President Donald Trump’s speech at the Pentagon on the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks gave every indication that “his mind is trapped in a fictional world,” according to a New York Times columnist.
Reflecting on the speech days later, longtime political observer Thomas Edsall felt the need to fall back on an April diagnosis of the president’s “dangerous decline” to put his current state in perspective.
Edsall pointed out that Trump appears to live in a fantasy world where he was a hero on 9/11, which led New York Magazine’s Nia Prater and Chas Danner to write that the president, “used his speech to repeat a questionable anecdote about his whereabouts and actions in the aftermath of the tragedy and later defended his recollection as questions arose.”
According to the columnist, that, combined with the president’s inability to stay awake during the ceremony, should set off alarms.
Edsall cited an email he received from Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, who wrote, “Trump’s loose relationship with reality extends to the issues that define our life, like inflation, public health, the war with Iran, our alliances or whether our elections are valid.
That led him to cite a statement made by “36 prominent medical specialists questioning Trump’s mental fitness for office” that was entered into the Congressional Record in April.
They wrote, in part, Trump exhibits “objectively observable signs of serious medical concern include: marked deterioration in cognitive functioning, evidenced by disorganized and tangential speech, rambling digressions, factual confusions, unexplained sudden changes of course in strategic matters, both national and international, episodes of apparent somnolence during critical public proceedings.”
According to the columnist, the “medical specialists did not hold back,” when they observed, “Severely impaired judgment and impulse control, reflected in reckless threats of violence, advocacy of lethal force against civilians, encouragement of extrajudicial actions by armed supporters, repeated threats and often actions — judicial, prosecutorial, police, military and by invoking emergency power — against political opponents and others who disagree with him,” before warning that Trump shows signs of “a rapidly worsening, reality-untethered, increasingly dangerous decline. If we were called upon under the 25th Amendment to judge the president’s present ability to discharge the duties of his office, we would have to conclude that he lacks the capacity to do so.”
Taken altogether, Edsall concluded, “The reality, however, is that no action to remove Trump from the White House will happen until he does something so threatening and damaging that drumming him out of the White House becomes an inescapable necessity — no small comfort for a nation looking forward to 28 more months of an unstable man holding the presidency.”
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