So, I’m a little late to the party here, but OMG, that rat bastard bully-boy Ron DeSantis has pulled out of the race for the Republican nomination, quitting after the Iowa caucuses. The first primary! One kick at the can and it’s all over! He’s not even going to hang around for New Hampshire! Yay! The best part is that he wasted about 150 million bucks of oligarch money that flowed into his PAC – named, get this, “Never Back Down” - when everybody in the billionaire class was hoping he had a good shot at beating Donald (there are reports that of the millions squandered, more was spent on private planes than advertising). Supposedly, DeSantis was the lesser evil. I didn’t hardly agree, and suffered a major case of the heebie-jeebies when all the hype made it sound like Ron was all but a shoo-in. Well, I needn’t have worried, praise Yahweh. DeSantis ran what may one day be judged the worst political campaign in American history, and now has to skulk back to Florida so he can keep banning books and passing draconian laws that violate human and constitutional rights, at least until the voters boot him out of the Governor’s mansion. Buh-bye, Ron, and I hope Disney pounds you into the ground like a tent peg. I hope a 30-foot anaconda slithers out of the Everglades and finds its way right to your bedroom. Asshole.
Let’s now allow ourselves five minutes of euphoric schadenfreude. Go ahead, whoop it up. I’ll wait.
O.K.?
Now stop being happy, because Ron’s hilarious self-destruction doesn’t save us from a fate worse than death. He was crushed by this guy, who’s now a mortal lock to take the nomination:
God Above, I’m sick of that hideous face.
Yes, if the pundits are getting it right, it’s all over but the diaper change. Conventional wisdom has it that Nikki Haley doesn’t have a hope of stopping him, and never did, so here we are, still contending with The Donald, only this time it’s worse. Way worse, because on top of being a criminal moron, Mr. Poutypants is losing his marbles, and starting to jabber like a gibbon at those Nuremberg rallies he loves to hold. The pundits are finally talking about it: Trump looks like he’s succumbing to dementia.
He was always such a lousy, incoherent public speaker, straining to read the teleprompter and regularly getting the words quite risibly wrong, that it’s hard to tell. The reader might recall the famous 4th of July speech during which he once again lost the thread trying to read from the screen, and had to improvise – always a disaster – until he wound up claiming that the Continental Army under Washington not only “rammed the ramparts” but also “took over the airports”:
”At least he didn’t say ‘rammed the man parts’” quipped an unusually witty David Frum.
So, are we simply observing the same old Donald, who’s really no more demented than he ever was? Or is his brain, never particularly powerful, now running dangerously short of synapses? Sad to say, given the stakes, that it really is starting to look like the latter.
Look at how he goes off on a tangent during what I think was an attempt to commit to improving America’s ballistic missile defences:
That seemed to be his impression of how the Israeli Iron Dome system does its thing, you know, beep bop boop, then bang.
Or how about his strange foray into the workings of electromagnetism:
Nobody could understand what the fuck he was talking about, but I think I know: I suspect he was remembering his opposition to the adoption of electromagnetic catapults (not elevators, as he now recalls) in the design of the newest class of aircraft carriers (he really did have a strong opinion on this, and amazingly, he wasn’t wrong), which he now thinks was a bad idea because aircraft carriers operate out in the ocean, right? Oceans are made of water, yes? That’s bad, because water kills magnets. Which it doesn’t. Also, I’m not sure the good people at John Deere would have been the best ones to set things straight. Maybe he thinks Deere makes elevators as well as combine harvesters, which they do, sort of, if grain elevators count.
Here he is talking about the perils of “de-banking”.
What’s de-banking? It’s not anything. Just another failure to read the teleprompter. I don’t even have a theory about the word he was actually supposed to say. Once again, we see him trying to improvise when he stumbles, and he winds up, somehow, at griping about electric cars.
He mixed up Nickki Haley with Nancy Pelosi, while attempting to lie about whose fault it was that the Capitol was sacked on January 6:
He was similarly confused when he asserted that Biden was so incompetent at foreign affairs that he was going to drag America into “World War Two”, as well as on the many occasions he’s insisted he ran against Obama in 2016. Then there are the times when he just seems to wander off somewhere inside himself while his mouth keeps running:
As Tina Fey once cracked about a somewhat less alarming lurch into incoherence by Sarah Palin, it looked like he got a little lost in the corn maze there.
Only God knows where he meant to go with this response to a question:
Look, I’m not a neurologist, so what do I know about the telltale symptoms of dementia, but Donald is sounding more lost and confused by the day, and that ain’t good. Maybe he’s just an old guy who’s been under an unholy crapload of stress, what with all those civil suits and criminal prosecutions to deal with, and is literally losing sleep most nights. Pile up enough anxiety and insomnia, and heck, anybody starts to sound like a running back who just had his bell rung by a 300 pound defensive end, right? Maybe that’s all it is. It’s possible, I guess. It just doesn’t seem like that to me, and I’m worried that the United States is about to hand the nuclear codes to a sun-downing brainstem who can’t tell you whether that’s a picture of a giraffe, an elephant, or a goddam vacuum cleaner, and keeps putting the toaster in the fridge. I know, that’s what the 25th Amendment is supposed to be for, but it’s hard to have any confidence that the MAGA cultists of the next Trump Administration would invoke it. Then what?
Just as an aside, when, for the love of Christ, do we get to stop asking ourselves how is this possible? How did we get here? No time soon, I guess, because not only is the GOP about to nominate, for the third time, a twice-impeached, four-times-indicted, coup-plotting, emolument-gobbling, thief of an adjudicated rapist with express plans to usher in a dictatorship, he’s decompensating right before our eyes.
If Trump has the nomination as sewn up as everybody thinks, then we have to hope that the broad voting public starts to pay attention, and realizes that Trump isn’t just the blithering idiot he was last time around, he’s midway through a disastrous cognitive decline that disqualifies him from running the three-legged race at the Calhoun County Fair, let alone the affairs of a nuclear-armed superpower. His handlers may try to hide it. They might attempt to limit his speaking events, and keep him well clear of any debates (as indeed they have already), but you can’t run for President without standing at a bunch of rostrums along the way. You also can’t keep Trump away from a microphone. The MAGA faithful might refuse to accept the evidence of their own eyes and ears, but surely the majority will understand that the man’s got a brain suffused with plaque that’s not getting enough blood flow.
I live in hope.
the needlefish 