It’s a crying shame that Nikki Haley waited until she was desperate before saying out loud what Americans outside the MAGA cocoon have long known, that the aging tyrant-in-training whom she trails so badly is cognitively cuckoo.
On the eve of Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary – her last best shot at slowing the nut job’s runaway train – she finally stated the obvious: “(Trump’s) mental stability is going to continue to decline…He’s just not at the same level he was in 2016. I think we’re seeing some of that decline…When you’re dealing with the presidency, we can’t have someone else that we question whether they’re mentally fit to do this.”
I question whether a sufficient share of New Hampshire independents are willing to help her embarrass Trump when the votes are tallied, but her message about his dearth of fitness could potentially resonate with the mainstream Americans who will be pivotal in the real presidential race in November. We have to assume, of course, that Haley will bend a knee to Trump long before the general election (I’m betting on late February), but, for now at least, she’s had a lot of ammo to work with. So have we all.
You’ve probably heard about this Trump-on-the-stump gem:
“By the way, they never report the crowd on January 6th. You know, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, you know they, do you know they destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence, everything, deleted and destroyed all of it. All of it because of lots of things, like Nikki Haley is in charge of security. We offered her 10,000 people. Soldiers, National Guards, whatever they want. They turned it down.”
His lies about the Jan. 6 investigation were standard stuff, but confusing Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi…now that was truly a chef’s kiss.
As Haley dryly noted yesterday, “I was nowhere near the Capitol on Jan. 6…He (has also) claimed that Joe Biden was going to get us into World War II. I’m assuming he meant World War III. He (has) said that he ran against President Obama. He never ran against President Obama…I don’t know if he was confused, but it should be enough to send us a warning sign.”
Ditto this Trump word salad, which he served up to his suckers three three days ago:
“We’re also going to place strong protections to stop banks and regulators from trying to debank you from your – you know, your political beliefs what they do. They want to debank you. We’re going to debank – think of this. They want to take away your rights, they want to take away your country, the things they’re doing, electric cars give me a break…”
My best guess is that he was referring to one episode last May, when one bank company, JPMorgan Chase, got some right-wing heat for supposedly discriminating against one religious freedom group. (The bank had closed the group’s account because it had failed to provide required regulatory information. The bank said that it routinely serves 50,000 religiously-affiliated nonprofits.) The bottom line here is that Trump was unable to express himself coherently. The mice on the wheels in his head must’ve derailed.
If President Biden had ever spewed sentence fragments like that, or had confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi four times, Biden Is Old headlines would’ve bloomed anew throughout the mainstream media.
Haley may be new to the “Trump is mentally unfit” narrative, but for most of us, alas, that stuff is old hat. Press stories have come and gone for years now – gone, mostly, in part because shrinks with expertise in such matters have been discouraged by the American Psychiatric Association from commenting publicly. Two months after Trump was inaugurated – swearing an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution (don’t get me started) – the APA said in a ruling that unless a mental health professional had personally examined Trump, any and all comments about his “affect, behavior, speech, or other presentation” would be unethical. So much for the notion that psychiatry has a “duty to warn.”
Haley, in a last-ditch bid for political survival, has latched onto the duty to warn. But barring a miracle, she’ll be outvoted by a cult that reveres Trump for “acing” a cognitive test and identifying a whale. The real question is whether his mental decline will be a live issue next fall when the chips are down for the future of democracy.
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Oh wait. What about Ron DeSantis? You won’t be hearing about him anymore. Mickey Mouse’s lightweight nemesis quit the race yesterday and endeavored to quote Winston Churchill: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
Only one problem: Churchill never said it.
It comes from a 1938 Budweiser ad.
Mickey should consign DeSantis to Fantasyland.