Wednesday, July 22, 2020

Person man woman camera TV

On his favorite TV soap box this evening, Trump waxed lyrical about how well he'd done on a cognitive impairment test. His performance was unusually disturbing even by Trumpian standards.

First, boasting about how well he'd done is a bit like bragging that you passed a covid-91 test. That's good but nothing to brag about. He almost certainly lied about "his perfect score" but again that's par for the course, just as was his likely exaggeration about the reaction of those who administered the test. The whole episode was quite comic, and a little pathetic. One might feel pity were he not such a raging narcissistic sociopath.

But the real questions that need to be asked are, first why did he take the test at all, second did he volunteer or was he advised to take it, and finally how many previous presidents have been asked (or volunteered) to take such a test.   

If, as I suspect it is, it is extremely rare for a sitting president to take such a test, then if he volunteered to take it, this is simply evidence of his ignorance as to its intended purpose. And if it was suggested to him by his staff, what were they seeing that made them worried that he was cognitively impaired.

Granted we've seen plenty, but the little things that reasonable people might construe as warning signs of dementia, slurring of speech, inability to focus, loss of sophisticated vocabulary, all are things his inner circle would likely overlook. So for one of them to persuade him to take the test (assuming someone didn't take it for him) they must have seen something they considered sufficiently serious to risk getting fired for disloyalty. Now that's alarming. 

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