Listen Closely, You Can Hear the Mounting Madness

Dancing to The Weave in MAGAland

Oct 18, 2024

selective focus photography of smiling Halloween doll — Photo by Jen Theodore on Unsplash

Finally, after months of ignoring/sanewashing former president Trump’s verbiage, it’s occurring to some in the media that his word “weaves” are indicative of some sort of cognitive decline.

For nearly a decade, the now-flag bearer for the Republican Party has skated close examination of his language thanks to a litany of excuses, most related to the everyday deference granted to the ultra-wealthy.

As his behavior has become more bizarre in recent months, more observers are questioning his fitness for office. Today’s LA Times includes a page two column by News and Culture critic Lorraine Ali entitled “We have to discuss Trump’s deepening madness.”

As other columnists and political reporters have pointed out, we’re running out of ways to describe the Mad-King slippage of Trump, and we shouldn’t have to at this point. The proof is in countless hours of MAGA rally videos, radio and podcast appearances and reams of his own musings across social media. There’s no shortage of accessible documentation showing the 78-year-old’s slide from strategically unpredictable to perilously incoherent.
But believing what’s right in front of our eyes is not enough since U.S. politics as usual began flirting with fascism, making reality a subjective thought experiment from which we can pick and choose our preferred truths. Now here we are, less than three weeks out from what’s predicted to be one of the closest elections ever, watching one of the candidates melt down to nonfunctional levels.
And I get it. I’d rather be writing about anything else at this point because I’m also sick of hearing about Trump’s “unhinged” behavior. But to ignore his decline is like failing to send out storm warnings or wildfire alerts. But this impending national disaster is the man-made sort.

Still the excuses keep coming. Trump’s campaign spokesman Steven Chung reacted to concerns expressed after the candidate swayed back and forth for 39 minutes in front of a crowd expecting a town-hall style dialogue in Oaks, PA by calling it a “lovefest.”

“There are people that like for their candidate to look strong and to look like they are in command,” said Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI). “This guy looks like he’s the last guy to leave the karaoke bar.”

A reliable source (The Hill) for MAGA propaganda in Washington DC promoted commentary saying that by sharing his Spotify playlist, Trump likely picked up uncommitted votes.

The candidate’s appearance before the Economic Club of Chicago, along with being an exercise in hostility and denial, wandered into barely comprehensible off-topic blathering.

This week, Kimberly Atkins Stohr, a senior opinion writer at the Boston Globe, wrote that Trump’s “diminishing cognitive ability can’t be ignored.”

Via Ed Mazza at Huffpost:

“Yet neither the media nor Republicans have shown that kind of urgency as Trump has repeatedly shown himself to be, to put it kindly, unwell,” she wrote. “That is not only unfair and irresponsible, it is dangerous for the future of our country.”
The column comes amid growing questions over Trump’s cognitive health.
Earlier this week, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie ― who was close to Trump throughout his presidency but has since turned into a critic ― said he noticed “significant declines.” Also this week, Omarosa Manigault Newman, who served in the White House under Donald Trump after previously competing on his reality TV show, said she has seen his “decline.”

Jay Kuo discussed the recent spate of canceled appearances by Trump’s campaign in an article titled: The Emperor Has No Closing:

60 Minutes on CBS (Harris accepted)
CNN Debate (Harris accepted)
CNBC News interview with Joe Kernan
NBC News interview with Christine Romans
NRA Rally in Georgia for the 2nd Amendment

…And pointed out that even some of the sanewashing media outlets are beginning to pick up on the notion of questioning the former president's statements.

Kuo concludes:

At least for now, going into these final weeks, there seems to be a growing drumbeat of negative press assessments of Trump. We won’t know until the polls close whether this will make much difference in the end, but one thing is already clear: Trump’s closing argument is not only landing with a thud, his campaign is actively removing him from view to limit the damage. His handlers simply don’t want voters to see how far he has declined from his former self, and they are hoping now to run out the clock, before the naked truth is revealed for all to see.

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For a guy who thinks that ranting about pronouns is a good campaign tactic, Donald Trump boo-booed big time during his appearance at the Univision town hall. I’d like to think this wording would be impactful for Special Council Jack Smith’s case about election interference, but he’s probably sitting on much more damning evidence.

We won’t know until the trial, because the Appendix to the prosecution’s complaint, released this morning, is 384 pages of mostly redacted evidence.

(We did learn some details about Trump aide Peter Navarro being investigated for violating the Hatch Act, but he’s such an idiot otherwise nobody probably cares at this point.)

Here’s Jonathan Allen at NBC News:

Asked about the mob of his supporters that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 in a fatal and ill-fated attempt to stop the official certification of his 2020 defeat, Trump placed himself — at least figuratively — in the crowd.
“There were no guns down there. We didn’t have guns,” he said. “The others had guns.”
The “others,” of course, were law enforcement officers defending the Capitol and the lawmakers inside it. Hundreds of the “we” have been convicted of various offenses related to the riot.

The Democratic candidates for the White House have started including questions about Trump’s acuity in campaign speeches. Whether or not this will garner more votes is an open question.

We have 18 or so days left to go before election day, so the Republican candidate’s language will be under the microscope. Given his lack of self-control, more evidence of his descent into whatever it is rich people call dementia may yet manifest itself.

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Friday Finds in the News World

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Trump Proclaims ‘I Killed Roe v. Wade’ as 134 Rape-Induced Pregnancies Occur Daily in Abortion Ban States by Will Ragland at Amercan Progress Action

In January 2024, several doctors published a paper in the medical journal JAMA Internal Medicine estimating the number of rape-induced pregnancies in the 14 states with full abortion bans that were implemented after the reversal of Roe. Their findings “estimated that 519,981 survivors of completed rape experienced 64,565 rape-related pregnancies during the 4 to 18 months that bans were in effect.”
Using the data from this study, the CAP Action analysis below inferred the rate of rape-induced pregnancies per day and found that an estimated 134 rape-induced pregnancies occur daily in these same 14 states. This figure underscores the devastating impact abortion bans are having on survivors of sexual violence and is a direct result of former President Trump’s successful effort to “kill Roe v. Wade.”

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Meet the IQ Test Tube Babies by Kelly Weill at MomLeft:

The pro-natalist movement seldom voices these views so explicitly, and many of the people featured in Hope Not Hate’s investigations denied affiliation with the racist right. Nevertheless, a new field of fertility tech companies has attracted far-right funding with wink-wink suggestions of optimizing genetics for the ultra-rich.
Thiel is a frequent presence in these circles. Simone Collins is the former managing director of Dialog, an exclusive, Thiel-founded networking group. Noor Siddiqui, the founder of the embryo testing startup Orchid likewise found her start in Silicon Valley with a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship. Though Siddiqui and Orchid publicly deny that the company has claimed to be able to test for intelligence, multiple sources told The Information this year that Siddiqui has privately claimed to be able to measure embryos’ potential IQ.
Thiel has likewise backed Nucleus Genomics, a startup that claims to be able to test genetics for IQ. This fall, Nucleus expressed interest in acquiring 23andMe, the financially embattled DNA testing giant.
Elsewhere in more explicitly political circles, Thiel has bankrolled the rise of his former employee J.D. Vance, the pro-natalist politician who this year became the Republican vice presidential nominee. And Thiel has dumped money into “28,” a menstrual-tracking company by the anti-feminist magazine Evie, which devotes an inordinate percent of its output to denigrating hormonal or IUD birth control.

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I understand why people ban books (Speech for the 2024 Iowa Author Awards) by Lyz at Men Yell At Me:

It’s no accident that the move to ban and remove books from school libraries and to restrict the teaching of critical race theory is happening after a summer of historic racial reckoning. It’s no accident that it’s happening after the murder of George Floyd ignited the country in a debate that forced people to at least pay lip service to the idea of equality and to reconsider, for a moment, our history and the way we tell the stories of our country and our culture. It’s no accident that the book bans are also happening as younger generations talk about sexuality and gender in a way that was taboo even just 20 years ago. The book bans are a reaction to the floodgates of knowledge.
Controlling access to information is about preserving power. Who gets to know that queer identities have been around as long as the history of humanity? Who gets to know about the women who preached and about the queens who put on pants and loved other women? Who gets to know about how to find birth control? Who gets to know about condoms? Who gets to know which boys to avoid dating? Who gets to know which bosses not to be alone with in the office after hours? And who is left out from this knowledge? And who then finds themselves at 35 finally learning that what happened to them at 20 was assault? Who gets to know? And who gets to put a name on their pain? And who doesn’t? Who finds themselves at almost 40 years old reading books written over a hundred years ago and saying, “Why didn’t I know this sooner?”
When you think about the destabilizing power of the true answers to those questions, it’s not so hard to understand why you would ban something. The wonder is when people actually tell the truth.

Words & Deeds

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