Trump is behind the eight ball on this one
It’s not often that I quote the late President Ronald Reagan on really much of anything, but he once rather famously quipped: “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.” The nature of politics is such that people don’t usually like to read a whole lot of backstory or fine print on any particular policy or any given scandal for that matter – so you only get a few seconds to either sound appealing to voters or to turn them off completely. It’s why slogans you have to explain or have voters research are always terrible – and it’s also why the GOP used to be fairly good at making scandals out of thin air – people will hear the accusations repeated over and over again, but they won’t stick around long enough to hear the rebuttal.
Despite being a fan of the 40th POTUS, Donald Trump never really seemed to digest this bit of advice. It led him to a number of embarrassing moments throughout his presidency that he largely made worse because of his inability to admit wrongdoing. His idiotic gaffes like claiming he beat President Obama when he ran in 2016 to claiming President Biden will start World War II have finally gotten the attention of the media – bringing up questions of the former guy’s cognitive fitness – even if the cry hasn’t reached fever pitch yet. Rather than ignore it, however, Trump and/or his handlers have decided to face it head on – with another truly insane post on Truth Social – saying he gets the names wrong on purpose while also bragging about a cognitive exam he ‘aced.’
This is exactly the way to bring Trump’s cognitive issues to the forefront – and make sure people keep talking about it. What seems odd is that he’d usually insist on being right all along rather than admit to deliberately misrepresenting something – so it’s fairly likely that his handlers wrote this tweet to fire up his base – but whether he wrote it or not, it bodes pretty poorly for the former guy since the media can’t really spin this into a positive light for him, nor dance around the issue much longer.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making