From Palmer Report:
When Donald Trump announced earlier this week that his son Donald Trump Jr was getting married, he initially appeared to say that his son was “someone I’ve known a very long time.” Upon closer inspection, a mumbly and barely coherent Donald Trump actually said that his son has “got someone I’ve known a very long time.” Not much better. Trump clearly has no idea what the woman’s name is, in spite of how long he’s known her.
Somewhere in there Trump revealed that he wasn’t going to attend his son’s wedding, blaming his presidential duties. Then his babysitters reportedly booked a trip for him to his own resort in New Jersey for the weekend. So he’s got time for that, but not time to go to his son’s wedding. Or maybe he’s just not well enough to travel to the Bahamas. Given that his trip to his resort has since been canceled, who knows? Something isn’t right with him.
But the larger underlying story here may be that Donald Trump simply can’t remember anything. And not in a forgetful, aging brain, “I can’t think of the word I was about to say” senior moment kind of way. No, this is something different entirely. It’s not that Trump momentarily couldn’t remember his son’s bride’s name. It’s that he has no recollection of having ever known it. How do we know this?
When Trump tried to give a speech yesterday, he came to the word “dumb” and then stopped to announce that a lot of people don’t know that the word “dumb” has a “b” on the end of it. No really, he said this. And it wasn’t a one-off, either. Recently Trump came across the word “sea” and then stopped to announce that a lot of people don’t know the word is spelled “sea” when referring to a body of water. Before that he announced that he’d never heard the word “groceries” in his life. Before that it was “corner store” that he’d never heard of.
No one would ever describe Trump as being particularly literate. But he’s certainly seen the word “dumb” enough times in his life to know full well that it has a “b” on the end of it. He also knows full well that “see” and “sea” are pronounced the same. And he’s spent a lifetime hearing words like “groceries” and “corner store” even if he’s never done his own shopping in his life. He knows these words. Or at least he did. But not anymore.
It’s pretty clear what’s happening here. Trump’s brain is dying one area at a time from dementia, and in the process he’s losing an entire lifetime’s worth of memories and experiences. His dying brain clearly no longer has any recollection of any of the thousands of instances in which he’s seen the above words. That’s all gone. And so when Trump is seeing these basic common words now, what’s left of his brain thinks it’s seeing them for the first time. Hence why he’s so surprised to learn how some of them are spelled.
. . .
Trump is trying to deflect his own frustration and insecurity by projecting all of this onto unnamed other people out there who have no prior recollection of having ever seen the words “dumb” or “sea” in their lives. And yet this fully senile individual, who has now lost most of his lifetime’s worth of recollection, is somehow President of the United States.