Aced it
Is there anything left in there?
Nikki Haley on Saturday questioned whether Donald Trump is mentally capable of serving as president again after he repeatedly seemed to confuse her with former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a campaign speech.
As she campaigned in Keene, New Hampshire, Haley referenced Trump’s speech the night before, in which he mistakenly asserted that Haley was in charge of Capitol security on January 6, 2021, when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the building seeking to stop the certification of his loss to Democrat Joe Biden.
Trump first said that Haley turned down security offered by his administration on Jan. 6 and then again mentioned Haley, adding, “They destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence, everything, deleted and destroyed all of it.”
Haley, Pelosi, what’s the difference? They’re both female, they both talk, they both don’t suck Trump’s dick, so what the hell is the difference between them? Nothing of significance, obviously.
“It’s a distinction without a difference. It’s Nikki and Nancy,” Trump campaign senior adviser Chris LaCivita said to reporters Saturday night. “What’s the difference?”
See? What I’m saying. Their names both begin with N, too. How much more identical can you get?
At his rally Saturday night in Manchester, Trump said that he took a cognitive test and “aced it.”
Nah. He didn’t take a test, and if he had he wouldn’t have “aced” it. He’s a skilled criminal, that much is clear, but intelligent, no.
“I’ll let you know when I go bad. I really think I’ll be able to tell you,” he added. “I feel my mind is stronger now than it was 25 years ago. Is that possible?”
In his case?
The question answers itself.
Regarding that cognition test, I read somewhere* a few days ago that the words he claims to have remembered – man, person, woman, TV, camera – would not all have been from the test he was given. The reason given is that the five words to be remembered would all be unrelated, so it could have included either man or person or woman, but only one of them. Similarly, it would not use both TV and camera. The words used must come from different categories precisely to prevent the chance of one word suggesting or leading to another: to remove the risk of correct answers by word association rather than genuine recall.
So in reality, if Trump’s recalled words really were ‘man, person, woman, TV, camera’ then not only did he not ‘ace’ the test, he absolutely failed it.
*If it was here, I apologise for the repeat.
Last year I had to put my father into dementia care against his wishes. He had begun to experience significant delirium and couldn’t distinguish the present from the distant past amongst other issues. Right at the beginning of the process I asked his doctor to perform a cognitive test. They did the standard test very similar to Trump’s much vaunted man, person … test – like Trump he aced it. They then did a more detailed test that forms part of geriatric driving assessments. He scored less than 30%.
Trump is clearly not as bad as my father was, yet, but neither has he been properly assessed for cognitive decline.
AoS heh yes it was here.
It’s always been the funniest (in a disgusting way) thing about his claim, because OBVIOUSLY a verbal memory test isn’t going to be a set of words that are clues. They also aren’t going to be things in the immediate vicinity of the person being tested, like camera tv. The fact that he pretended such giveaway words were the test just demonstrates how THICK he is.
To the MAGA crowd, I suspect ‘they’re both Trump-hatin’ bitchez’ is as far as the reasoning goes. But this might peel off some of the more aware Republicans at the general.
I’d like to think that the ‘more aware’ Republicans have already been peeled off. Maybe not, but you’d have to be pretty unaware to think Trump was an ok guy for the Presidency at this point.
Oh it’s not that they’re not aware, it’s that they consider it worth it.
Wait. Were you ever good?
That reminds me of someone else. Now, who was it? Ah, yes: HAL-9000.
Why the GOP base isn’t that worried about Trump’s mental state:
1) The Are You Not Entertained crowd: “All I need him to do is give speeches and social media releases that Own The Libs! As long as he entertains me and pisses off the people I hate, that’s what really matters. It’s not the president actually does anything important.”
2) The Ideologues: “I’d prefer a mentally competent president, but as long as he can sign his name, it’ll be fine. All I need him to do is win the presidency and sign whatever bills a GOP Congress puts in front of him, and appoint whatever judges the Federalist Society tells him to.”
3) The Hopelessly Naive: “The institutional guardrails will hold. Trump doesn’t actually need to run things himself, we can keep him distracted with shiny objects while the chief of staff and cabinet do the real work. And if he really goes off the rails, there’s always the 25th Amendment or impeachment, and surely we can count on Trump’s hand-picked VP and cabinet and/or a GOP Congress that mostly worships him to do the right thing and remove him from power.”
The number 2 is dumbest of all: put anyone else forward with a pulse and your win is nearly a sure thing, but no, you’ve gotta win with the candidate with the lowest chance of success. Isn’t their agenda more important than fielding a terrible candidate?
BKiSA,
Two problems with that. First, I think your premise is disputable — polls show Trump doing more or less just as well against Biden as other candidates. And that’s without factoring in that there’s a good chance Trump would do everything he could to sabotage a non-Trump nominee.
Second, even if you’re right about general election matchups, there’s a “you can’t get there from here” problem.
Sure, most elected officials or leaders in the GOP — including many of the ones who fawn over Trump publicly — can’t stand him, and would prefer someone else. But party nominations aren’t decided in a smoke-filled backroom any more. Someone would have to beat Trump in a primary, and, well, we see how that’s going. Neither of the explicitly anti-Trump candidates (Hutchison, Christie) went anywhere, the “Diet Coke Trump” (DeSantis) just pulled out of the race, the “Trump but more smug and arrogant” version (Ramaswamy) never had a shot, and it’s not looking good for Nikki Haley with her “Trump was a great president and is being unfairly persecuted, but vote for me anyway” message. GOP voters like Trump, or at least, enough of them do, when combined with the “I don’t like him but” crowd.
You could tell a similar story on the Democratic side, of course. Not that I think Trump and Biden are equivalents, just that it doesn’t matter how many Democrats “wish” someone other than Biden was the nominee, the fact is that nobody’s going to beat Biden in a primary contest, and I doubt any “big name” challenger would fare much better than Dean Phillips is.
Hypothetical Alternative Candidate always polls well, but it rarely translates into anything on actual ballots. (For that matter, I can tell another version of this story about third party candidacies. Lots of people will tell pollsters they would love a third option. The problem is that some of those folks want an option farther to the right, some want one farther to the left, some want someone in between the two parties ideologically, some want a magical mystery candidate who agrees with all of their idiosyncratic views, some don’t know or give a crap about policy and just want someone they’d “like to have a beer with” better.