Nearly Half Of Americans Believe Trump Is Suffering Cognitive Decline

The chart above reflects the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between April 10th and 13th of a nationwide sample of 1,748 adults (including 1,573 registered voters). The margin of error is 3.1 points for adults and 3.0 points for registered voters.

 

Most Americans Think Trump Has Become Erratic With Age

The chart above is from the Reuters / Ipsos Poll -- done between February 18th and 23rd of a nationwide sample of 4,638 adults, with a 2 point margin of error.

Why Isn't The Media Covering Trump's Mental Decline?

The media has recently been full of stories about President Biden's mental decline. But it seems to be ignoring the rather obvious mental decline of the current occupant of the White House. Why?

The following is part of a post by Michael A. Cohen at MSNBC:

Earlier this week, President Donald Trump told a story that, even for the least honest president in American history, was notable.

During an energy and technology summit in Pittsburgh, Trump claimed that his uncle John Trump, a former professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, taught the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. “My uncle was at MIT, one of the great professors,” Trump said. “Fifty-one years, whatever. Longest-serving professor in the history of MIT. Three degrees in nuclear, chemical and math. That’s a smart man.”. . .

According to the president, he once had a conversation with John Trump about Kaczynski: “What kind of a student was he, Uncle John?’ Dr. John Trump,” Trump asked. “He said, ‘What kind of a student? ‘Man,’ he said, ‘seriously good. ... He’d go around correcting everybody.’ But it didn’t work out too well for him.”

This is an interesting story, but what is most notable about the president’s digression is that none of it was true.

First, Kaczynski attended Harvard, not MIT, so it would be unusual, though not impossible, that this uncle would come in contact with the future Unabomber. (Students at both schools do cross-enroll on occasion, though NBC News reported the courses Kaczynski took were taught at Harvard, not MIT.)

Second, John Trump passed away in 1985. Kaczynski committed bombings that killed three people and wounded nearly two dozen others from 1978 to 1995. He was finally arrested in 1996 and sentenced to life in prison in 1998. If both the president and his uncle knew that Kaczynski was the Unabomber more than a decade before his arrest ... now that would be a story! . . .

Trump’s Unabomber tale is yet another example of the president’s increasing disconnect from reality. Yet, as with so many of Trump’s recent and unsettling statements, the mainstream media seems uninterested in covering the story. Trump’s Unabomber story has received scant coverage, despite reflecting a repeated pattern of confused and exaggerated statements.

For example, the day after his bizarre digression in Pittsburgh, Trump complained once again about Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and publicly stated, “I was surprised he was appointed.”

The person who appointed Powell was Donald Trump in 2017.

On Monday, at a White House Faith Office summit, he called Powell “a knucklehead” and a “stupid guy,” derided the intelligence of other politicians, including his former energy secretary Rick Perry, and said former President Joe Biden “wasn’t faithful enough and sought to persecute religious leaders.”

At the same gathering, Trump asserted that gas prices have “gone to the lowest level in decades. You’re seeing $1.99, $1.98, I saw $1.95 at certain states.”

Trump has made this claim repeatedly — two weeks ago and several times in April. In fact, the average national gas price has never fallen below $3 a gallon since Trump took office in January, and it is currently around $3.16.

Trump also appears to have very little idea of what’s happening in his own administration.

In the run-up to passage of his massive tax and spending bill, he repeatedly claimed that it would eliminate taxes on Social Security — a claim that massively exaggerates the impact of the bill. Of even greater concern is a story that received almost no attention. NOTUS reported that, only days before the legislation was signed into law, Trump told House Republicansthat if the party wants to win elections, it shouldn’t cut Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. According to three sources, one GOP member had to tell Trump, “But we’re touching Medicaid in this bill.”

Additionally, Trump appeared to be unaware that his administration had paused military aid shipments to Ukraine, even going so far as to ask a reporter whether she knew who had ordered the halt.

One might conclude from this compendium of stories that America is in the midst of a governing crisis. The president of the United States is making up stories, repeatedly making false claims and attacking other public officials.

Yet there’s been little reporting connecting these incidents. . . .

The president of the United States is showing substantial, arguably greater public evidence of possible cognitive decline. Trump at times is unaware of what is happening inside his administration, can seem clueless about major policy events, and doesn’t always appear to understand the very legislation that he is promoting.

One can certainly debate the extent to which Biden was truly experiencing cognitive decline. But if reporters are going to argue that the media dropped the ball in not giving that story greater coverage, then how does one explain not even talking about what is happening right now?

Trump's Mental Capacity Is Rapidly Diminishing

Donald Trump's mental capacity is rapidly being diminished. Republicans won't admit it, and most of the media won't report it. Finally, we have an article about it! The following is just a small part of a great article by Peter Baker and Dylan Freedman in The New York Times:

Former President Donald J. Trump vividly recounted how the audience at his climactic debate with Vice President Kamala Harris was on his side. Except that there was no audience. The debate was held in an empty hall. No one “went crazy,” as Mr. Trump put it, because no one was there.

Anyone can misremember, of course. But the debate had been just a week earlier and a fairly memorable moment. And it was hardly the only time Mr. Trump has seemed confused, forgetful, incoherent or disconnected from reality lately. In fact, it happens so often these days that it no longer even generates much attention.

He rambles, he repeats himself, he roams from thought to thought — some of them hard to understand, some of them unfinished, some of them factually fantastical. He voices outlandish claims that seem to be made up out of whole cloth. He digresses into bizarre tangents about golf, about sharks, about his own “beautiful” body. He relishes “a great day in Louisiana” after spending the day in Georgia. He expresses fear that North Korea is “trying to kill me”when he presumably means Iran. As late as last month, Mr. Trump was still speaking as if he were running against President Biden, five weeks after his withdrawal from the race.

With Mr. Biden out, Mr. Trump, at 78, is now the oldest major party nominee for president in history and would be the oldest president ever if he wins and finishes another term at 82. A review of Mr. Trump’s rallies, interviews, statements and social media posts finds signs of change since he first took the political stage in 2015. He has always been discursive and has often been untethered to truth, but with the passage of time his speeches have grown darker, harsher, longer, angrier, less focused, more profane and increasingly fixated on the past.

According to a computer analysis by The New York Times, Mr. Trump’s rally speeches now last an average of 82 minutes, compared with 45 minutes in 2016. Proportionately, he uses 13 percent more all-or-nothing terms like “always” and “never” than he did eight years ago, which some experts consider a sign of advancing age.

Similarly, he uses 32 percent more negative words than positive words now, compared with 21 percent in 2016, which can be another indicator of cognitive change. And he uses swearwords 69 percent more often than he did when he first ran, a trend that could reflect what experts call disinhibition. . . 

He does not stick to a single train of thought for long. During one 10-minute stretch in Mosinee, Wis., last month, for instance, he ping-ponged from topic to topic: Ms. Harris’s record; the virtues of the merit system; Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s endorsement; supposed corruption at the F.D.A., the C.D.C. and the W.H.O.; the Covid-19 pandemic; immigration; back to the W.H.O.; China; Mr. Biden’s age; Ms. Harris again; Mr. Biden again; chronic health problems and childhood diseases; back to Mr. Kennedy; the “Biden crime family”; the president’s State of the Union address; Franklin D. Roosevelt; the 25th Amendment; the “parasitic political class”; Election Day; back to immigration; Senator Tammy Baldwin; back to immigration; energy production; back to immigration; and Ms. Baldwin again.

Some of what he says is inexplicable except to those who listen to him regularly and understand the shorthand. And he throws out assertions without any apparent regard for whether they are true or not. Lately, he has claimed that crowds Ms. Harris has drawn were not real but the creation of artificial intelligence, never mind the reporters and cameras on hand to record them. . .

He considers himself the master of nearly every subject. He said Venezuelan gangs were armed “with MK-47s,” evidently meaning AK-47s, and then added, “I know that gun very well” because “I’ve become an expert on guns.” He claims to have been named “man of the year” in Michigan, although no such prize exists.

He is easily distracted. He halted in the middle of another extended monologue when he noticed a buzzing insect. “Oh, there’s a fly,” he said. “Oh. I wonder where the fly came from. See? Two years ago, I wouldn’t have had a fly up here. You’re changing rapidly. But we can’t take it any longer.”

But like some people approaching the end of their eighth decade, he is not open to correction. “Trump is never wrong,” he said recently in Wisconsin. “I am never, ever wrong.”

Huge Support For Competency Tests For Politicians Over 75

The chart above reflects the result of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between September 2nd and 5th of a nationwide sample of 1,500 adults (including 1,329 registered voters). The margin of error for adults is 3.3 points, and for registered voters is 3.1 points.

Is Donald Trump's Mental Capacity Deteriorating ?

(This caricature of Donald Trump is by DonkeyHotey.)

Whether you agree with the policies proposed by Donald Trump or not, there is one thing we should all want -- that Trump's mental capacity is strong and healthy to perform the duties of the presidency. But there is now some linguistic evidence that his mental capacity is not what it once was -- and that may well indicate those capacities are slipping.

Below is part of an excellent article by Sharon Begley at Stat. I don't know about you, but I find it very troubling.

It was the kind of utterance that makes professional transcribers question their career choice:

“ … there is no collusion between certainly myself and my campaign, but I can always speak for myself — and the Russians, zero.”

When President Trump offered that response to a question at a press conference last week, it was the latest example of his tortured syntax, mid-thought changes of subject, and apparent trouble formulating complete sentences, let alone a coherent paragraph, in unscripted speech.

He was not always so linguistically challenged.

STAT reviewed decades of Trump’s on-air interviews and compared them to Q&A sessions since his inauguration. The differences are striking and unmistakable.

Research has shown that changes in speaking style can result from cognitive decline. STAT therefore asked experts in neurolinguistics and cognitive assessment, as well as psychologists and psychiatrists, to compare Trump’s speech from decades ago to that in 2017; they all agreed there had been a deterioration, and some said it could reflect changes in the health of Trump’s brain.

In interviews Trump gave in the 1980s and 1990s (with Tom Brokaw, David Letterman, Oprah Winfrey, Charlie Rose, and others), he spoke articulately, used sophisticated vocabulary, inserted dependent clauses into his sentences without losing his train of thought, and strung together sentences into a polished paragraph, which — and this is no mean feat — would have scanned just fine in print. This was so even when reporters asked tough questions about, for instance, his divorce, his brush with bankruptcy, and why he doesn’t build housing for working-class Americans.

Trump fluently peppered his answers with words and phrases such as “subsided,” “inclination,” “discredited,” “sparring session,” and “a certain innate intelligence.” He tossed off well-turned sentences such as, “It could have been a contentious route,” and, “These are the only casinos in the United States that are so rated.” He even offered thoughtful, articulate aphorisms: “If you get into what’s missing, you don’t appreciate what you have,” and, “Adversity is a very funny thing.”

Now, Trump’s vocabulary is simpler. He repeats himself over and over, and lurches from one subject to an unrelated one, as in this answer during an interview with the Associated Press last month:

“People want the border wall. My base definitely wants the border wall, my base really wants it — you’ve been to many of the rallies. OK, the thing they want more than anything is the wall. My base, which is a big base; I think my base is 45 percent. You know, it’s funny. The Democrats, they have a big advantage in the Electoral College. Big, big, big advantage. … The Electoral College is very difficult for a Republican to win, and I will tell you, the people want to see it. They want to see the wall.”

For decades, studies have found that deterioration in the fluency, complexity, and vocabulary level of spontaneous speech can indicate slipping brain function due to normal aging or neurodegenerative disease. STAT and the experts therefore considered only unscripted utterances, not planned speeches and statements, since only the former tap the neural networks that offer a window into brain function.

The experts noted clear changes from Trump’s unscripted answers 30 years ago to those in 2017, in some cases stark enough to raise questions about his brain health. . . .

The reason linguistic and cognitive decline often go hand in hand, studies show, is that fluency reflects the performance of the brain’s prefrontal cortex, the seat of higher-order cognitive functions such as working memory, judgment, understanding, and planning, as well as the temporal lobe, which searches for and retrieves the right words from memory. Neurologists therefore use tests of verbal fluency, and especially how it has changed over time, to assess cognitive status.

Those tests ask, for instance, how many words beginning with W a patient can list, and how many breeds of dogs he can name, rather than have patients speak spontaneously. The latter “is too hard to score,” said neuropsychologist Sterling Johnson, of the University of Wisconsin, who studies brain function in Alzheimer’s disease. “But everyday speech is definitely a way of measuring cognitive decline. If people are noticing [a change in Trump’s language agility], that’s meaningful.”

Although neither Johnson nor other experts STAT consulted said the apparent loss of linguistic fluency was unambiguous evidence of mental decline, most thought something was going on.

John Montgomery, a psychologist in New York City and adjunct professor at New York University, said “it’s hard to say definitively without rigorous testing” of Trump’s speaking patterns, “but I think it’s pretty safe to say that Trump has had significant cognitive decline over the years.”

Texas Will Violate The Constitution Tuesday

All civilized nations have either discontinued use of the death penalty, or at the very least decided that those inmates who are mentally retarded should not be executed. In 1992, the United States Supreme Court decided that it was against the U.S. Constitution to execute a mentally retarded person. Texas doesn't care about either what the rest of the civilized world is doing, or what the Supreme Court has decided. Tomorrow they will execute a person with an IQ of 61 (well below the official designation of mental retardation).

How can Texas get away with defying the Supreme Court ban? Here's what State Senator Rodney Ellis (D-Houston) says:
"Unfortunately, Texas continues to circumvent the U.S. Supreme Court's categorical ban on the execution of offenders with mental retardation by developing its own set of determining factors for who will be exempt from execution."

Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/2012/08/04/4154763/state-senator-joins-calls-for.html#storylink=cpy

The problem is that when the Supreme Court banned executing the mentally retarded, they did not define exactly what mental retardation was, leaving it up to the states to do that. I'm sure they expected the states to follow generally accepted definitions of mental retardation. But Texas doesn't play by the same rules as other states do. Texas came up with a definition that will allow them to execute anyone they wish, regardless of the intellectual limits that person might have.

In Texas, a person must have below-average intellectual function, must lack adaptive behavior skills, and must show evidence of both before the age of 18. The inmate scheduled for execution on Tuesday has an IQ of 61 and had that IQ before the age of 18 -- meeting the first and third qualifications. It is the second qualification that gives the state its "out". Anyone not so mentally deficient as to require institutionalization would likely fail that test. The term "adaptive behavior skills" is such a loosely defined term, that basically anyone who can walk and chew gum at the same time can be executed.

Texas may not be violating the letter of the Supreme Court decision (although even that is debatable), but it most certainly is violating the spirit and intent of the decision. The inmate scheduled to be executed meets any reasonable definition of mental retardation -- and Texas is going to execute him anyway. All of us Texans should be ashamed of our state's impending action.

State Abuse Scandal Is Brewing

It looks like Texas has another scandal brewing -- this time in our state schools and centers for the mentally disabled. The Justice Department has announced that it will investigate charges of abuse at the largest state school -- the Denton State School. An investigation of the Lubbock State School in 2006 revealed widespread abuse, and there is little doubt that the new investigation will find the same.

The 13 state facilities service about 5,000 clients and have around 12,000 employees. According to figures relesed by the Texas Department of Aging and Disability Services, over 800 employees have been fired for abuse in the last four years (239 in 2007, 200 in 2006, 203 in 2005, 180 in 2004).

These are incredibly high numbers. It means nearly 7% of the employees have been fired in the last four years. Last year, 450 incidents of abuse were verified. The bulk were instances of neglect at 51%, while 31% involved physical abuse, and 16% involved verbal or emotional abuse. Less than 1% involved sexual abuse.

Governor Perry pointed to the large number of people fired as proof that something is being done. He is wrong! The fact that over 200 people are being fired every year just means the abuse is continuing unabated. We can't believe the problem is being addressed sufficiently until the number of firings starts dropping.

Our state leaders have done nothing except mouth platitudes about better training is needed. That's easy to say, but very hard to do under current conditions. The conditions must change before increased training can be effective.

The fact is that these are very difficult and frustrating jobs, and the employees get little recognition and abysmally low pay. Nearly all state employees are underpaid, but the employees in this field are among the lowest-paid state employees. This results in a large turnover and an unstable work force. Training can barely keep up with turnover.

There is a solution, but our state leaders must be willing to do what is necessary. The only solution is for leaders to bite the bullet and raise the pay significantly for the rank-and-file workers at these facilities. And I'm not talking about a paltry $40 or $50 a month for workers while management gets huge raises (which is what usually happens).

I'm talking about a large raise for line workers -- a raise that will attract good employees and keep them for a long time, thus eliminating the huge job turnover. This way, they can be properly trained and put those skills to use on the dorms.

Our Republican leadership must stop pumping big money into the pockets of rich corporations, and put that money into hiring and keeping good employees. Until they do, we are just spinning our wheels and the abuse will continue.