I fully agree with what David said on Monday:
I get the ironic context, but I’ve seen way too much dunking on Trump botching Ronny Jackson’s name. We don’t need everybody calling dementia/cognitive decline at every verbal slip or faulty recall of the candidates.
I’d go a bit farther, actually: We should hold off on anyone calling "cognitive decline” unless we truly have no other explanation available. And neither Trump nor Biden is anywhere close to that line.
Trying to focus on Trump here: Yeah, no. It is of course absolutely true that Trump babbles incoherently all the time — if you missed it, there was a classic one recently about batteries, boats, and sharks, and his rants to Republicans on the Hill produced someone in the room saying it was like “talking to your drunk uncle at the family reunion.” Oh, and he didn’t impress the CEOs he met with either.
But look: Your drunk uncle doesn’t have dementia. He’s drunk. And he’s probably just like that anyway. Trump may be weirdly obsessed about sharks…but if that goes back at least a decade, it’s not a sign of mental decline.
I don’t really think Trump is any worse about this than he was during his first run at the White House. But even if he is, there’s a far better explanation than available through armchair geriatrics.
Just about every politician develops a bit (or more) of a fixation on the idea that “they” said he or she could never win, and they were wrong. I’ve heard politicians say that who actually never had a tough election in their lives. They probably weren’t fantasizing it; it’s likely that someone, somewhere, called one of their candidacies unlikely. With Trump, however, almost everyone thought that his 2016 run for the presidency was preposterous.1 Tons of people were harshly critical of various aspects of his campaign and him personally. And yet he won.
It says nothing good about him that the lesson he learned from that was basically “more of the same, ignore everyone who says otherwise” but it’s not exactly surprising either. And even though it produced a president who, as Matt Yglesias puts it, “has no idea what he’s talking about and is too intellectually lazy to find out,” that’s a reason to avoid nominating people who don’t know what they’re talking about, not cause for speculation about cognitive decline.2
Why not? Well, for one thing dementia is a real thing and it’s not very respectful to those suffering with it (and those caring for them) to use it falsely as a political accusation. But perhaps more importantly, if we want to understand our politicians — as allies, as opponents, as bargaining partners, or just to know what’s going on — it’s counterproductive to jump to medical conclusions when they’re not warranted.
I think it’s hard for a lot of observers to accept that Trump simply is ignorant about a lot of stuff that normal politicians have learned. That he really believes all sorts of nutty nonsense. I think some of that is denial: Did the US really have a guy with scary levels of foolish ideas in his head? And some of it is a normal cognitive bias: We want to attribute success to people who have somehow earned it. The “he’s lost it” idea fits both, suggesting that he once was up to the job even if it’s obvious he currently is not. Even if it requires forgetting the many, many examples to the contrary from his actual presidency.
And, yes, I understand the Democrats’ urge to to this. Joe Biden just returned from two trips to Europe, which produced plenty of doctored or out-of-context videos but as usual no one running to reporters with stories that provided evidence of problems. (Yes, many of the participants were US allies who probably want Biden to defeat Trump…but the history of these things is that if there were stories, we’d get many of them. Or at least some). The smears against Biden are ugly. That doesn’t mean smearing Trump is correct. Especially when it’s so unnecessary: Nothing wrong with pointing out his shortcomings. Just don’t blame it on age.
None of this means that having elderly presidential candidates is a great idea. Trump may not be deteriorating, and Biden’s signs of age remain his re-emerged stutter and a stiff walk, but the nation will be taking a gamble with whichever one of them wins in November.3 I mean, more so than the risk that’s always there. And while I do think the gotcha clips intended to show them as incapable of doing the job are totally unconvincing, it is still possible that more subtle deficits are present in one or both of the candidates and could get worse in the next four years.
Anyway: There’s nothing wrong with saying that Trump doesn’t know enough to be a good president, or that he rants and raves about nonsense. Just please stop pretending that’s a medical diagnosis.
Most of them not as much or as long as myself during the nomination contest, but still.
Indeed, with Trump it’s probably also a consequence of his pre-politics career, in which he (as Jim Hightower once said about George H.W. Bush, fairly or not in that case) was born on third base and thought he had hit a triple.
Remarkably, I see no hits for calling the alleged attempts by the White House to cover up the way Biden walks “gait-gate.” Maybe my search skills are at fault.