YMCA

 

     During Trump's predictable shitshow of a trip to Asia, he reminded us yet again why the 25th Amendment was passed by the 89th Congress in 1965. On the aircraft carrier USS George Washington, Trump couldn't explain how water worked to the US Navy that's now working for free. He also said he doesn't "like good-looking people". Elsewhere, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi had to navigate Trump around a room as if he was a lost tourist looking for s toilet.

     But, yeah, keep crying about Biden and his autopen.

     As he was on Air Force One, he took another shot at Rep. Jasmine Crockett, calling her "low IQ", his racist and misogynistic default position on any woman of color. Recently, he also challenged AOC to take an IQ test (I'd go him one better and demand they both take an IQ test game show-style and announce the results on a PPV).

     But he also bragged, again, at acing the IQ test he thinks was administered to him after his recent MRI at Walter Reed (his second annual physical in six months).

     As someone who's sat for several IQ tests in the past, I can assure you that someone's intelligence quotient involves a lot more than memorizing five words for a short period of time. While I don't necessarily believe that your standard IQ test is a true barometer of someone's overall intelligence, it's certainly more comprehensive than being able to point out a giraffe or an elephant. They generally take over an hour to complete 

     Trump likes to dance like an overloaded washer to the gay hookup song, "YMCA" at his rallies. But in this case, YMCA means, "Your Montreal Cognitive Assessment", which was what Trump is, once again, crowing about acing. It's administered to people who have recently suffered a stroke or some other potentially debilitating medical episode and is intended to test for signs of dementia. Just the very fact that the staff at Walter Reed thought to administer him the Montreal Cognitive Assessment should give us cause for worry.

     Trump was never the brightest bulb on the tree, to begin with. One of his professors at Wharton Business School called him "the dumbest Goddamn student I ever had". His marketing professor, William T Kelly, further said Trump was often unprepared for study groups, was loath to study and thought he knew it all, which is perfectly consistent with Trump's attitude toward everything today.

     He once pronounced Yosemite as "Yo Semite" (A Freudian slip of the ages) and pronounced Nepal as "nipple" and Bhutan as "button." He thought you could just blow apart a hurricane with a nuclear weapon and told us to inject disinfectants into our bodies. That kind of idiocy should disqualify anyone from the office of the presidency.

     It's bad enough that any idiot could get elected to the most powerful office in the world with absolutely no qualifications whatsoever and one can be ushered into the Oval Office after just winning an election using an antiquated Electoral College and not even a popular vote.

     But then you have to add dementia to the mix. 

     Not that Trump was all there during his first term. He once called Apple CEO Tim Cook "Tim Apple" and couldn't even remember his own wife's name. And in this term, on at least two occasions, Trump kept asking for people who were sitting right across the table from him. But people don't get sharper as they age. The opposite happens. Neurologists have been saying the brain starts shrinking at age 60 and that dementia is hereditary (Fred Trump died from Alzheimer's in 1999).

     Trump is pushing 80 and he's not getting better. His bizarre forward tilt that makes him look as if he's hanging off a coat rack is a clear sign of frontotemporal dementia, a symptom that was first diagnosed in 1888.

     Stupid is bad enough. Dementia is positively frightening and, as someone who'd recently cared for someone who'd had it, I know what I'm talking about. Rages are part and parcel to dementia and, again, I'd lived through that. The subject knows something's wrong but they're so demented, they can't quite put their finger on what's wrong, so they lash out and don't care how much they hurt their closest intimates.

     Imagine those rages being manifested by someone who has the awesome power of the US government in their hands. Oh, wait. We don't have to imagine. We're seeing that scenario being played out in real time before our eyes. 13 boats bombed in the Caribbean, scores of innocents dead. US cities being invaded. Imagined enemies being persecuted by the DOJ.

     To use that wonderful phrase from Better Call Saul, our country is being run by "a chimp with a machine gun". And we're getting past the point where we need to decide between saving our country or the fragile ego of a demented old tyrant.