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The Troubling Signs of Trump's Cognitive Decline

The first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden put a spotlight on Biden's declined cognitive abilities and ultimately caused him to leave the presidential contest.  The debate this past week between Trump and Kamala Harris seemingly spotlighted that Trump himself is suffering from mental decline. Some of his answers were incoherent not to mention utterly non-responsive to questions posed by the moderators.  Worse yet, Trump rambled on about a false meme on the far right - it was pointed out to him that there was no credible evidence to support the untruth - that Haitian immigrants were eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio.  Even many conservative commentators and Republican elected officials conceded that the debate was a disaster for Trump (who insanely claims he won the debate). Since then, Trump has doubled down on the false storyline, prompting the mayor of Springfield to beg him to stop repeating the lie. Equally disturbing is the fact that Trump is surrounding himself with crackpots and lunatics of the far right, including Laura Loomer who, in my view, belongs in a mental institution. A piece in The Atlantic by a psychiatrist looks at Trump's behavior and incoherence and suggests he needs a full mental health analysis and may not be at all up to holding the presidency again. Here are excerpts: 

Tuesday’s presidential debate was, among other things, an excellent real-world test of the candidates’ cognitive fitness—and any fair-minded mental-health expert would be very worried about Donald Trump’s performance.

The former president has repeatedly bragged over the past several years that he has passed various mental-status exams with flying colors. Most of these tests are designed to detect fairly serious cognitive dysfunction, and as such, they are quite easy to pass: They ask simple questions such as “What is the date?” and challenge participants to spell world backwards or write any complete sentence. By contrast, a 90-minute debate that involves unknown questions and unanticipated rebuttals requires candidates to think on their feet. It is a much more demanding and representative test of cognitive health than a simple mental-status exam you take in a doctor’s office. Specifically, the debate serves as an evaluation of the candidates’ mental flexibility under pressure—their capacity to deal with uncertainty and the unforeseen.

Just to be clear: Although I am a psychiatrist, I am not offering any specific medical diagnoses for any public figure. I have never met or examined either candidate. But I watched the debate with particular attention to the candidates’ vocabulary, verbal and logical coherence, and ability to adapt to new topics—all signs of a healthy brain. Although Kamala Harris certainly exhibited some rigidity and repetition, her speech remained within the normal realm for politicians, who have a reputation for harping on their favorite talking points. By contrast, Donald Trump’s expressions of those tendencies were alarming. He displayed some striking, if familiar, patterns that are commonly seen among people in cognitive decline.

Much of the time, following Trump’s train of thought was difficult, if not impossible. In response to a question from the moderator David Muir about whether he regretted anything he’d done during the January 6 insurrection, Trump said:

I have said “blood bash—bath.” It was a different term, and it was a term that related to energy, because they have destroyed our energy business. That was where bloodbath was. Also, on Charlottesville, that story has been, as you would say, debunked. Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Jesse—all of these people, they covered it. If they go an extra sentence, they will see it was perfect. It was debunked in almost every newspaper. But they still bring it up, just like they bring 2025 up. They bring all of this stuff up. I ask you this: You talk about the Capitol. Why are we allowing these millions of people to come through on the southern border?

Evading the question is an age-old debate-winning tactic. But Trump’s response seems to go beyond evasion. It is both tangential, in that it is completely irrelevant to the question, and circumstantial, in that it is rambling and never gets to a point. Circumstantial and tangential speech can indicate a fundamental problem with an underlying cognitive process, such as logical and goal-oriented thinking. Did Trump realize that his answer was neither germane to the question nor logical?

Eleven days before the debate, at a campaign event in Pennsylvania, Trump responded to criticism of his rambling speech by claiming that it is part of a deliberate strategy to frustrate his opponents. “I do the weave,” he told the audience. . . . . Viewers can judge for themselves whether the disjointed statements they heard during the debate cohered brilliantly in the end.

The speech Trump excuses as the “weave” is one of many tics that are starting to look less strategic and more uncontrollable. Last week, David A. Graham wrote in The Atlantic that the former president has a penchant for describing objects and events as being “like nobody has ever seen before.” At the debate, true to form, Trump repeatedly fell back on the superlative. Of the economy under his presidency: “Nobody’s ever seen anything like it.” . . . But Trump’s turns of phrase are so disjointed, so unusual, and so frequently uttered that they’re difficult to pass off as normal speech.

Trump’s speech during the debate was repetitive not only in form but also in content. . . . But plenty of the former president’s repetitions seemed compulsive, not strategic. After praising the Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán, Trump spoke unprompted, at length, and without clarity about gas pipelines in the United States and Europe, an issue unlikely to connect with many voters. A few minutes later, he brought up the pipelines again. The moderators cut him off for a commercial break. Even in cases where Trump could have reasonably defended himself, he was unable to articulate basic exculpatory evidence.

In psychiatry, the tendency to conspicuously and rigidly repeat a thought beyond the point of relevance, called “perseverance,” is known to be correlated with a variety of clinical disorders, including those involving a loss of cognitive reserve. People tend to stick to familiar topics over and over when they experience an impairment in cognitive functioning—for instance, in short-term memory. . . . Given the complexity of being president, short-term memory is a vital skill.

If a patient presented to me with the verbal incoherence, tangential thinking, and repetitive speech that Trump now regularly demonstrates, I would almost certainly refer them for a rigorous neuropsychiatric evaluation to rule out a cognitive illness. A condition such as vascular dementia or Alzheimer’s disease would not be out of the ordinary for a 78-year-old. Only careful medical examination can establish whether someone indeed has a diagnosable illness—simply observing Trump, or anyone else, from afar is not enough. For those who do have such diseases or conditions, several treatments and services exist to help them and their loved ones cope with their decline. But that does not mean any of them would be qualified to serve as commander in chief.

 While perhaps always insane and certainly a malignant narcissist, Trump appears to be melting down mentally before our eyes.  He can never occupy the White House again for the good of the country. 

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MAGA Will Fall for Anything

Once upon a time the Republican Party believed in knowledge, objective facts and data, rational discourse and people who had legitimate credentials relating to issues they spoke about.  Those days are far back in the rearview mirror as the MAGA base continually demonstrates that it will believe almost any far fetched lie and false conspiracy theory.  Equally bad is the MAGA base's willingness to embrace and believe fictional stories put out by "influencers." most of which have not credentials or expertise.  Added to the mix is the non-stop lies and disinformation put out by Fox News and its imitators.    Fox News viewers forget that Fox News admitted it had peddled lies and was an "entertainment" outlet when it paid out nearly $800 million to settle a defamation case (other such case remain pending).  Some of this gullibility stems from the fact that educated voters are fleeing the GOP and leaving low information voters in their stead, but the main driver is the willingness to believe anything that supports one's bigotries and hatred, most of which when all else is stripped away comes down to racial prejudice if not open hatred.  Hence, the willingness to believe lies that Haitian immigrants are killing and eating neighborhood pets.  A column in the New York Times looks at the willingness of MAGA world to believe the most fat fetched of lies:

It was the strangest thing I’ve ever seen during a presidential debate, and I’m exactly the kind of nerd who has watched every general election debate since he was 11 years old.

A few minutes into the contest, Kamala Harris interrupted her remarks to mock Donald Trump’s rallies. She invited viewers to attend one made fun of Trump’s meandering and self-absorbed speeches and then said, “People start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.”

She was baiting him, and he fell for it. He responded with a barrage of conspiracy theories and misinformation that culminated in a bizarre rant about immigrants and pets in Ohio.

In that moment, Trump amplified a truly strange claim that had spread through the online right over the days before. It’s hard to trace the origin of a rumor, but it blew up with a Sept. 6 post from a prominent right-wing account called End Wokeness . . . .

The next day, a Malaysian MAGA influencer named Ian Miles Cheong posted about a disturbing incident in Ohio in which an American-born woman from Canton, Ohio, Allexis Telia Ferrell, is being prosecuted for killing and eating a cat. (She is pleading not guilty.)

Cheong falsely speculated that she was Haitian, and MAGA ran with it. . . . . It’s hard to describe the sheer weirdness of the discourse, which has also included investigations of whether Haitian immigrants are killing wild ducks or geese — something very different from stealing and killing a person’s pet — and featured a series of memes featuring heroic images of Trump protecting frightened kittens.

JD Vance also jumped on the claim, with possibly the most destructive message. His role in the campaign is to try to apply Yale Law School polish to many of MAGA’s most demented conspiracies. . . . . nd how did he suggest that his followers respond? By continuing to spread baseless claims. “Don’t let the crybabies in the media dissuade you, fellow patriots,” he wrote on X. “Keep the cat memes flowing.”

[O]ne of the defining characteristics of the Trump era is the former president’s willingness to believe (or at least profess to believe) virtually anything negative about his opponents — no matter how outlandish — and then repeat and amplify those claims until they permeate the Republican Party.

But I’m actually less interested in debunking each individual hoax than in answering some questions. Why is MAGA still so gullible? Why didn’t Republicans learn anything from 2020, when they fell for some of the strangest conspiracy theories I’ve ever heard about?

In the days after Jan. 6, 2021, I argued that years of extreme right-wing rhetoric had made millions of ordinary voters vulnerable to the wildest of ideas. If you watch right-wing television — or if you listen to right-wing radio — you will hear the most vicious insults against Democrats and the media over and over. It’s a constant drumbeat of inflammatory rhetoric: “They” hate America. “They” hate Christians. “They” will destroy our country.

And few populations have been more thoroughly demonized during the age of Trump than immigrants. . . . . Trump has been painting a lurid and terrifying picture of the immigrant threat.

Another way of putting it is that animosity fuels gullibility. If you like or respect someone, you’re immediately skeptical of negative claims, and the more outlandish the claim, the more skeptical you’ll be. But if you loathe a person or a population, in a perverse way you become more receptive to the worst stories. After all, they’re the ones that vindicate your hatred the most.

But as our conspiracy crisis continues, I’m realizing that explaining gullibility primarily through the lens of animosity is incomplete.

The problem, then, isn’t just with right-wing villainization, it’s with who the right elevates as its champions. Every movement elevates heroes and leaders, but in the age of Trump, the right’s heroes are created almost entirely through pugilism and confrontation, not through inspiration or elevation. . . . . The first rule of the right is simple: You must fight. In their minds, McCain didn’t fight, so he lost. Romney didn’t fight, so he lost. Trump fought, so he won.

And if your chief combatant is also a gullible conspiracy theorist, then it orients the entire community toward the most lurid of tales.

Of course the friend/enemy distinction is older than politics, but the twist here is that right-wing media doesn’t just elevate the wrong heroes — by making the mainstream media an enemy every bit as loathed as its partisan political opponents — it also walls itself off from accountability. . . . . In this world, the conspiracy theorists are both the fact-finders and the fact-checkers, and there is no restraint on the reach of their lies.

A real-world example helps explain the dynamic. A few days ago, several people I know shared a viral social media post from a Newsmax host named David Harris Jr. that included a video that purported to show a line of Somali illegal immigrants waiting to get driver’s licenses . . . Almost immediately, both local media and Florida officials debunked the video. Christina Pushaw, a spokesperson for Gov. Ron DeSantis, posted, “The people waiting for driver licenses & IDs in the video are black AMERICANS. Not Somalians or any type of illegal aliens!”

But MAGA scorns the mainstream media, and it is skeptical of DeSantis after he challenged Trump. In the friend/enemy world of the right, the allegation came from a friend, all the debunking came from enemies, and why would anyone believe those terrible people?

To make matters worse, when you talk to people who are deeply embedded in MAGA America, you know that the friend/enemy distinction isn’t just relevant to how they view public figures, it also applies to personal relationships. MAGA is a very tightly knit community, which gives its members an immense amount of purpose, joy and fellowship, but that community is conditioned on unwavering support for Trump.

How many times can a friend lie to you and remain a friend? Ordinary Republicans should be offended at the way their own media has treated them. They should be outraged at the lack of respect for their independence and intelligence. But for now, they hate or fear their enemies so much that they will not properly vet their friends, and when your friend in chief is Donald Trump, then you will be led astray.

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Trump Blames Everybody but Himself

Numerous editorials and articles in outlets ranging across the political spectrum from the right wing National Review, to The Atlantic here and here (both written by conservative former Republicans) and the liberal Salon and even Trump boot licker Lindsey Graham, a/k/a the Palmetto Queen and Lady G,  have all confirmed that Donald Trump's debate performance last night was a disaster and train wreck.  Yet Trump and many of his most loyal - and untruthful media outlets - apologists have blamed everyone and everything other than Der Trumpenfuhrer himself for the debacle.  Seemingly, the MAGA base and the faux journalists on much of the political right simply cannot admit to themselves that their cult leader is a mentally declining elderly man who time after time took the bait thrown to him by Kamala Harris and diverged into insanity, including blathering about the totally debunked conspiracy theory that Haitian immigrants were eating neighbors' dogs and cats. The batshit craziness was off the charts and at times it was impossible to understand what the self-absorbed, narcissistic Trump was even trying to say.  Sadly, it is doubtful that many in MAGA world will belatedly do some soul search and realize they have been worship a buffoon whose only attribute is fanning the base's hatreds and prejudices.  Another piece in The Atlantic (again by a former Republican) looks at Trump's refusal to accept blame for his own disastrous debate performance: 

This morning found the former apex predator of American politics looking for some hand-holding. Donald Trump said on Fox & Friends that he is “not inclined” to do any more debates, but that if he does, he wants only the friendliest possible moderators—his suggestions were the Fox News hosts Sean Hannity, Jesse Watters, or Laura Ingraham.

Trump’s comment came during a morning spent complaining about last night’s ABC moderators and arguing that the network should lose its broadcasting license. He was trying to pick up the pieces from a shambolic performance. “Trump lost his cool over and over,” David Frum wrote in The Atlantic. “Goaded by predictable provocations, he succumbed again and again.” Kamala Harris baited him with surgical precision, triggering his insecurities while giving him full freedom to openly wallow in his delusions.

Even some of Trump’s most reliable sycophants had to recognize that the fault lay neither in the stars nor in the moderators but rather in the candidate himself. Others in the former president’s universe, though, have refused to acknowledge that truth. . . . . Megyn Kelly [a former big law firm attorney who clearly knows better] posted: “These moderators are a disgraceful failure and this is one of the most biased, unfair debates I have ever seen. Shame on you @ABC.” Other reactions were even more hysterical. Sean Davis, a co-founder of The Federalist, suggested not only that ABC lose its license but that the moderators and network executives be charged with “criminal election fraud and interference.”

As soon as he got offstage, Trump grasped onto his supporters’ line of defense. “I thought that was my best Debate, EVER, especially since it was THREE ON ONE!” Trump wrote on Truth Social, echoing phrasing used online during the debate. Trump must be aware on some level that last night, tens of millions of voters watched a bitter, confused, and diminished elderly man fall apart in front of their eyes. At his rallies, Trump can get away with his signature lies and tantrums of grievance—and with not saying much at all about actual policy plans. In his softball interviews with fawning right-wing hosts, he can ramble and lie without fear of being challenged. At the presidential debate, though, it didn’t work. So he has decided to blame everybody but himself.

History should note that the former president spent part of the day of the debate hanging out with a notoriously bigoted conspiracy theorist and posting memes referencing a false claim about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Ohio. Even after the story of the pet-eating immigrants was debunked, Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance, continued to push the racist idea, which led to the debate’s most memorable moment.

Actually, it’s not happening, as the debate moderator David Muir pointed out, noting that ABC had reached out to the Springfield city manager to confirm this. Trump and his supporters were incensed that the ABC moderators, who fact-checked some of Trump’s statements in the debate live, corrected this and a few of his other egregious lies—for example, pointing out that killing newborn babies is illegal, contra Trump’s claim that in some states, doctors can “execute” babies after birth.

Attacking debate moderators and the media in general is nothing new for Trump. He makes no secret of his loathing for the press and for anyone who holds him to account.

But it wasn’t the moderators or the network, or even Harris, who forced Trump to begin ranting that “they’re eating the dogs!” That was all Trump. Ever the showman, he may understand just how awful last night’s show was for him—which is why he’s pointing the finger at everyone else.

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Taylor Swift Endorses Kamala Harris Post Debate

Watching the debate last night I thought - as seemingly do many others - that Kamala Harris out performed Donald Trump who did what he always does" lie, ramble and hold up non-white immigrants as a bogeyman for his racist and misogynist MAGA base.  Of course, members of Trump's base who have immersed themselves in a cult of the orange one care nothing about Trump's lies, incoherence and rants.  But sentient people not lost in that cult should have had the take away that Harris has a command of the facts and future facing agenda while all Trump offers is more of the same old hate and division that he has been spewing for the last nine years or longer.  Adding to the positive evening was Taylor Swift's endorsement of Harris for president. Some say celebrity endorsements are meaningless, but Swift is both talented and smart - something Trump cannot stand in women - and rightly believes that all of us need to take a stand against those who seek to take the country backwards in time.  Here are Swift's comments via CNN: 

Taylor Swift said Tuesday she is supporting Vice President Kamala Harris in the race for president, ending speculation about whether the superstar singer would share her political views ahead of November’s election.

“Like many of you, I watched the debate tonight. If you haven’t already, now is a great time to do your research on the issues at hand and the stances these candidates take on the topics that matter to you the most. As a voter, I make sure to watch and read everything I can about their proposed policies and plans for this country,” Swift wrote on Instagram, shortly after the conclusion of Harris’ debate with former President Donald Trump, her Republican rival, on ABC News.

“Recently I was made aware that AI of ‘me’ falsely endorsing Donald Trump’s presidential run was posted to his site. It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation. It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth. I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election.”

“I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them. I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos. I was so heartened and impressed by her selection of running mate @timwalz, who has been standing up for LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body for decades,” Swift wrote.

“I’ve done my research, and I’ve made my choice. Your research is all yours to do, and the choice is yours to make. I also want to say, especially to first time voters: Remember that in order to vote, you have to be registered! I also find it’s much easier to vote early. I’ll link where to register and find early voting dates and info in my story.”

Swift signed off on the post by calling herself a “childless cat lady,” alluding to a phrase previously used by Sen. JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, to criticize Democrats.

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Hypocrisy, Spinelessness, and the GOP's Surrender to Trump

One of the most disturbing yet remarkable in a very negative way is the manner in which the majority of Republicans have willingly prostituted themselves to Donald Trump.   In the process, they have abandoned everything that the Republican Party claimed to stand for in the past. Fiscal responsibility has been thrown out the window as the massive Trump tax cuts for the wealthy exploded the deficit and the GOP in some ways has become the party of Vladimir Putin.  Meanwhile, any claims to stand for morality and decency have likewise been discarded as the party kisses the ring of perhaps the most morally bankrupt political figure in American history.  Hate, grievance, bigotry racism, homophobia and misogyny have been both embraced and normalized within the MAGA base and the ranks  of Republican elected officials, particularly in Congress.   What is most disheartening as a former Republican is that the Congressional Republicans busy genuflecting to Trump is that - with exception such as Margorie Taylor Greene and those of her ilk - is that they know better.  They simply do not care so long as they think their conduct spares them from primary challenges and helps their reelection prospects.  It is a study in hypocrisy, spinelessness and moral bankruptcy.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the GOP's surrender to Trump and immorality:

In the summer of 2015, back when he was still talking to traitorous reporters like me, I spent extended stretches with Donald Trump. He was in the early phase of his first campaign for president, though he had quickly made himself the inescapable figure of that race—as he would in pretty much every Republican contest since. We would hop around his various clubs, buildings, holding rooms, limos, planes, golf carts, and mob scenes, Trump disgorging his usual bluster, slander, flattery, and obvious lies. The diatribes were exhausting and disjointed.

But I was struck by one theme that Trump kept pounding on over and over: that he was used to dealing with “brutal, vicious killers”—by which he meant his fellow ruthless operators in showbiz, real estate, casinos, and other big-boy industries. In contrast, he told me, politicians are saps and weaklings.

“I will roll over them,” he boasted, referring to the flaccid field of Republican challengers he was about to debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library that September. They were “puppets,” “not strong people.” He welcomed their contempt, he told me, because that would make his turning them into supplicants all the more humiliating.

“They might speak badly about me now, but they won’t later,” Trump said. They like to say they are “public servants,” he added, his voice dripping with derision at the word servant. But they would eventually submit to him and fear him. . . . . Like most people who’d been around politics for a while, I was dubious. And wrong.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Trump told me the following spring, as he was completing his romp to the 2016 nomination. We were talking on the phone, and Trump had just wrapped up a rally in Anaheim, California. . . . . “It’s happening with all of them,” Trump said. “Lindsey Graham just called and was very nice … even though he used to say the worst things.” (Graham had called Trump, among other not-nice things, “a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot” and “a kook.”) Soon enough, the last holdouts would come around too. “It’s just so easy, how they do that,” Trump said.

As went individual Republican politicians, so went the party. . . . After Trump won the nomination in 2016, “The party defines the party” became a familiar feckless refrain among the GOP’s putative leaders.

By the second night of the 2024 Republican National Convention at Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum in July, some attendees had started showing up with a gauze pad slapped over their right ears, a tribute to the boxy white dressing Trump wore to cover the injury he’d suffered in an attempt on his life in Pennsylvania just days earlier. . . . the ear accessories quickly spread through the crowd and became ubiquitous. In a sense, the entire Republican Party has become an accessory. To no one’s surprise, everything in Milwaukee revolved around its unavoidable protagonist, “our 45th and soon-to-be 47th president, Donald J. Trump.”

I’d been watching Trump’s adulators work the arena all week, trying to outdo one another. “My fellow Americans,” Senator Marco Rubio said from the podium while Trump—his Audience of One—squinted up at him like a building inspector. As with many other brand-name Republicans in the arena, Rubio had once despised Trump. . . . Trump derided Rubio as “Liddle Marco” and called him “weak like a baby.” That last assessment held up well.

I talked a lot with Rubio in the last days of the 2016 primary, back when he was happy to speak candidly about Trump, and about how he knew better than to entrust the leadership of the United States to a “fraud,” “lunatic,” and “con artist” with autocratic instincts. And they all knew better—the Rubios, the Ted Cruzes, the J. D. Vances, the Doug Burgums, the Nikki Haleys, the Mitch McConnells, the Vivek Ramaswamys, all of them. They probably still know better. But they are all expedient, to their political core. “If you don’t want to get reelected,” Graham once told me, “you’re in the wrong business.”

For years, many had predicted a reckoning, a shared realization that the noisy, grievance-packed redoubt that the GOP had become—marked by servile devotion to one man—was perhaps not aligned with the party’s best traditions . . . I’d thought that maybe 2024 would be the year the GOP finally began some semblance of a post-Trump future. At the very least, new voices of resistance had to finally assert themselves.

“I feel no need to kiss the ring,” Nikki Haley, Trump’s most competitive primary challenger in 2024, had vowed in February. . . . . But the ring, it would be kissed. “Donald Trump has my strong endorsement, period,” Haley said.

I ran into former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson on the arena concourse. He was one of the only Republican-primary challengers who dared question Trump’s worldview. His campaign had gone nowhere, but Hutchinson held relatively firm. “I’m troubled,” Hutchinson told me. “I don’t want our party to be defined by attacks on our judiciary system. I don’t want it to be defined by anger.”

The speed with which Trump has settled back into easy dominance of his party has been both remarkable and entirely foreseeable—foreseen, in fact, by Trump himself. Because if there’s been one recurring lesson of the Trump-era GOP, it’s this: Never underestimate the durability of a demagogue with a captive base, a desperate will to keep going, and—perhaps most of all—a feeble and terrified opposition of spineless ciphers (“weak like a baby”).

Trump’s last remaining primary challenger, Haley, quit the race on March 6. That same day, Mitch McConnell—who had criticized the then-president for his “disgraceful” conduct on January 6, 2021—endorsed Trump.

The message was clear: “That Republican Party, frankly, no longer exists,” Donald Trump Jr. gloated on Newsmax the day of the RNC staff purges. “The moves that happened today—that’s the final blow. People have to understand that … the MAGA movement is the new Republican Party.”

Yet beneath the Republicans’ triumphalist excitement in Milwaukee, I sensed an undercurrent of disbelief. They were projecting confidence, yes, but there was a tight, gritted-teeth quality to this, of a once-serious party that had now been subdued, disoriented, and denuded of whatever their convictions once were. . . . Republicans had expressed these doubts before, and not so long ago, before they all capitulated.

The nagging dissonance of this spectacle: the gap between what the GOP traditionally believed and what it now allows itself to abide. The party that allegedly reveres the Constitution is going all in on someone who has called for its termination. A party that cherishes freedom is willing to cede authority to a candidate who says he would be a dictator on his first day in office. A party that supposedly venerates law and order is re-upping with an actual felon. A party whose rank and file overwhelmingly wants Russia to defeat Ukraine believes that Biden stole the 2020 election, and that Trump’s legal shambles are entirely a Democratic plot. This is now a party whose standard-bearer has not been endorsed by any former Republican president or nominee, or even his own vice president, who barely escaped death by hanging the last time. And to what end, any of it?

If nothing else, Trump has a keen eye for finding soft targets: pushovers he can bully, rules he can flout, entire political parties he can raze and remake in his image. He would roll over them.

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

 

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How Trump and Project 2025 Would Harm the Country

Like so much that comes out of Donald Trump's mouth, his efforts to disavow and distance himself from the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, are lies and should not be believed.  Despite Trump's protestations seventy-eight percent of the contributors to Project 2025 were members of Trump's regime while he was in the White House and his last time in office demonstrated how loyal Trump was to following the then Heritage Foundation agenda which pales compared to what Project 2025 would wreak on the nation. I suspect that many MAGA members and Republicans living in the delusion that the GOP remains something akin to what it once was foolishly believe Project 2025 would not impact or harm them.  Indeed, one of the ironies is that many red states - where the GOP continues to use "god, guns and gays" to dupe their base into voting against their own best economic interests - would be the hardest hit both in loss school funding, higher taxes on lower income wage earners, and a cap on Medicaid.   A column in the New York Times lays out what Trump cannot be allowed to distance himself from Project 2025 as well as a sampling of what it would mean for millions of American (if one adds in the negative consequence for racial minorities and LGBT Americans, it is even worse.  Here are highlights:

When Donald Trump takes the debate stage on Tuesday, he will doubtless again try to disavow Project 2025, the radically conservative blueprint spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation for the next Republican administration. We shouldn’t let him.

Seventy-eight percent of the contributors to the effort were members of his last administration and many of them are likely appointees to his next team if he’s re-elected. As the old Washington saying goes, “personnel is policy.”

The group of authors includes Russell Vought, who headed the Office of Management and Budget; Chris Miller, one of Mr. Trump’s acting defense secretaries; Ken Cucinelli, Mr. Trump’s deputy secretary of homeland security; and Peter Navarro, a longtime Trump adviser who was closely involved in the ex-president’s attempt to overturn the election.

We’ve seen this movie before. In 2016, ahead of Mr. Trump’s first term, the Heritage Foundation released the seventh edition of its “Mandate for Leadership.” One year into his presidency, Mr. Trump had embraced 64 percent of its policy recommendations, ranging from leaving the Paris climate accord to raising military spending to increasing drilling offshore and on federal lands.

Based on Mr. Trump’s campaign utterances and Project 2025’s proposals, expect far more radical actions from a second Trump presidency. Relying on analysis by the Center for American Progress and others, below are eight examples of how Project 2025’s proposals could alter American life.

Raise Income Taxes on Those Earning Less

Project 2025 proposes to “simplify” the tax code by collapsing the complex system into two tax brackets — 15 percent and 30 percent — while eliminating most deductions, credits and exclusions. Sound good? The plan would also raise taxes for American families making under $170,000 a year — nearly tripling them for a family earning $75,000 — while cutting them substantially for those with higher incomes.

Oh, and remember when Mr. Trump slashed corporate taxes to 21 percent from 35 percent? Project 2025 wants to reduce the rate even further, plus shrink the already low rate on capital gains enjoyed by the wealthy.

Cap Medicaid

Project 2025 would slash Medicaid by imposing a lifetime cap on the length of time Americans can be enrolled in the program. The consequence could be the loss of Medicaid eligibility for as many as 20 percent of Americans currently enrolled. And for those who remain eligible, work requirements would be imposed. . . . . For example, in Wisconsin [and Virginia], 41 percent of enrollees could lose their coverage.

This measure isn’t likely to be popular: 90 percent of Democrats and 65 percent of Republicans have a favorable opinion of Medicaid.

Eliminate Head Start

Project 2025 doesn’t believe in group child care. It proposes eliminating Head Start and giving the money to parents, either so a parent can afford to stay home with a child or pay for “familial, in-home child care.”

Given the cost efficiency of group child care, it’s very hard to see how decreeing that it’s every family for itself would be preferable to Head Start.

Phase Out Title I

Project 2025 would phase out the $18 billion currently allocated to Title I, a key source of education aid, and return funding responsibility to the states. That makes it yet another policy change that would hit red states harder, because Title I provides public funding for high-poverty public and charter schools (and red states house disproportionately more of these schools).

The Center for American Progress estimates that this move could cost the nation 5.6 percent of all teachers’ jobs and as much as 12 percent of those jobs in Louisiana.

Repeal the Inflation Reduction Act

The conservative manifesto seeks to repeal large parts of the Inflation Reduction Act, which despite its name is principally aimed at facilitating a shift toward renewable energy. The legislation, which provides tax credits to stimulate conversion from fossil fuels, has been substantially more successful than its backers anticipated.

Also on the chopping block: the government’s power to negotiate drug price reductions, which has already lowered the cost of insulin and other much-used pharmaceuticals.

Project 2025 also wants to repeal the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which, after years of wrangling, is finally having an impact on our crumbling roads, aging airports and so much more.

Ban the Abortion Pill

Project 2025 wants the Food and Drug Administration to ban the drug mifepristone, which blocks a hormone needed for pregnancy development. Since its approval (and that of a companion drug) in 2000, use of the medication has soared and now accounts for 63 percent of all abortions. Meanwhile, the number of surgical abortions has dropped from more than 1.5 million yearly in the 1980s to fewer than 400,000 in 2023. 

Bolster President Trump’s Power

Mr. Trump has long argued that the “deep state” — by which he means the federal bureaucracy — stymied many of his policy initiatives. In 2020, he tried to address this real or imagined concern by reclassifying an estimated 50,000 civil servants as political appointees. President Biden repealed Mr. Trump’s executive order. Now Project 2025 wants it reinstated.

This may sound like inside baseball, but it is a critically important issue, as a huge increase in the number of political appointees (there are currently only about 4,000) would substantially increase the reach of presidential power.

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Reject the Lies: Trump's Economy Would Be A Mess

Among the exasperating things one sees is the "feeling" by many, particularly among the clueless MAGA base, that the U.S. economy would be better under a second Trump regime.  If one looks at the data and objective reality, the only thing that fuels this incorrect belief is the inflation that spiked as the world came out of the Covid-19 pandemic.  Never mind that such inflation was a worldwide phenomenon and that America has done a better job reducing than other advanced industrial nations.  Also, never mind that during the surge in inflation, corporate profits for both big oil and the cartel that controls much of the food supply in America were hitting all time highs with the pandemic and its aftermath thanks to corporate price gouging - the pandemic merely provided a useful smoke screen to dissemble about out of control corporate greed.  Now, inflation is down significantly and in some instances corporations have dropped prices in the face of consumer revolts. The other thing ignored by MAGA world --, which prefers living in a world of "alternate facts" - and a mostly totally hapless main stream media is the historic reality that the American economy does better under Democrat administrations while Republican presidents have regular greatly increased the national debt and worked to benefit billionaires and the very wealthy at the expense of everyone else. "Trickle down" economics simply do not work as demonstrated for decades of economic data and Trump's tariff proposals would be catastrophic for American consumers.  As a piece in Salon argues, it is time for the media and sane, thinking voters to reject the lies spread by Trump and his sycophants.  Here are excerpts:

Last month, a poll commissioned by the Financial Times found that people trusted Kamala Harris more on the economy than her felony-convicted opponent. To be fair, that poll was something of an outlier — at least until last week, when a USA Today/Suffolk poll also shows Harris’ numbers much improved on the question of the economy. 

Still, the idea that Donald Trump would somehow be better for the economy persists among millions of Americans who remember what prices were like before the COVID pandemic took down the world economy. Trump also benefits from a general bill of goods Americans were sold long ago: the entirely false idea that Republicans do a better job with the economy. 

Democrats should conquer their fears on this topic and calmly continue to point out how entirely wrong that is, even in the face of how people “feel” about the economy . . . . They should cede no ground on this crucial question — and, generally speaking, they are not. Refusing to stand up for reality is how we wound up with Trumpism in the first place. There is no good reason to surrender to “alternative facts.”

As for the media, it should insist on the truth as well. In our hyper-partisan, non-reality-based political environment, polluted 24/7 by disinformation spewed from Fox News and its faux-journalism spawn, and by corporate talking heads forever forecasting an economic downturn, actual journalists have a responsibility to remind the public that Democratic presidents have almost always done better — in fact, much better — than Republicans when it comes to the U.S. economy.

According to a much-cited academic study by Alan S. Blinder and Mark W. Watson, that’s been true at least since from the Truman administration through Barack Obama’s first term, and is true in every major economic category: GDP growth, job creation, unemployment, growth in real wages and controlling inflation. (That last very much the topic of the moment.)

Sure, inflation spiked during and after the worst months of the pandemic, and that was no fun for anyone. But that was a global problem, and the U.S. economy recovered more rapidly under the Biden administration far better than any other advanced countries. (Inflation has been slowing for more than two years now.)

We can only guess at how disastrously Trump would have done steering the economy in the same period, had he actually won the 2020 election he’s been lying about for four years. He showed us how well he can handle a major crisis during the pandemic, when  he delayed taking action, denied the science, interrupted experts with his blather about ultraviolet light and injecting bleach, and turned masks and vaccinations into political issues that led to countless numbers of needless deaths.

Think we should put that guy in charge of the world’s largest economy all over again? Big men, strong men, well-read men, with tears in their eyes, might ask WTF you’d been smoking. 

In an op-ed by Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, president of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute, published by the New York Times in June, we learned that CEOs of top corporations, most of them Republicans, are not supporting Trump — or at least not with their own money. Few of them did so in 2020 either, according to Sonnenfeld.

We know Trump is beloved by billionaire tech-bros and Wall Street hedge fund managers, so what’s up with the corporate CEOs? About a week before Sonnenfeld’s essay appeared, as it happens, Trump had appealed directly to many of those corporate leaders and did nothing help his case. After some CEOs at the Business Roundtable meeting expressed concern about his meandering and often incoherent speech, Trump responded on Truth Social by demanding 100% loyalty from business leaders, saying they should, somehow, be fired for incompetence. 

Maybe corporate leaders, who infamously don’t peer much beyond Q4, can see in the 78-year-old, multiply-convicted MAGA cult leader what his followers can’t: an increasingly unhinged, criminally minded man-child with no real business sense and, for that matter, no self-control; a man hell-bent on replacing the expertise of career civil servants with know-nothing toadies, upending our constitutional separation of powers and our international alliances.

In fairness, none of that sounds good for business.

It fits the pattern in place ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt lifted the country out of the Great Depression: A Republican president fumbles the economy after being handed a typically strong one by a Democrat, increases the national debt in service to the wealthy, oversees the creation of far fewer jobs and often drives the nation into recession.

Or to look at it the other way around, Democratic presidents have often walked into a mess left by a GOP predecessor. Both Obama and Biden were confronted with historic economic meltdowns, thanks to the subprime mortgage financial crisis and the mismanaged pandemic, before they even walked into the Oval Office.

Presidents have very little ability to affect gas prices or grocery prices, the things voters are most likely to notice. There’s always an element of luck in how the economy fares overall during a particular president’sl term. Even so, as Blinder and Watson note: 

The superiority of economic performance under Democrats rather than Republicans is nearly ubiquitous: it holds almost regardless of how you define success. By many measures, the performance gap is startlingly large — so large, in fact, that it strains credulity, given how little influence over the economy most economists (or the Constitution, for that matter) assign to the president of the United States.

Of the last 11 economic recessions in the U.S., 10 of them have come with a Republican in the White House. . . . .Republican presidents have underperformed Democrats in all the ways noted above in the modern era, including their tendency to increase the national debt by running deficits.

And despite the media’s facile comparisons of the Trump and Biden economies, Trump’s tariffs and tax cuts did nothing to improve the economy and caused the national debt to soar, after the pattern of his Republican predecessors. 

In contrast, under the Biden-Harris administration the economy has recovered well from the pandemic and, with the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, is poised for continued growth, creating jobs in red and blue states alike and building critically needed roads, bridges, airports, waterways, broadband and environmental improvements. 

With investments provided by the CHIPS and Science Act, the United States will no longer depend on foreign supply chains for semiconductors, which will be manufactured domestically. A series of tech hubs across the country are being funded to drive future innovation. Even with the recent slowdown in job growth, they’ve continued to grow quickly in rural “left-behind” counties that largely don’t vote Democratic.

Economic experts tell us that both Trump’s tariff plan and his proposal to extend or deepen tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations would make inflation worse — and so would his blatantly racist and profoundly impractical pledge for the mass deportation of immigrants. Maybe you’ve read about how crops rotted in the fields and hospitals lost critical workers in the U.K. after Brexit. Well, Trump’s cruel and anti-American deportation plan would be like Brexit on steroids. 

Would Trump purposely destroy the good things Biden and his team have accomplished? Without a doubt. Trump is angry and agitated anytime anyone else gets credit for something that works. He will gladly wreck the current economy both because he didn’t create it and because he’s loyal to Big Oil and other corporate behemoths that are gouging Americans with inflated prices and junk fees.

Any half-reasonable economic advisers Trump may have had during his first term have been replaced, as Sonnenfeld puts it, “by MAGA extremists and junior varsity opportunists.”

What kind of economic decision-making would MAGA’s authoritarian-based anti-wokeness lead to? A prime example is readily available from Florida’s combative, white-booted governor: going to war with your own state’s premier attraction.

On the one hand, as Salon’s Heather Digby Parton wrote in July, you have Joe Biden’s historically successful economic policies, which will likely continue under a Harris administration. On the other, you have Trump, the pick of anti-union, misogynist tech billionaires, who teased an infrastructure plan but never came up one, or any other useful economic policy. He’s once again offering only recycled “trickle-down” economics, preposterous tariff policies and a promise to mass-deport workers we desperately need. Trump recently praised Elon Musk for firing employees who complained about working conditions, telling him, “You’re the greatest!”

If we’re paying attention, we might notice that Trump’s undisciplined, self-serving know-it-all behavior has measurable negative consequences. In July, his thoughtless bloviations about Taiwan sent markets plummeting. He has regularly expressed his hopes for an economic crash that might help his election prospects.

Trump’s speech to the Economic Club of New York last week produced an incomprehensible word-salad about how his tariffs might help Americans struggling with child care costs. 

Comedian John Mulaney may have best captured the chaos and madness of Trump’s first (and, we hope, only) term in the White House: “There’s a horse loose in the hospital.” Do business people want to see that horse, now creaking with age and even more touchy and unpredictable, let loose in the ICU all over again? History should offer them the answer.

Voters need to wake up to historic economic reality and reject Trump and his voodoo economic policies.   America does not need to vote for the economic equivalent of Brexit (which has left the UK's economy severely damaged and prices soaring) in November.

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