and heel we will!
It took him three tries to spell “heal” correctly.
Aide: Sir, typo
Trump: Fixed it
Aide: No still there, "heel"
Trump: Yea, heel!
Aide: You mean "heal"
Trump: No I dont
Aide: Gimme your phone pic.twitter.com/uwzo8kzKKP— maura quint (@behindyourback) August 19, 2017
Moral apologist for white supremacists & KKK calls on country to "heel" since it has been divided for "decade." What an eloquent statesman. pic.twitter.com/2p3c6n4lDi
— Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) August 19, 2017
Also, this “our great country has been divided for decade” thing – what does he think he means? This is a guy who makes a huge point of playing only to his “base” while treating the rest of us, the large majority, as if we were criminals and traitors. It’s a guy who did more to amp up divisions than any presidential candidate most of us have ever seen. He wants us divided. He likes it like that.
Plus he can’t spell “heal.”
Maybe he really means heel. After all, to heel is to be obedient. We will obey the Donald; we will heel. (I for one do not intend to heel, or heal. I intend to remain divided if being united means being a Nazi, a Nazi sympathizer, KKK, a KKK sympathizer, misogynist, a misogynist sympathizer, homophobe, homophobe sympathizer, or someone who tries to “understand” any of the above).
Bless him. We all know that the spelling he’d desperately love to use is ‘heil’.
This is one of those moments where I really do think there’s something mentally wrong with him. Like, some kind of dementia. I was watching a piece of video from the nineties where he was talking about the Central Park 5, and it struck me that although he was clearly just as appalling a person then as he is now, the difference in how he speaks is quite stark.
Trump may not be the smartest man out there, but in that interview he is relatively coherent, speaks in full sentences and makes horrid but comprehensible statements. He is educated and in this interview, it shows, even if the views he expresses are abhorrent. (I may be belaboring my point here, sorry, I’m trying to make clear that I’m talking about his cognition in the abstract).
The comparison between that man and the one on display as POTUS makes it clear (to me) that Trump is suffering from anomia and deficits in executive function such one might see in early stages of Alzheimer’s Disease and other dementia syndromes. It’s rude to diagnose someone from the couch, but when someone has the power to destroy all life on earth, perhaps a little rudeness is warranted.
Yes, I’ve seen more than one post or tweet sharing a clip of him from the past to…well to him now, making that point: he has deteriorated cognitively a lot.
It’s bizarre, really, that no one in his family was concerned enough to get him diagnosed.
It doesn’t seem so bizarre to me. I have experience of this both personally and professionally, but I’ll offer my personal anecdote here.
My grandmother had vascular dementia, and in the early days it was very difficult for us to get my grandfather and my aunt (who lived with them) to accept there was a problem. My mother and I knew there something was wrong, because we only saw her once or twice a month at most and the decline was obvious. But when you see a person every day, and each tiny decline is subtle, you can be too close to see what’s happening.
Even after my aunt accepted that something was wrong, it was only when my grandmother got violent that she finally accepted that something had to be done. (Violence is not uncommon, because a person who is confused and believes they are being forced to do something by strangers reacts in a primitive way).
So to my eyes, Trump’s family are behaving pretty much as I would expect. He’s not yet demonstrating the symptoms (at least in public) that typically spur a family to seek help. Denial can be very strong especially in the kids, because there are few things harder than accepting that a parent is slipping away from you. And as much as we despise Trump, I’ve never doubted that his kids love him.
I don’t think anyone in his family in recent decades has had the authority over him to get him to a doctor, or that he has been willing to take sincere or well-meaning advice about his health that he wouldn’t want to believe seriously, whether it comes from a doctor, family member, or anyone else. He’s the smartest person in any room – according to him – about anything, medical advice included.
The report on his health from his supposed doctor during the campaign read like some sort of bizarre medical fan-fic – there’s no reason to expect on that basis that he’s had any examination from anyone with real qualifications that has led to any report of any value that he both understands and accepts.
And as for his family, it’s hard to see genuine warm human feeling surviving in that environment – the kids in public life aren’t showing evidence of it, and Melania may just be waiting for this to be over and enjoying the wealth meanwhile. (It’s a wild guess; I don’t pretend to understand living like that well.) I don’t think we can assume normal family care there – even if he were capable of acting on it if they spent it on him.
Yes that all makes sense.
Unlike you though, Claire, I do doubt that his kids love him. I think they love the way of life he gives them, but not him so much. I don’t know that of course, but I don’t consider familial love so automatic that it always overcomes even his level of hideousness.
Keep in mind that there were tapes of G.W.Bush before he entered politics that showed a much larger and more precise vocabulary that that on display during his presidency. Bush obviously cultivated a “real Texan” persona, and Trump may currently be role-playing as well.
I think his kids are more like slaves to him. But it is a good point about the dementia and children denial phase.
I wonder if the decade thing came from his (and a disturbingly large number of others) belief that racism only turned up with Obama.
Loath as I am to defend the odious git, it is very easy to make all sorts of errors from a phone/tablet keypad. After I installed the Google keypad on my phone, I found the number of wrong words I was sending went up dramatically (“all sorts” above came out as “AOL sorts” before I spotted it. And “spotted” came out variously as “stopped” and “speed”).
Having seen the sort of mangling that swiped/predictive text can make of what you *thought* you were typing, I’ve stopped drawing any conclusions about a person’s ability with language from their tweets or quick comments.
https://www.facebook.com/144310995587370/photos/a.271728576178944.71555.144310995587370/1636853892999732/?type=3&theater¬if_t=notify_me_page¬if_id=1503221236667190
https://www.facebook.com/144310995587370/photos/a.271728576178944.71555.144310995587370/1636860122999109/?type=3&theater