*Screams incredibly loudly due to the fact that the United States is going to slide directly into theocratic fascism followed by total extinction from climate change because an old man caught a cold*
I was just about to write something about this but—I have a shrewd sense it's not quite that bad. ~Chara
It's as simple as this: I've seen enough clips of Donald Trump at relatively uncontrolled speaking engagements, like those rallies all the Twitter fash have been bragging about recently, to know that yes: Donald Trump really has serious dementia. I've seen and heard what it does in real life (it's not a fun memory) and I know total linguistic fragmentation when I see it. Trump's wandering between disconnected phrases and clauses when he's talking freely.
I think it's highly significant that after the first rally or two, even though the Twitter fash have all still been crowing about how amazing the Trump events have been, they have actually gotten very scarce with actual footage. They like to show crowds but clips of Trump talking? If those were hot memetic stuff I think I would have seen them. That tells me the GOP and Trump's pal Musk are working very hard to keep the true state of Trump's campaign off social media.
And that's great news for The Democrats, because their political spy-work must surely be very good (if nothing else about them is good) and so I think they've seen enough on their own and have been collecting some really juicy footage, playing a rope-a-dope game (that's where you're like Ali letting himself get pummelled for a bit so he can explode at the right moment) and getting ready for just the right time to unload all that footage on the heads of the Trump campaign. Maybe I'm being overoptimistic but I don't actually think Trump's likely to survive the open campaign trail. I honestly think they may try to avoid open campaign events as much as possible, trusting to X and Musk and the right-wing media sphere to sculpt a convincing narrative out of the barest minimum of material.
This raises another possibility, one that I like because I am sneaky and a bit of a thief at heart, which is that Joe Biden's actually been baiting the Republicans a bit, playing up his supposed debilities. But that's a wild surmise.
~Chara of Pnictogen
EDIT: Oh I forgot an important point. As dementia advances, cognition decays but the sufferer can still do things they've learned by heart. This was how they managed to keep Ronald Reagan looking halfway normal. He was an actor and he still knew how to act and take direction, and he had teleprompters to read, so they could make it work (less well, the 2nd term.) Donald Trump is basically an actor, so I think the CNN debate was more or less a rehearsed performance. As I understand it he didn't really answer the questions, he just talked, so...yeah I think he had a spiel ready. He can do THAT and still seem relatively compos mentis, I'm guessing. ~Chara
