Bluesky

Honestly, it sounds like he just misheard the question.

Obviously, he rambled and spouted word salad throughout his answer, but that's how he's spoken throughout the past ten years.

Before this comment was posted (thank you for quoting it, btw), I watched all of yesterday's Trump material looking for what the tweet was referring to. Watched the 8 minute helicopter talk, the two gulag tour videos, and the hour-plus long press event where this question came from (toward the end). By and large, Trump was coherent. He understood where he was, what he was doing, was (almost) referencing actual events and data as opposed to lying at all times... As far as his handicap goes, I would say he was shooting above par.

And it tracks for me, because he's been spending his whole life dreaming about the day he'd get to lock up thousands of brown people in a deadly swamp with only the guise of due process. It's not like he's at a UN meeting or something. Mentally speaking, his head has always been at Alligator Auschwitz.

Which is really the point. It is not being called Alligator Auschwitz by its critics only for effect. Calling Trump and his administration Nazis is not slander or hyperbole. It's descriptive. It's what's happening. They are attempting to dismantle all social safety nets and civil rights, to replace it with a true fascist regime, and so far, they are right on course.

So, it bothers me when I see things like this tweet, saying that the hiding of Trump's mental decline is the new Big Lie. Because it's not. Was it a Big Lie when Biden's people tried to present him as more cognitively able than he was? No, at most, it was a regular lie. And Biden was arguably worse on that debate stage than we have seen Trump to date.

That is not to say that Trump is not in cognitive decline. He is. He did seem to mishear that question, and combined with the fact that he will never admit to being wrong, that's a dangerous combo. Hearing loss is often an early indicator of dementia, at least in part because having less sensory information about the world around you makes it harder to keep your thoughts tied to the real world. In the next few years, we could see a true mad king, and that sure is something to be alarmed about.

But the Big Lie is something like claiming an election is stolen despite never being able to produce a shred of evidence. Or something that rises to that level of deceit to attack the foundations of democracy itself. Such as calling a presumptive mayoral nominee a criminal and saying he should be deported, while frequently floating the idea of "deporting" US citizens. Or saying that a governor's "crime" was running for office. These are not just regular lies, they are truly fascist lies. That is what we are trying to delineate and why it is important not to ignore the parts of Trump that are still comprehensible. We should not give him the moral credit of being an oblivious fool while he is speaking coherently about detaining and renditioning political opponents who have committed no crimes.

I knew he was going to get elected again when I saw that rally where he cut the Q&A short and danced for like 20 minutes onstage while listening to multiple versions of Ave Maria. All the media outlets immediately reported that he had lost it and was fully senile. But I went and watched that rally to get the full context. There were multiple people fainting from extreme heat in the audience, so he was pausing the event while they got medical attention, and basically started asking for some of his favorite songs to be played over the loudspeakers which transitioned this into onstage dancing. The liberals saw this as unhinged, which I'm sure he loved because it kept them from noticing that everyone who was on Trump's side and following along saw it as a hang out session. Their leader just rolling with the punches and playing his favorite songs for them and generally having a good time. It made him look like an every-man, not a politician.

Every single time this guy goes up against democracy, everyone laughs about how he's a clown who says funny things and doesn't know what's going on, and how nobody could possibly agree with this orange-faced buffoon. And then, the National Association of Buffoons backs his agenda and he kicks democracy's ass. It's frustrating how consistent this pattern is. I have no call to action to end on here. I think we all know. I'm just tired of this and wanted to vent. I really hope we can bring this civilization back from the brink before it's too late.

In his defence hasn't he be rambling like that since 2016?