Whatever thought pops into Trump s mind he says it I guess he believes people are shooting at firefighters while they re rescuing people on ladders Juliet Jeske is a political commentator and creator of the newsletter and podcast Decoding Fox News In one popular segment on her show she reads transcripts of Trump speeches backed by music She noted it was hard to figure out what the president was saying After scouring records Jeske discovered that shooting firefighters almost never happens The last time that happened was like years ago and it was like years before that when the previous one happened Puff Donny Trump made it sound like there was a current epidemic On Sept in the Oval Office he went off the rails talking about grass saying he s planning to re-grass all the parks and that grass lives a life you won t even recognize because in a year that graffiti will be gone He announced he knew a lot about grass and potholes will be gone and marble will be polished And he s going to do chosen drawing circles and everything will be spit shined More in recent times in a Sunday interview on Fox News the president observed that no one knows what magnets are As for his beloved tariffs he defended them by claiming on the system that if he wasn t implementing them the entire world would be in a depression Those close to Trump admit he doesn t read much and relies on people to tell him what to think And no one wants to give him bad news a source reported That s no secret It s also well known that Trump necessities writers and treats his presidency like it s an episode of The Apprentice Either way facts and his increasingly taxed mind never meet I have seen him decline very hurriedly in recent times Jeske noted Others are seeing it too The Epstein issue maddens him one of his advisers informed me Perhaps that s why one of his closest acolytes Steve Bannon in the last few days advised a group of Republicans that if the party didn t win the midterms a lot of people including himself were going to prison He s afraid Trump will crash and burn and someone will be left holding the bag In a modern Substack post former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich trolled Trump s comments about affordability after the Nov elections The president Reich wrote called it a new word and stated Republicans had not talked about it then blasted it as a Democratic con job and declared I don t want to hear about the affordability The former secretary also pointed out that when Trump was in recent weeks questioned about his mental acuity he confused a dementia screening test for an IQ test Trump also claimed he had solved an imaginary conflict between Cambodia and Armenia two nations that have never been at war and are miles apart Days before he bragged about stopping a showdown between Azerbaijan and Albania apparently meaning Armenia Then there were his eye-rolling comments to reporters the day after the president met with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer D-N Y and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries D-N Y about the shutdown when he forgot Jeffries name Chuck Schumer who was here the day before along with uh the a very nice gentleman who I didn t really know You know who I m talking about he noted The difficulty is that often nobody knows who or what Trump is talking about and it s becoming increasingly apparent that he might not either The question isn t if he s fading but how fast and how much more dangerous he will become The obstacle is that often nobody knows who or what Trump is talking about and it s becoming increasingly apparent that he might not either The question isn t if he s fading but how fast and how much more dangerous he will become For the reporters covering this president it has in a word been impossible to pull a cogent quote from him I have to pull partial quotes and try to make sense of the rest one reporter notified me We should quit trying and instead give it to the American citizens raw Let them see what Trump really sounds like The White House should just send us transcripts of what he authentically announced and let us pass it along to everyone else Or maybe we should just let Jeske read them on national television She sounds pleasant enough and the music s entertaining Jeske explained that while she was trying to understand what Trump indeed noted during his interview with Minutes versus what was seen on television she realized that the broadcast story bore little semblance to the actual event They sane-washed it she announced They cut out single words They moved whole sections around And this is the president who sued because of the edits made to the Kamala Harris interview We need your help to stay independent Subscribe at present to patronage Brian Karem s commentary Sane-washing Trump will ultimately fail It is a stupid futile gesture that only lends credence to the idea that the media is protecting him At the same time his desperation in trying to control the release of the Epstein information gives even Trump s staunchest allies the idea that he s pulling a Richard Nixon-style cover up This heat continues to grow while his ability to handle it is dramatically decreasing His Friday schedule includes no work He s leaving town apparently unable to handle the political oven of Washington D C As Harry Truman famously mentioned If you can t stand the heat get out of the kitchen Donald Trump though never could stand the heat and he constantly sought to burn down the kitchen Now He just doesn t know why As questions continue to be raised about his association with Epstein I would recommend Trump embrace his craziness It may be his best defense Read more about Donald Trump s healthcare How s Trump s physical condition He d rather talk about the state of his soul Trump s long weekend of humiliation Even insiders are questioning Trump s fitness The post Quit sane-washing Donald Trump appeared first on Salon com