dementia rough notes
I watched my mother descend into dementia. When I watch Trump, I’m watching my mother all over again.
When Trump was campaigning in 2020, as I watched his rallies, sometimes the hairs on the back of my neck would stand up. Some of the things he said, the way he said them, made me think of my mother as she mentally destabilized as she neared her 70s. She had always had emotional problems, but during the last 15 years or so of her life, she grew increasingly erratic and illogical.
During Trump’s second term, only four years after the last one, his mental decline is dramatically more apparent.
Among many other symptoms, Trump is bad about taking credit for something someone else did that turned out good, or blaming things he himself did on others when they turn out bad. All you have to do is search the congressional record to find out the truth. My mother would do that too. Take credit or assign blame, whichever way made her look good.
But lately, Trump has stepped it up. He’ll say something, and make a huge deal out of it. He’ll even have a press conference to make sure everyone knows he’s saying it. Then a few days, weeks or months later, he’ll deny ever saying it, and get hostile toward anyone who reminds him that he DID say it.
My mother did exactly the same thing as her mental state continued to deteriorate. Sometimes it was just me in the room. Sometimes one or both of my brothers would be there, or sometimes her home health nurse.
She would get started on something: something that supposedly happened, or something she was going to do, or whatever else she was ranting about. She would go on and on and on, and you couldn’t get her to change the subject. Then a couple days later, you could mention something about it, and she would come unglued. “I never said any such thing!”. Then she would hurl accusations at whoever brought it up.
How can anyone watch Trump doing that, and not see a problem?
These Things, Just Like My Mother Did…
Instead of answering a question, he’ll launch into a tirade about something completely unrelated to the question.
He’ll start talking about something, and before he even gets to the point, in mid sentence he’ll start talking about something else.
If anyone disagrees with him, he turns on them and childishly insults them, and even threatens them.
He has a persecution complex. He thinks everyone is out to slander him.
He periodically lapses into incoherent slurring for a few words while he’s speaking.
He makes impossible promises, like my mother would. I watched the California Coachella rally. Trump said if he got elected, he would make sure California has plenty of water. How was he going to do that? Conjure it up like a wizard?
On several occasions Trump has said he was the best president this country ever had. My mother would say no man could ever have found a better wife than she was.
He does have lucid periods where he speaks strongly and assuredly. He almost sounds like a normal person.
But overall, he’s slowly becoming more deranged, delusional, confused and incongruous. The same pattern I watched in my mother.
Some of His Ridiculous Claims
- Trillions and trillions of tariffs have been collected!
- He’s reduced medicine prices up to 800%!
- He has stopped 7 wars!
- He made deals with companies to build factories here!
- Thousands of pounds of fentanyl is coming from Canada!
- Trump ordered that water be released from Terminus Dam at Lake Kaweah and Schafer Dam at Lake Success to put out the fires in southern California.
It’s actually closer to $200 billion. Anyone with a calculator can determine that even one trillion would work out to almost $3000 for every man, woman and child in this country. People aren’t spending THAT much more than they were last year.
That is mathematically impossible.
Some of the countries he claims he stopped from fighting each other weren’t fighting in the first place. The others he takes credit for are still fighting.
Almost all the ones he is claiming were deals made with Biden! It’s all in the Congressional record. Anyone can look it up. Some companies were planning factories independently of any presidential deals. But anyhow, some of those companies have put their plans on hold due to tariff uncertainty and the incident at the battery factory.
Almost NO fentanyl comes through from Canada. What little fentanyl gets through was missed by AMERICAN BORDER AGENTS WHO SEARCHED THEIR CARS, THEN LET THEM IN!
Even though southern California had record high amounts of water in their reservoirs, Trump kept on and on about them not having enough water to fight the fires.
Even though California explained to him over and over that there is no “faucet” to turn on, that there is no way at all to get water from northern to southern California, and even though the fires were ALREADY OUT in LA County, he gave that order.
The result being that the water that farmers in San Joaquin Valley depend on for growing their crops during the summer when the rains stop was completely wasted.
Unhinged Scrawlings
How anyone can read Trump’s demented posts on Truth Social and not detect how unbalanced his mind is, is beyond me. Sometimes he spends all night writing back to back to back posts- dozens of them.
He posts many easily debunked lies. He whines about people not liking him or not going along with his ideas or how people sabotage his efforts.
He also brags about himself. He wants people to know how wonderful he is, and he brags about all the wonderful things he’s done for the country (none of which is true).
My mother used to buy stacks of spiral notebooks to write in. She seemed to step it up that last 2 or 3 years before the last time she went into a nursing home. She would be furiously writing for hours, but I didn’t pay attention to it because she’d always done a lot of writing. She would hear something interesting on TV and write it down. She would make lists. She would record family stories. She would just write down anything she thought of to write.
So, I just didn’t pay attention that last few years. It kept her busy, so that’s all that mattered.
I went through her stuff after she was gone. One day I picked up the stack of notebooks and idly opened one of them. HOLY MOLY WHAT KIND OF LUNACY WAS THIS? She had plumb gone off her rocker. I sat down and started flipping through the pages, reading passages here and there.
She recounted every incident she could think of where people had wronged her somehow. Some were real events, but greatly exaggerated. Some were purely born of her imagination. She went on and on about all the horrible things that needed to happen to these people.
She ranted about all kinds of other subjects also, a lot of it almost incomprehensible word salad. The stuff she wrote was just altogether too similar to Trump’s delirious posts.