Donald Trump’s four-fold cognitive collapse.
I’m not a doctor of course. But since Donald Trump never allows real doctors to get anywhere near him, the rest of us are stuck trying to provide nonprofessional best guesses about what’s wrong with him. Is it dementia? Is it Alzheimer’s? Is it senility? Take your pick.
But something occurred to me. Trump keeps getting Joe Biden and Barack Obama confused with each other. It’s happened so many times that it’s gotten a lot of attention. But Trump isn’t strictly mixing up Biden for Obama. Trump has also confused Obama with Hillary Clinton. Trump has also confused Biden with George W. Bush. You could make the argument at this point that as Trump’s mind collapses, he now thinks these are all the same person. It’s some kind of four-fold confusion.
If you’ve had the misfortune to watch someone in your life succumb to dementia or Alzheimer’s, you know what it looks like. You know that their universe sort of shrinks. If they have two kids, then those memories collapse into each other, and those two kids become one person in their mind. If they’re dealing with someone in the present tense but they lack the cognitive ability to figure out or remember who the person is, they mistake the person for someone from their past, back before their mind collapsed. And so on.
And now here we have Donald Trump’s mind collapsing in on itself to the point that he seems to think Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W.Bush, and Hillary Clinton are all one combined person. Trump can’t seem to remember who Biden is, so he substitutes Obama instead. And why wouldn’t he? Trump’s brain still worked back when he was sparring with Obama a decade ago. Now that his mind no longer functions when he tries to process his current political battles, he ends up equating it to a previous similar political battle.
Again, I’m no doctor. We all know that. But because Donald Trump refuses to allow himself to be examined by legitimate doctors even as he claims to be running for President of the United States, we’re stuck trying to parse his cognitive collapse ourselves.
The kicker is while Trump once bragged about being able to pass a “person woman man camera TV” level cognitive test, it’s not clear that he could even pass that test today. He thinks Biden, Obama, Bush, and Hillary are all the same person. In all seriousness, are we sure he can still correctly identify a picture of a giraffe?
