Day of the Dotard

The senilization of American politics

Some of you may remember Jake Tapper and several other prominent pundits raising an alarm when President Biden, then competently running a middle-of-the-road Democratic administration, showed signs of age-related deterioration.

These worthies, you may have noticed, have gone eerily quiet about presidential dysfunction a year and a half into the Age of Tubby II, in which all who have eyes and ears can observe the President falling asleep during press conferences and cabinet meetings, and gibbering like a loon when awake.

They have also seen him destroy the East Wing of the White House, hold a martial arts competition on the White House lawn, stick his own name on the Kennedy Center, and, more recently, announce that he would fix damage allegedly done by Presidents Obama and Biden to the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial, hire a known con artist at an exorbitant cost to “repair” it by painting the bottom of the pool blue, and, when that caused (as scientists had warned) the water to teem with algae, blame “vandals.”

Not to mention the recent war in Iran, begun for no coherent reason, prosecuted with no apparent strategy, and at present in a Schrödinger’s state of being simultaneously over, ongoing, won, and lost.

The Prestige Press, as usual, does its best to disguise Trump’s more bizarre behaviors, as when he swipes a sports trophy, accuses the Prime Minister of Italy of trying to get herself photographed with him, or posts a photograph of an unknown woman and refers to her as “Daughter.” Not to speak of the disturbing humiliation rituals that he puts his cabinet through.

To some extent these behaviors are not out of character: Trump has always been an extreme and poorly socialized narcissist, and, protected from all consequences by his wealth and celebrity, did things in public during his first term that would have gotten other people hustled away from where people could see or hear them — such as the insulting nicknames he gave to his enemies (always puerile but treated in the press like Don Rickles-grade material), the off-color story he told a bunch of Boy Scouts, his monologues about hydroxychloroquine and internal disinfectant treatment for COVID, etc.

But even graded on the curve that his many, many enablers set up for him, the President’s current actions suggest very strongly that he’s no-fooling mentally impaired. Senile. Gaga. Out to lunch.

I assume the blasts of energy he shows in some of the public addresses he is called to make between his long bouts of dissociation and somnolence are fueled by megadoses of something like The Formula in our Trump sketches. But we have all seen what it’s like when the effect wears off.

I am on record as disapproving of distance-diagnoses of presidents by mental health professionals. But I’m not a doctor and you don’t need one to see what’s going on here. If you saw a guy screaming and waving a machete in the street, you wouldn’t wait for professional verification before declaring this guy’s nuts, let’s get out of here.

Similarly, if you’ve seen dementia in action, you don’t need test results (of the sort Trump is always bragging that he’s aced) to know that Trump is demented. If your own father were acting this way you would, at the very least, take away his car keys.

But no one’s taking the keys from Tubby.

For me, though, the big issue is not competence. It’s the normalization of mental illness as policy.

As we saw during the shitfits over Biden, whether you think Sleepy Joe was just Sleepy or really impaired, clearly his administration didn’t falter — it went forward as normal, making rules, appointing judges, etc., pretty much as any ordinary Dem admin would.

(That’s one reason Tubby ranted so much about Biden’s alleged use of the “autopen” — the work was clearly getting done; Trump just wanted to push the idea that Biden himself was out of the loop.)

Similarly, Trump’s presidency is going forward, too — as cruelly and stupidly as it would if Trump were still in his right mind, because he surrounded himself with rightwing creeps who share the same hatreds and grudges as he. (I’m not talking about the idiots like Noem and Kennedy, so much, but rather the competent but sinister functionaries like Vought and Miller and their many factota.)

These creeps, not being brain-damaged themselves, have a slightly better idea about how to effect his cruel and stupid policies than the dotard-in-chief does. I’m sure a lot gets shoved under his nose with a post-it note that says “this will drive the [liberals/bitches/racial slur of choice] nuts” and he either goes for it or doesn’t.

So in terms of policy we have something similar to what we’d have if the old boy didn’t have a screw loose. Non-senile Trump would be no more inclined to heed the public outcry over his vicious ICE raids, for example, than is senile Trump.

But we might worry about what he’ll get up to as he declines further.

Like I said, as he and his stooges are in agreement philosophically (i.e. evil), so are their policies. And when he goes a little off the beam, like with the Reflecting Pool repair, they know enough to play along. (He may be non compos mentis but he’s still the boss; if they push back he might make them wear the wrong size shoes again.) And as mentioned they have the press on their side.

So what happens when he decides, for example, to arrest tourists and passers-by at the Reflecting Pool and charge them with vandalism to cover for his own stupidity?

Because he just did that:

David “Davey” Hearn, 67, was detained by the pool’s edge on Friday as he was finishing a long bike ride.

Hearn told BBC News that he had removed his cycling glove to simply touch a long strip of rubbery material which appeared to have “delaminated” from the bottom of the pool, when he was stopped by US Park Police and National Guard troops.

The champion canoeist is now facing a misdemeanour charge of destruction of government property.

Trump’s US Attorney for the District, Jeanine “Glug Glug” Pirro, has promised to prosecute Hearn and “anyone who is in a position of vandalizing or attempting to vandalize.”

Now, Hearn’s almost certainly not going to be found guilty. And his case is nowhere near as crazy and consequential as the predations and depredations of ICE or the conspiracy charges thrown at “antifa” protesters.

But Hearn’s case is, more clearly (though admittedly not much more) than the others, a result of Trump’s madness — which has him pushing his goons to arrest, not immigrants or protestors as usual, but a guy biking down the Mall and doing what tourists do every day because his disordered mind decided that only sabotage could have caused the failure of his brilliant plan and somebody had to be arrested for it.

What happens when his dementia and paranoia and need to make reality conform with his fantasies increase? As his approval ratings continue to plummet, will he have pollsters arrested? Will his continuing humiliation in Iran (whose negotiators Trump just threatened to murder) drive him to use nuclear weapons? Will he issue orders making it a crime to say the words “climate change”? Will he demand to be made co-anchor of CBS Evening News?

None of these seem beyond him, do they? In fact they’re right on the border of what he’s already done. All that stands between that and this is the imminent loss of a few more of his remaining brain cells.