The other day, I was thinking about Trump’s claim about Willie Brown, a helicopter and Kamala Harris – and how it’s been refuted by Willie Brown (who wasn’t involved) and Nate Holden – who was the person on a helicopter with Trump, though refuted all the insisted on Kamala Harris even being brought up.  Yet Trump continued to insist his story was true, furious at the New York Times for writing an article that denied it all, insistent it was true, insistent he had manifest records, threatening to sue, insisting he was right – despite all the other people involved in the story absolutely refuting it.
 
Yes, he was on a helicopter that had flight trouble and was with a Black politician.  But everything else was totally wrong, and explained why it was wrong by those involved in his tale, yet he insisted, insisted he was the one who was right. 
 
What I couldn’t figure out was why, in the face of all that, Trump would keep insisting it was entirely true, that it was Willie Brown and that they had talked about Kamala Harris.  Insisting, insisting, insisting.  In part, that’s Trump being Trump, unable to admit he’s wrong about anything.  In part, it’s mixing up two names from long ago.  But the core points of the whole story were shown to be wrong, and Trump just kept being so continually insistent that he was right and everyone was wrong was just…almost too weird, even for Trump. 
 
Then something clicked in familiar to me.
 
I had a relative, we'll call him Pat, who had Alzheimer’s, a type of dementia. At the point of this story, he was conversant, but limited.  Periodically, I’d ask if he wanted to watch a ballgame.  We’d turn the game on, and the conversation would go basically like –
 
“I’ve seen this game.”

“Well, no, Pat, this isn’t a replay.  It’s a new game.”
 
“No, I’ve seen this one.”
 
“Really, that’s not possible.  It’s live.  The game is on right now.”
 
“I’ve seen this game before.”
 
“Oh," I'd smile, "Well, okay.  So...what happens in it?!”
 
“I’ve seen it already.”
 
Eventually, of course, we just watched.  Interrupted occasionally with a random, “I’ve seen this.”  And it happened with most ball games.  No matter how much it was pointed out what was reality, he was insistent this fantasy he had in his mind – that clearly overlapped with other games he’d seen – was absolutely, positively real.  Almost comforting to him, a touchstone he felt he could recognize.  He insisted on it.  Insistent.
 
And it occurred to me that that might be a part of what was happened with his Willie Brown and Kamala Harris story.  Not the whole reason behind it – Trump being Trump is always a core reason for everything.  But perhaps there is an aspect to even early dementia where the person thinks of something that is familiar, that has a tangential overlap with the truth, but is actually a totally fantasy and that becomes drilled into the person’s mind as absolutely real, no matter how much others explain it’s not.  And so the comforting fantasy is insisted, insisted, insisted on – and all others, they’re the ones not remembering correctly, they’re the ones who are wrong.
 
I have no idea.  It’s not my field of expertise.  It’s not my training.  And as I said, there are probably a lot of things involved.  But since so many doctors for whom dementia is their area of expertise and say they seen signs of early dementia, perhaps it’s not unreasonable to see an overlap of what I experienced and Trump’s rock-solid, unmoving instance that what was fantasy not only was true, but had to be true for him.  Even at an early stage in his dementia. 
 
To be clear, it’s not the “getting the story wrong” that struck me about this – that happens to everyone – it’s the unswerving instance that something all others and all evidence of reality says it’s not at all true is, is, is, and must be, true.
 
As readers here know, I’ve been writing at length about Trump cognitive issues that many psychologists and psychiatrists have said in articles and books appears to be early dementia.  And his recent speeches and interviews and outrageous claims, his instance that his crowds are the biggest in history, and Kamala Harris’s crowds are just AI, have reinforced that, to the point of starting to publicly concern even MAGOP officials. 
 
A friend sent me this article the other day from a medical publication, Stat, its banner noting “Reporting from the frontiers of medical and health.”  The article deals with the issue, dealing with several doctors, experts in the field, who have looking at patterns of Trump’s speech -- at the heart of which is one particular doctor who has been studying Trump’s past speeches and comparing how the linguistics have changed over time, and how that fits with others who have cognitive issues.
 
I can’t link to the article, since a password is required.  But the title says a lot, “Trump keeps losing his train of thought. Cognitive experts have theories about why”.  But it’s worth mentioning that the Trump common pattern of suddenly veering off topic and going into a totally different, almost unrelated subject is not something usual, but something that actually has a medical name.  As the article notes –
 
“This shifting from topic to topic, with few connections – a pattern of speech called tangentiality – is one of several disjointed and occasionally incoherent verbal habits that seem to have increased in Trump’s speech in recent years, according to interview with experts in memory, psychology and linguistics.”
 
That’s far above my pay grade.  But it’s good to know that the patterns in Trump so many have seen stand out as not normal because…they’re not normal.
​

​

As a bonus, for those interested, this is the very good, thoughtful, detailed (sometimes very detailed) interview that Jon Stewart did afterwards with Mark Cuban.  It covers a wide range of subjects, including basketball, his dealings with Trump, a lot on AI industrialization, and medical drug transparency.

I’ve written in the past several pieces about how the mistakes Trump makes with words in his speeches are not “glitches” or “slurring,” but what mental health experts call paraphasia, which is one of the early signs of dementia.  That’s when the person makes up non-existing words in place of the actual word they’re trying to say.  They often then change the direction of what they were saying.
 
One of the leading experts in this field who has been prominent in his addressing Trump’s cognitive decline is Dr. John Gartner, a psychologist, psychotherapist, and former assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University Medical School.  He’s also the founder of Duty to Warn, a collection of mental health professionals who have been warning about Trump failing mental faculties since he took office in 2017.  He's also one of the 37 experts in the field who participated in the book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump:  37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.  You can find the book here.

Gartner has said that he tells people to take a good look at Trump because "This is the best you will ever see him," since dementia is a degenerative disease, and Trump will not be getting any better.

He gave an interview the other day with attorney Jay Kuo, subtitled, "An expert’s view of Trump’s mental slide into dementia," where he address the situation over time and presented four examples that demonstrate how close Trump is moving towards full dementia.

​The whole article is extremely interesting -- extensive and detailed, as well as accessible -- which you can find here.  But several passages leap out and bear being singled out.

But something that he says somewhat near the beginning is important to reference at the very start.  He addresses the criticism (much from non-professionals) that it’s unprofessional for mental health experts to diagnose Trump without him being a patient. What he responds is, in actual practice, making such diagnoses are actually common, and for a very good reason.  As he puts it --
 
“I don’t know if people know this, but in real life, in day-to-day clinical practice, we diagnose dementia based on behavioral observation and informant reports every day of the week. Thousands of medical charts would back me up on that. An ‘interview’ with a demented person doesn’t usually yield a lot of information, for obvious reasons.
 
"As a professional community,” he continues, “thousands of us have observed hundreds of hours of Trump’s public behavior.  We also have dozens of informant reports.  So, all the people hyperventilating about 'diagnosing from a distance' should take a breath. This is more business as usual than you might think. In real life, we’ve institutionalized tens of thousands of patients on far less data."
 
All that leads Dr. Gartner to is overall point.  That the evidence for Trump’s dementia is this: Trump shows an overall decline from his own cognitive baseline, with marked progressive deterioration in four areas: ability to use language, memory, behavior, and gross and fine motor skills.”
 
Among the specifics he points to are:
 
Gartner notes that Trump has shown a “shocking decline from baseline" from when he first announced his run for the presidency in 2015.  At that point, Trump was “highly articulate. He spoke in polished paragraphs with a sophisticated vocabulary. Now, his vocabulary is impoverished, and he often can’t finish a sentence or even a word. Typical of dementia patients, he repeats himself and overuses superlatives and filler words.”
 
In terms of memory, Gartner explains that some things are perfectly ordinary.  “Forgetting names and dates is normal for people who are aging.” But forgetting is different from confusion.  “By stark contrast,” he points out, “the Dementia Care Society says ‘confusing people and generations’ is a sign of advanced dementia. And this is the type of profound memory disturbance we’re seeing in Trump.” 
 
Like confusing President Biden with President Obama, and Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi with evidence of cognitive decline.  Rather than Trump just joking, as his staff tried to point out, Gartner says, "The more plausible explanation is that once again we are watching the workings of his demented mind in real time.  Obama and Biden have something very important in common in Trump’s brain that can allow them to be fused in his molten mind: two Democratic presidents who bested and humiliated him have become one imaginary super-villain."
 
In Michael Wolff’s book on Trump, where he was granted unprecedented access to the Oval Office, he wrote that Trump would often not recognize old friends. “I don’t mean he forgot their names,” Gartner says. “He acted as if he’d never seen them before in his life. If you’ve ever had a relative with dementia you know how heartbreaking that stage of decline can be-- to have to remind a loved one of who you are.
 
“Trump is almost there.”
 
Third, Dr. Gartner discusses paraphasia and gives a long, but by no means comprehensive list of examples where Trump has used “non-words in place of real words, that usually include a fragment of the actual word.”  Among them --
 
“mishuz” (for missiles)
“Chrishus” (for Christmas)
“space-capsicle” (for space capsule)
“combat infantroopen”(for combat infantry)
“sahhven country”(for sovereign country)
“renoversh” (For renovations)
“supply churn” (for supply chain)
“Liberal-ation (for liberation”)
“benefishers” (for benificiaries)
“stat-tics, suh-tic-six” (for statistics)
“crimakle” (for criminal)
“transjija” (for transition)
“I know Poten”
“We will expel the wald-mongers.”
 
And a great many more, covering “Semantic aphasia,” such as when trying to say “Three years later,” Trump instead said, “Three years lady, lady, lady.”  And the “Complete loss of verbal language,” such as “Gang boong.  This is me.  I hear bing.”  And “Tangential thinking,” where Trump “drifts from one unrelated thought fragment to another”  Where the “narrative is literally incoherent,” rather than “rambling.”  For instance, recently outside of the Manhattan courtroom, Trump said, “We can’t have an election in the middle of a political season. We just had Super Tuesday. And we had a Tuesday after Tuesday already.”

And Gartner makes clear that this is not just an articulation problem, as some have suggested, but a brain problem.  “But all those competing explanations are disproven by one fact. Trump commits these aphasic errors in his written posts, as well, proving the problem is in his brain, not his articulation.”  Like when Trump wrote, ““Joe Buden DISINFORMATES AND MISINFORMATES”.
 
And finally, the fourth of the signposts that Dr. Gartner points is motor performance.  He quotes dementia expert Elisabeth Zoffmann, an assistant professor of Forensic Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia, who told Salon that Trump evidences a “wide-based gait, commonly found among patients with dementia. Video online shows that he swings his right leg in a semi-circle as if it were dragging a dead weight. He has also shown deterioration in his fine motor coordination, for example having difficulty drinking a bottle or a glass of water without two hands.”
 
Dr. Gartner makes clear that he’s not alone in his concerns about Trump, and has started a petition from medical professionals warning of the danger. “We needed a chorus of professional voices. To summon them I reached out to colleagues and put a petition for licensed medical and mental health professionals online that states in part:

If you didn't see Last Week Tonight with John Oliver on Sunday, the Main Story was about opioids.  However, it's not from the perspective of most news stories and the several recent limited series.  The focus here is about what's happened to the money that many companies have paid in settlements -- upwards to $50 billion.

​It's a long, detailed story and very interesting.  As well as, often very funny.
​

Okay, a day late this week (under HBO's new "Thursday drop" schedule), if you missed Last Week Tonight with John Oliver this week, the Main Story was about healthcare, but specifically Medicaid.

The report is terrific.  Extremely interesting, largely about changes that have been made to the program, largely by specific states who administer it, all of which are creating hurdles for the people the Medicaid is meant to assist.  And in some cases, essentially eliminating access.

​The piece is very detailed, information, galling, fascinating and often extremely funny.

If there’s any further evidence needed for how terrified Republicans are by the Arizona Supreme Court ruling Tuesday on a draconian 1864 total abortion ban that jails doctors and anyone assisting the woman involved, it’s Trump’s own statement attempting to save himself.
 
When asked about the court ruling, Trump said that he felt it “went too far,” but added “It’ll get straightened out by the governor, and anybody else who will bring it back into reason.”
 
This is officially known as desperate flailing.
 
First of all, Trump’s position on abortion starts with repeatedly taking credit for appointing the U.S. Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade – an action that specifically made the Arizona ruling possible.  You can pretty much stop there, because it’s so damning, but there’s much more.
 
Second, Trump also appointed judges who around the country are ruling on behalf of abortion bans.  Not to mention banning the abortion pill mifepristone which has made its way to the Supreme Court.
 
Further, only days ago, Trump released his supposed “abortion policy” which was that states should decide.  And just days later, we saw the result of that:  a total abortion ban than jails doctors and anyone who assists the woman getting an abortion.
 
Those are foundational problems for Republicans and Trump on abortion, and damning ones, whatever Trump tries to say.  And what he says just shines a light on them all.
 
For instance, in saying the court “Went too far” ignores the reality that that’s the risk you take when leaving abortion law up to individual states and not have a national abortion ruling, as Roe v. Wade was. 
 
In addition, by saying the court “Went too far,” Trump may think he’s appealing to Independents (never mind that he didn’t say how “too far” they went…), but what he’s really doing is spitting in the face of his most loyal extreme-right base of “evangelical Christians” (sic) for whom a total abortion ban is the only option.
 
Moreover, when he says the Arizona law will get “straightened out by the governor” who will “bring it back into reason”– he’s not only living desperately on hope and a prayer, but far more importantly, if that actually comes to pass, he’s putting the fix into the hands of the Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs… whose idea of reason when it comes to abortion is most surely completely different from Trump, his extreme-right base and “evangelical Christians” (sic).

(And by the way, making this ace Trump policy of "No problem, dude, it'll be straightened out by the governor" all the more troubling for him and the entire Republican Party is that, just this morning, the MAGOP House in Arizona blocked an effort to repeal the 1864 bill!!  Yes, really.  So much for, y'know, Republicans being part of "bringing it back into reason.")
 
But if the Democratic governor straightening it out hopefully does come to pass, it won’t be soon enough to keep the law from going into effect in just 12 days.  And importantly, too, even if it does get fixed, the damage is done – the headline of total abortion may is out there and written in stone.  It shows everyone that “This is the Risk,” this is what you get from Republicans and Trump’s “I’m responsible for ending Roe, and now leave it to the states” even if it gets fixed (by the Democratic governor in Arizona – your state might not be as lucky).
 
There’s another thing Trump said, as well.  That if he is president and a national total abortion ban came across his desk, he wouldn’t sign it.  I believe that the correct response is –
 
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!
 
Putting aside that the make-up of Congress will near-certainly not allow for such a bill to be based, if it ever was, and a total abortion ban was passed by a Republican House and a Republican Senate – a bill that is the fevered dream wish of Trump’s extreme-right base and the “evangelical Christians” (sic) -- I can see no way on earth that Trump not only wouldn’t giddily sign the bill, but would try to turn it into a TV special with marching bands and fireworks.  To not sign it would mean immediately losing his base that would rise up against him, and that would be so out of character for Trump that it is unimaginable.
 
The point being that Trump merely saying this, that he wouldn’t sign a bill, is yet additional evidence of how petrified he is of the horrifying message Arizona’s 1864 total abortion ban sends to American voters.
 
Of course, in the end, next to nothing Trump says – no matter how shuffling towards the center or lying or terrified – matters.  Because only three things matter here.
 
1. Trump happily takes credit for ending Roe v. Wade, which made the 1864 Arizona law possible. And makes all the state abortion bans possible.
 
2.  Trump says abortion laws should be left up to the states.  Which is what made the 1864 Arizona total abortion ban possible.
 
Anything else he says is just ephemera.  And worse, anything he says, no matter how flimsy and false, only serves to remind people what his two foundational positions are.
 
And there’s one other bit of evidence from Tuesday to show how terrified Republican officials and spokesmen are about the 1864 Arizona total abortion ban –
 
On April 9, the day the Arizona Supreme Court ruling was announced, Media Matter looked into how much time the three major cable networks gave to the story.  MSNBC gave it 2 hours and 20 minutes.  CNN gave it two hours.  And Fox?  They discussed the story for 12 minutes! 
 
Yes, Fox tried to bury it.  It’s the ol’ ostrich gambit.  If we can’t see it, it doesn’t exist.  Unfortunately for Fox, I am certain the court ruling got full coverage on all the local Fox affiliates in Arizona – where it actually matters, and most because Arizona is a Swing State and has a major U.S.  Senate race in helping determine control of the Senate.  And national Fox trying to hide the story from its viewers can only serve to make them surprised on election night when the results come in from Arizona. 

But then, Fox viewers being surprised by election results is pretty much standard these days.
 
Trump and Republican officials are terrified by the Arizona 1864 total abortion ban law.  We can tell by their words and their actions, many which I noted yesterday.
 
The thing is – they should be terrified.  And the thing is, this is what they’ve wished for, for decades.  A total abortion ban.

In fact, taking this "wish" further, I've always sensed (rightly or wrongly) that at least some or perhaps many Republican politicians weren't as strongly anti-abortion as they cried out in righteousness for their wish, but rather it was a great issue for them to appeal to the evangelical base and get votes and donations, and ride along on that wave of support, always sure in their mind that total abortion wouldn't ever become real. Or for many of them, even thinking that ending Roe wouldn't likely ever happen. But it was a great campaign issue, bumper stick slogan and battle cry.  A wish.  Maybe not probable, but oh, what a wish.  A total abortion ban.  It's the proverbial dog chasing the car, one day amazingly catching it, and then not knowing what to do with it next.
 
As I said yesterday, be careful what you wish for.
 
You might get it.