Renewed Trump Dementia Concerns

I’ll say it up front so there’s no mistake: I don’t think Trump’s a dementia case to the extent of a Zhou—not really close. I’m even open to variant diagnoses. But the bottom line is simply that all is not well with Trump’s mental health. He’s slipping and his behavior in public is increasingly inappropriate, indicating that his judgment and impulse control are becoming impaired. As in all such cases, symptoms vary from day to day, but this is troubling in the circumstances. Contrast Trump’s regular lapses into inappropriateness with Putin’s public appearances. One of the two seems pretty much as sharp as a tack—and it ain’t The Donald.

Yesterday Judge Nap, LJ, and Ray touched on this issue at the end of their Intel Roundup. Some of Ray’s remarks point at these issues that I’ve been talking about. The inappropriateness comes out in Trump’s public appearances, which are increasingly rambling monologues all about himself and his unique greatness. Rambling on about oneself in public—that’s inappropriate. That inappropriate behavior is matched also by his public fit of pique over not getting the Nobel in his first year—like Obama. Can you say: Insecure? Yesterday morning I noted that Putin was probably playing Trump—playing to Trump’s obvious insecurities and need to appear to himself as The Great Man. In Ray’s comments we see reference to the ass kissing (“fawning”) behavior of the cabinet officers, but also to what I referred to: Putin plays along and strokes Trump’s Nobel insecurities. When you combine that with Xi’s hardball, we almost see a good cop/bad cop team.

Ray, I don’t know where it goes next, but well, …

I think the the thing that bothers me most, Judge, is that as I said before, Trump is not okay and if the performance before the UN where he went on for over an hour about petty politics in the US, if the performance before those generals in Quantico was not enough, watch the first 40 minutes--mind you, 40 minutes--of the “cabinet meeting” just yesterday or did ...

Judge: No, it’s unwatchable, Ray.

Ray: My god. You know, it’s all about Trump and, actually, he didn’t ad lib it. He had somebody write down all this noxious stuff and everybody turned around then, he said, “Okay, now we don’t have a lot more time. Anybody else want to say ...?” Now cabinet meetings are for cabinet officers to report to the president what’s going on. Right. It was all effusive. It was adulatory. It was fawning by each and every one of them. ‘Oh, you did a great job,’ and all this stuff. Now, maybe he needs that. And you know Putin seems willing to play along and not alienate him. But, my god, where does that lead? Where does that lead?

Judge: This is not exactly George Washington with Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson in his cabinet. Let’s put it that way.

LJ: You know, Sy Hersh came out with an article this week in his Substack. He was doing mea culpas that he didn’t write this kind of piece when Joe Biden was in clear mental decline.

Judge: What did he say in his piece?

LJ: Well, what he said was, basically, he’s hearing from people around Trump that Trump’s slipping. Trump is not not what he used to be. Which tracks with people I know that have been around Trump, that he’s lost his ability, really, to read the room. Somebody should pull a comparison of how Trump talked off the cuff six, seven years ago with this monotone like Dustin Hoffman in “Rainman.” There’s no deviation, no inflection, and some of it seems to almost be mumbly. I think there’s something wrong there. He may have moments of lucidity but there are other moments where he’s just not firing on all the cylinders.

I’ll paste in the for the public teaser portion of Sy Hersh’s article that LJ refers to. This isn’t rocket science from a psychological point of view—just common sense observations:

IS TRUMP IN COGNITIVE DECLINE?

The view from inside is that the president has been slipping

Perseveration is a medical term used in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, and speech-language pathology to describe a particular response such as a phrase that is repeated or a gesture that is inappropriate. It’s a symptom most commonly seen in patients who have PTSD, autism, traumatic brain injury, or dementia. I thought of the term, which I heard many times over several years when a close relative was experiencing the degeneration of dementia, while viewing President Donald Trump’s seventy-one minute speech to an estimated eight hundred US military leaders who were assembled, for reasons still not clear, at the order of Pete Hegseth, the Army National Guard reserve major who is now the secretary of war, at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, on September 30.

After a rah-rah opening speech by Hegseth, the president delivered his usual mixture of personalized history and complaints—most notably, he has repeatedly claimed credit for solving international crises that he did not solve—that some of his close aides in the White House understand to be yet another sign of his increasing mental disorganization and inability to focus at high-level meetings.

Most significantly, I was told, Trump, always masterful in dealing with crowds, large or small, is no longer able to “read the room”—quickly size up the audience and let his instincts as a showman take over and get the audience engaged. It would have been refreshing, and perhaps unprecedented, for Trump to outline his views on foreign policy and give the assembled generals and admirals a chance to ask questions of their president. Instead, they got a reprise of Trump’s greatest triumphs. The president returned to one of his most misguided views—that of himself as a settler of wars. “I have settled so many wars since we’re here,” he said. “I’ve settled seven and yesterday we might have settled the biggest of them all,” referring to ongoing talks between Israel and Hamas. “Although,” Trump added, “I don’t know. Pakistan, India, was very big, both nuclear powers. I settled that.” ...

Yeah. Yikes!

How does this play out in the real world? Well, what’s going on, and Trump’s responses, aren’t reassuring. Obviously, Trump doesn’t make decisions without taking advice—not like the way he enjoys speaking off the cuff and shocking his listeners. Well, we hope not. The fear, however, is that, just as Putin appears to be playing on Trump’s neediness and insecurity and stroking him, those with access to Trump and who have their own special agendas may be doing the same thing. I sense an administration that’s losing its grip, as its plans for a Great Turnaround come to nought. Desperation time, which fuels bad decisions. And Trump not at the top of his game. It’s getting serious.

Philip Pilkington @philippilk

If this doesn’t get resolved fairly quickly the AI bubble will likely burst and the entire US economy will unwind in a way that very few people are ready for.

Note PP’s use of the word “few”, meaning, some are ready for it:

Philip Pilkington @philippilk

5h

The late-stage imperial looting is really something to behold.

blake @blakestonks

15h

Shoutout to this guy for opening a $330M short position on Ethereum minutes before Trump announced more tariffs on China.

Let the corruption live on.

Puts a new twist on MAGA, that.

Let’s talk about impulse control …

Philip Pilkington @philippilk

5h

It is a complete mystery to me why Trump would go YOLO [you only live once] on China at the same time as the AI-driven tech bubble is being watched nervously by pretty much everyone.

Zhao DaShuai 东北进修 @zhao_dashuai

19h

China is about to pop that AI bubble.

King Dollar watch:

Luke Gromen @LukeGromen

Oct 10

The US government is selling USTs to buy commodities and selling USDs to buy Argentine pesos and you’re trying to call a top in gold?

Good luck with that.

In related matters—because everything these days is connected—here’s an item that I’ve had open in a tab for several days. Send it to friends who are irate about Venezuela flooding America with drugs to kill us all:

Bringing a Howitzer to a Knife Fight: US Armada Off Venezuela

Washington’s escalating regime-change offensive against Venezuela uses drug interdiction conflated with combatting “terrorism” as a pretext for expansion of imperial militarism

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Recently retired head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Pino Arlacchi, pronounced the cartel “a product of Trump’s imagination… useful for justifying sanctions, blockades and threats of military intervention against a country which, incidentally, sits on one of the planet’s largest oil reserves.” Venezuelan analyst Clodovaldo Hernández described the cartel and its alleged connection to Maduro as “nothing more than a reheated dish that was never edible.”

False narrative on drugs in the Caribbean

Casting doubt on Trump’s avowal that the boats were carrying “fentanyl mostly,” a congressional CRS report reported that Mexico is the main source of illicit fentanyl entering the US. PolitiFact also found that most fentanyl comes from Mexico. And the State Department had hitherto mainly described land/over-the-border routes for fentanyl.

According to reports from the United Nations, the European Union, and the US Drug Enforcement Agency, Venezuela is essentially free of drug production and processing – no coca, no marijuana, and certainly no fentanyl. The authoritative UN 2025 World Drug Report identifies Colombia and secondarily Peru and Ecuador as the major coca growers and/or cocaine producers.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of the cocaine traffic is from the Pacific, not from Venezuela’s Caribbean coast, according to the US National Drug Threat Assessment. The world’s leading cocaine exporter is Ecuador, using banana boats owned by the family of Trump’s ally and right-wing president of the country, Daniel Naboa.

The war on “terrorism”

The Herald marveled how Trump dispatched an armada of warships – destroyers and a nuclear submarine – plus F-35 stealth jets and 4,500 troops for drug interdiction. In contrast, the knowledgeable military press, such as the US Army-funded Stars and Stripes, skeptically described the deployment as “bringing a howitzer to a knife fight.”

In fact, drug interdiction is a ruse for Washington’s goal of regime-change in Venezuela, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

US administrations have steadily merged the war on drugs with the war on terror, framing Latin American drug trafficking as a national security threat to justify military operations. George W. Bush rebranded Plan Colombia as counter-terrorism, and Barack Obama increased the military buildup.

This laid the present groundwork for Trump, who tied migration to terrorism and cast Venezuelan refugees as a criminal invasion. The president labeled Venezuelan migrants as terrorists to expand executive authority to carry out naval deployments, extrajudicial strikes, and mass deportations. And he weaponized the human rights discourse to criminalize migrants.

Further, Trump invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, designated drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and directed the Pentagon to prepare options for military force against cartels. However, conflating “organized crime/drug cartel” with “terrorism/wartime enemy” is legally and conceptually problematic.

Such measures not only violate international norms but also amplify a narco-terror narrative. They falsely link the Venezuelan government to major drug trafficking while promoting domestic support for intervention in Venezuela.

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