One year ago today, I was preparing for new Splinter’s launch, wondering if you should vote for Joe Biden. As he became more frail and less coherent in his extremely limited public appearances, many asked questions that were finally answered at perhaps the most infamous presidential debate in history. We have already lived through one president creating a crisis by adding another win to father time’s undefeated record in very public fashion, and as I wrote last summer, the press is giving a pass to a completely delirious president who could be walking the same path that Biden did.
Donald Trump has long been incoherent just as a matter of principle, so the dividing line between his general tendency to ramble and his melting brain making him do it is difficult to discern. Diagnosing medical issues from a distance is a no-no for many medical, legal and moral reasons, but at the same time, we all saw Joe Biden’s brain fall out of his head on national TV last year, which made a lot of things that happened in the past make a lot more sense. I am simply asking the question: is it happening again?
The second Trump administration is completely unhinged. They are doing random things they never talked about in the campaign like dedicating most of their energy and all of the stock market’s post-election profits and then some to forcing Canada to become the 51st state, something a whopping eight percent of Americans support per one poll. Trump’s contention, a thing he never talked about in the campaign in part because the figures on it are so miniscule, is that Canada is destroying the United States by allowing fentanyl to flow across the northern border. If that sounds like what he has been saying about Mexico, it’s because it is. Does he know that Canada and Mexico are different countries? If so, his policy agenda is not doing a great job demonstrating that he does!
Trump is now telling the Pentagon to draw up plans to put a military presence in Panama to counter the “Chinese soldiers” that aren’t there, providing the potential to set off a regional war (or a war with China) that even Henry Kissinger didn’t want. Trump has destroyed the core of American power, our massive infrastructure dedicated to the cutting edge of scientific advancement, practically overnight, all to satisfy the deranged whims of a ketamine addict and a bunch of know-nothing college-aged kids stripping the government for parts. Trump is so dedicated to letting Elon Musk take the wheel, he staged perhaps the most sweaty and desperate event in White House history this week, hawking Elon’s shitty death traps on the White House lawn in a bid to rescue Tesla’s plummeting stock price. Social Security, the famed Third Rail of American politics, is never to be touched by any politician lest they want to anger the largest group of committed voters, yet here is said ketamine bro on TV saying he’s coming for it. Trump is apparently fine with all this! This is nuts! Bonkers! Totally unhinged! What the fuck is going on!?
Wild idea: maybe the reason this is all so insane is because the person behind it is not exactly all there. I know that this is uncouth to suggest in America, especially with a Beltway political press still trying to pretend like this is all normal, but this would not be the United States’ first rodeo with a commander in chief who is well past his expiration date. Joe Biden wasn’t even our first time dealing with this Mad King shit.
Ronald Reagan, who also wasn’t America’s first “is he all there” saga, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease five years after completing his second term, and his son Ron Reagan said that he saw signs of it in his father as early as 1984 in his debate with Walter Mondale (his other son, conservative activist Michael Reagan, disputes this). Researchers at Arizona State University published findings in The Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease which suggested that alterations in Reagan’s speech could be predictive of the development of Alzheimer’s, providing credence to Ron’s claim.
Maybe the widespread corruption and chaos of the second Reagan administration could have a simple explanation that all animals with a skull innately know: your brain doesn’t get better as you get older, especially the further you get past the average lifespan of your species.
What was perhaps our first rodeo with this dynamic netted America a female president. Despite some of the boomer wish casting around Reagan’s second term, it probably wasn’t Nancy Reagan. It could have been Jill Biden, in retrospect. It definitely was, however, Edith Wilson. There’s a whole episode of Drunk History about it and everything. President Woodrow Wilson was partially paralyzed by a minor stroke in 1919, and she acted as the president for the rest of his term, facilitating all communication between whatever Woodrow was capable of at that moment and the rest of the government.
There are other examples of poor health raising questions about who may be acting president, like Dwight Eisenhower’s litany of health problems wearing him down, or “one of the unhealthiest presidents we have ever had” in John F. Kennedy, debilitated by chronic back pain and Addison’s disease long before he became etched into history for an entirely different kind of injury. Grover Cleveland had a cancerous lesion removed from his mouth in his second term, while Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously battled polio. A year after becoming president, Chester Arthur was diagnosed with Bright disease, a deadly kidney ailment that saps its victims of their energy. A country who elects a lot of old people to be president is going to have presidents dealing with health issues, and that is exactly what has happened plenty of times in our history. Making this a taboo subject in a world run by gerontocrats is emblematic of yet another aspect of this country’s denial about the bed it has long made for itself. Before you even get to everything Trump is and says and does, it’s not unreasonable to wonder whether a soon to be 79-year-old man made entirely of resentment, cable news and Big Macs has all of his marbles in order, especially given what we went through not even a year ago, or forty years ago, etc…
Now we are dealing with Trump upending the entire post-World War II order overnight, sparking the largest constitutional crisis since the Civil War by handing over control of the federal bureaucracy to Elon freaking Musk who is wearing sunglasses indoors for unknown reasons that also raise compelling health-related questions, wielding a chainsaw gifted to him by the Argentinian president overseeing 23 percent inflation in his country. Trump’s insane trade war has tossed his beloved markets into complete chaos, and it has alienated our closest allies and trading partners, perhaps forever. This is all so crazy!
For what? Why are we doing this? Sure, it’s the smash and grab operation the American oligarchy has been planning since the establishment of the New Deal a century ago, but it’s also like, the end of the US auto industry as we know it if we keep going down this path, among many other cataclysmically self-destructive moves. It’s all so insane that the only rational explanation is that the driving force behind it must be just as crazy as it all looks.
GET SPLINTER RIGHT IN YOUR INBOX
The Truth Hurts
