In our government run by middle school boys, there is a very middle school boy-style spat unfolding, as Trump shared a racist and mildly deranged AI video of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. This has led to many other spats orbiting around it, like Ted Cruz reminding everyone he is just a parrot and still does not fundamentally understand the concept of humor, as well as Democratic Rep. Madeline Dean confronting Republican Speaker Mike Johnson about it off the House floor on Tuesday in an exchange that was caught on cameras.
While many on the right are trying to make this about Rep. Dean being upset over what they claim is a silly harmless video, the real headline for me is how one of Trump’s closest allies responded to what she said. This is not a denial, and in fact, the “too” part of Johnson’s retort could easily be interpreted as a confirmation of her allegation that the president is “unwell.”
Johnson even nods his head when she says Trump is unwell! This exchange is so straightforward that you don’t have to do any armchair psychoanalysis to interpret what Johnson may think of the growing notion that we are living under the deluded rule of Brandon 2.0 right now. But if you did want to do some unqualified analysis, the GOP Speaker’s curt response of “I didn’t see it” while he looked away and avoided eye contact gets my poker brain thinking bluff. If he did see Trump’s speech to the generals and he’s telling people he didn’t, that likely means the Speaker didn’t like what he saw. Perhaps because it was yet another demonstration of how the oldest president ever inducted into office looks to be “unwell.”
Albania, Azerbaijan and France’s leaders are all laughing at us out in the open. America is the butt of the planet’s jokes, and not just because the GOP is run by the world’s most over-caffeinated twelve-year-old boys, but it certainly is a big part of it. Trump is claiming to make peace deals he never did then demanding a Nobel Peace Prize for it while posting then deleting fake AI videos of himself, all while shadow president Stephen Miller uses the word “hardcore” unironically. Three countries who are very used to being varying degrees of punchlines for centuries with a deep history of deluded autocrats now have reached higher ground than us, as measured by the sentience of their leadership relative to ours, and they’re laughing at us about it.
It is so telling that the self-appointed president brain patrollers in CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex ‘I don’t know the difference between a scientific and a push poll’ Thompson are not telling everyone how doggedly they are pursuing a story investigating this president’s cognitive health, just the last one. That these two stenographic book salesman cosplaying as journalists are still talking about Joe Biden, a man no one cares about anymore except the people on the right losing juice and trying to blame the GOP’s failures on the most milquetoast villain in their cinematic universe, proves yet again how the media holds Republicans and Democrats to completely different standards. It’s also a good demonstration of what easy marks so much of the media are, where Biden’s lifelong stutter animated their belief in his cognitive decline, while Trump’s sweaty sales shtick still works on their smooth brains despite all the evidence that he provides proving it is not 2016 upstairs in his noggin anymore.
I feel like sharing and deleting the AI video referencing an unhinged conspiracy theory that preys on sick people was something of a watershed moment for this subject. Amateur diagnosis of health problems from a distance is a no no for myriad good reasons, but exceptions have been made for public servants with immense power, as we demonstrated last year. If those controlling the levers of power are not operating logically, then neither are some of the most powerful institutions and structures in the world, and that’s a life-threatening problem for the rest of us. Tapper and Thompson would be right if their book was about anything other than flagellating each other for being so smart and savvy for publishing a report a year after the Biden story broke, but the president’s health is a vitally important subject. I look at this as a real news story with meat on the bone the same way I wrote about Biden last year. If the president himself is doing something so bizarre as to share a video of a fake version of himself promising he will give so-called medbeds to people, then deleting it, then by the president’s own admission, he screwed up.
Why did he screw up? Why share that video at all? Or any of the other bizarre AI videos he’s been sharing? Why wreck the economy and betray some of your most fervent voters for Argentinian farmers? Is it because he is “unwell”? We don’t know for certain, but we now have video proving that if you ask the Republican Speaker of the House about it, he won’t deny it.
