About his mental acuity
What prompted me to ask Google about “routine” MRIs was Heather Cox Richardson’s post yesterday about Trump’s mental acuity.
President Donald J. Trump’s behavior over the holiday weekend has increased concern about his mental acuity. A rant on his social media account at midnight on Thanksgiving itself threatened to strip citizenship from naturalized immigrants, called Minnesota governor Tim Walz a profoundly offensive slur, and ended: “HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL, except those that hate, steal, murder, and destroy everything that America stands for—You won’t be here for long!”
On NBC’s Meet the Press yesterday, Walz responded by calling for Trump to release the results of an MRI he told reporters he underwent in October, later saying: “I have no idea what they analyze, but whatever they analyze, they analyzed it well and they said that I had as good a result as they’ve ever seen.” Although Trump told reporters the MRI was part of his routine physical, medical experts say such tests are not routine.
Walz said to Kristen Welker: “Here we got a guy on Thanksgiving, where we spent time with our families, we ate, we played Yahtzee, we cheered for football or whatever. This guy is apparently in a room, ranting about everything else. This is not normal behavior. It is not healthy. And presidents throughout time have released a couple things. They’ve released their tax returns—not Donald Trump—and they’ve released their medical records—not Donald Trump. And look, the MRI is one thing, but I think what’s most concerning about this is, as your viewers out there are listening, has anyone in the history of the world ever had an MRI assigned to them and have no idea what it was for, as he says? So look, it’s clear the President’s fading physically. I think the mental capacity, again, ranting, you know, crazily at midnight on Thanksgiving about everything else. There’s reasons for us to be concerned. This is a guy that randomly says the airspace over Venezuela’s closed. He’s ruminating on if you could win a nuclear war. Look, this is a serious position. It’s the most powerful position in the world, and we have someone at midnight throwing around slurs that demonize our children, at the same time he’s not solving any of the problems. So I’m deeply concerned that he is incapable of doing the job.”
Last night, on Air Force One, Trump responded oddly to a reporter’s question about Walz’s call for Trump to release the MRI results: “[I]f they want to release it, it’s okay with me to release it,” Trump said. “It’s perfect. It’s like my phone call where I got impeached. It’s absolutely perfect…. [I]f you want to have it released, I’ll release it.” When a reporter asked “What part of your body was the MRI looking at?” Trump answered: “I have no idea. It was just an MRI. What part of the body? It wasn’t the brain because I took a cognitive test and I aced it. I got a perfect mark, which you would be incapable of doing,” he said, pointing at the female reporter. He then pointed at another female reporter and said: “You, too.”
He didn’t get a perfect mark. If the test were on misogyny on the other hand, that he would ace.
Today White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt released a memo from the president’s physician, Sean P. Barbabella, saying that “advanced imaging” was performed on the president as a preventative measure. The memo said this imaging “was performed because men in his age group benefit from a thorough evaluation of cardiovascular and abdominal health.” It said Trump’s cardiovascular and abdominal imaging is “perfectly normal.”
Conspicuously absent from the memo was any reference to the president’s brain.
Picky picky picky. Brain, abdomen; what’s the difference?
Is this significantly different from Trump’s crazed rants five or six years ago?
If that means between the Trump brain and the Trump rear end, not much.
I see no way you can have an MRI and not know what part of the body they are looking at. I’ve had at least three MRIs; they made it clear they were looking at my shoulders, and I was embedded in a machine that made me realize that there are at least a few cases where I can become claustrophobic, a condition I never worried about before. None of these were done as part of a routine physical, though. I had definite complaints.
I am married to an older man (a bit older than me) and he has had MRIs; they were always for something. They were always about something. Routine physicals might include mammography (not for Trump); prostate exam; colonoscopy; EKG, perhaps, at his age. I’ve never heard of MRIs being done routinely, and I once worked in insurance.
I personally don’t see a difference. Some people refer to his decline, and I think that’s fair enough, but I don’t think these crazed rants are part of that. I think they are part of his persona, and they appear to me to be basically the same sorts of things we’ve seen from him since he started running for president. They may have been seen sooner, but I have not been a follower of his, did not watch his show, and ignored him until he forced me to notice him…which seems to be the only thing he is truly good at, forcing people to notice him.
iknklast:
The art of winning in politics, particularly for despots and wannabees like Putin and Trump, is to appeal to the ego of the follower rather than to the conscience. Trump is happy for the Ukrainians to be thrown to the Russian wolves, enhancing in the process the ‘Great Russian’ chauvinism so much a part of that empire’s history. Under the Putin regime, Russian dissenters, such as they are, are keeping their heads well and truly down.
Trump appears to me to be uniting both Latin America and Western Europe against him, in an anti-Trump coalition stretching from John O’Groats in the north of Scotland to the south end of Terra del Fuego; virtually from pole to shining pole. Quite an achievement.
CORRECTION RE #4:: My sincere apologies to the people of Greenland, whose country according to my high-school geographer’s globe extends all the way to the North Pole, with its southernmost tip well north of the northernmost tip of Britain, which is John O’Groats. Trump offended them all by wanting to make them a state of his Greater US, and arguably as an insurance against the encroaching anthropogenic global warming, which BTW, he streuously denies is happening.