Having a literal Fox News grandpa as president would be really bad

Credit where credit is due: This (gift) is a very good Peter Baker deep dive into Trump’s very obvious and very obviously age-related ongoing cognitive deterioration.

He rambles, he repeats himself, he roams from thought to thought — some of them hard to understand, some of them unfinished, some of them factually fantastical. He voices outlandish claims that seem to be made up out of whole cloth. He digresses into bizarre tangents about golf, about sharks, about his own “beautiful” body. He relishes “a great day in Louisiana” after spending the day in Georgia. He expresses fear that North Korea is “trying to kill me” when he presumably means Iran. As late as last month, Mr. Trump was still speaking as if he were running against President Biden, five weeks after his withdrawal from the race. . . .

Experts said it was hard to judge whether the changes in Mr. Trump’s speaking style could indicate typical effects of age or some more significant condition. “That can change with normal aging,” said Dr. Bradford Dickerson, a neurologist at Harvard Medical School. “But if you see a change relative to a person’s base line in that type of speaking ability over the course of just a few years, I think it raises some real red flags.”

Now that Biden is out of the race, it’s no longer necessary to pretend that “typical effects of age” are OK when they’re manifested in an 80-something president, because the “typical effects of age” are in fact really bad! Of course Trump having some distinct age-related neurological condition would be an added reason for concern beyond the fact that having an 80-year-old president is a terrible idea and has always been a terrible idea, although again we all had to pretend for awhile there that this wasn’t the case.

And Trump is such a complete catastrophe as a human being and a politician that the fact that he’s too old to be president and is as a consequence deteriorating cognitively in real time is well down the list of reasons to be horrified by the prospect of his re-election, but it’s still a great reason to vote against him, along with the 75 other reasons that are higher up on the list.

On a related note, I spent the last few days traveling through the San Luis Valley and northern New Mexico, and was reminded over and over again that there are a lot of people in this country whose families have been here for many generations, yet still speak Spanish as their primary language (that’s why the name of every town is Spanish). Most of these people have at least some indigenous ancestry, although some don’t and look perfectly “white” until they start to speak their native language, which instantly makes them look something other than “white” in el gabacho.

All these people are in the sights of Stephen Miller et al., as the fact that their great-great-great-grandparents may have all been American citizens is of no moment, since in Trumpland “American” means “white,” and “white” means among other things that English is your first language.