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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsTrumps New York Times Interview Is a Portrait of a Man in Cognitive Decline
I watched part of the interview. Trump was just rambling on and on.
Trumps New York Times Interview Is a Portrait of a Man in Cognitive Decline
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a14516912/donald-trump-new-york-times-michael-schmidt/
I dont care whether Michael Schmidt was tough enough. Weve got bigger problems.
Getty
By Charles P. Pierce
Dec 29, 2017
17.1k
On Thursday, El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago sat down with Michael Schmidt of The New York Times for what apparently was an open-ended, one-on-one interview. Since then, the electric Twitter machineand most of the rest of the Intertoobzhas been alive with criticism of Schmidt for having not pushed back sufficiently against some of the more obvious barefaced non-facts presented by the president* in their chat. Some critics have been unkind enough to point out that Schmidt was the conveyor belt for some of the worst attacks on Hillary Rodham Clinton emanating from both the New York FBI office and the various congressional committees staffed by people in kangaroo suits. For example, Schmidts name was on a shabby story the Times ran on July 23, 2015 in which it was alleged that a criminal investigation into HRC's famous use of a private email server was being discussed within the Department of Justice. It wasnt, and the Times public editor at the time, the great Margaret Sullivan, later torched the story in a brutal column.
.....................................Neither of those will concern us here. What Schmidt actually got out of this interview is a far more serious problem for the country. In my view, the interview is a clinical study of a man in severe cognitive decline, if not the early stages of outright dementia.
Over the past 30 years, Ive seen my father and all of his siblings slide into the shadows and fog of Alzheimers Disease. (the president's father developed Alzheimer's in his 80s.) In 1984, Ronald Reagan debated Walter Mondale in Louisville and plainly had no idea where he was. (Would that someone on the panel had asked him. Hed have been stumped.) Not long afterwards, I was interviewing a prominent Alzheimers researcher for a book I was doing, and he said, I saw the look on his face that I see every day in my clinic. In the transcript of this interview, I hear in the president*s words my late aunts story about how we all walked home from church in the snow one Christmas morning, an event I dont recall, but that she remembered so vividly that she told the story every time I saw her for the last three years of her life.
The president* exhibits the kind of stubbornness you see in patients when you try to relieve them of their car keys.
In this interview, the president* is only intermittently coherent. He talks in semi-sentences and is always groping for something that sounds familiar, even if it makes no sense whatsoever and even if it blatantly contradicts something he said two minutes earlier. To my ears, anyway, this is more than the president*s well-known allergy to the truth. This is a classic coping mechanism employed when language skills are coming apart. (My father used to give a thumbs up when someone asked him a question. That was one of the strategies he used to make sense of a world that was becoming quite foreign to him.) My guess? Thats part of the reason why its always the failing New York Times, and his 2016 opponent is Crooked Hillary." .......................................
underpants
(182,949 posts)riversedge
(70,347 posts)guillaumeb
(42,641 posts)When was he ever intelligent?
Irish_Dem
(47,518 posts)Should be reserved for advanced students, too much pathology to diagnose for beginners.
John Fante
(3,479 posts)That alone should have been a huge hint that he isn't all there anymore (and he was anything but an intellectual heavyweight in his prime).
Stupid + dementia = bad mix. Trump isn't fit to run a bath these days, nevermind the country.