Is Trump Experiencing Dementia?

 Maggie Haberman - who has been a weird sort of insider reporter in Trumpistan - thinks that Trump is as sharp as he's ever been. Now, my position is that Trump has always been pretty stupid, especially if we are talking about higher, abstract cognitive functions. He has a base ability to bully and cajole and "sell" himself, but he is not a deep thinker. He has also spent his entire life at war with the world, and that stems from his lack of overarching intelligence. He was the not-too-bright failson of a self-made asshole from Queens, and he simultaneously craved the attention of the Manhattan set and resented them for not accepting him, except as a punchline.

As Rofer points out in the linked piece, saying that Trump is not suffering from dementia does not imply that he is operating in a productive cognitive state. Trump's business was an extremely small outfit of co-conspirators. During his first term, he was surrounded by the "adults in the room" - people who understood how government worked and what American principles generally were. 

Now, Trump is surrounded by sycophants who lavish North Korean-style praise on him. He is increasingly in a bubble, where bad news isn't really penetrating his inner bubble. The result is the Iran fiasco, the inflation, the various legal setbacks, and the complete inability to pass legislation despite having control of both houses of Congress. 

Haberman's point that Trump does not exhibit "dementia" is probably only slightly accurate. Having watched people fall into dementia, it's not a light switch. You slowly degrade in ways that can be very hard to pick up by people who are around you all the time. Still, there's a chance that we have someone who was not very smart to begin with, is experiencing normal aging and is walled off from information that might wound his fragile ego. 

This doesn't account for the falling asleep in meetings, the unexplained medical visits and his incessant bragging about passing a dementia test. As someone who felt that Biden was suffering not from dementia but from an acceleration of his speech impediment, I suppose I should extend the same benefit of the doubt to Trump.

I just don't feel like it.