Tag Archives: senility

President Vance?

Those of us who have been obsessively following the political campaigns have been struck by Trump’s increasingly precipitous mental decline.  In just the past week, he has turned in truly bizarre performances. At a rally, he stopped taking questions and stood for 39 minutes silently “dancing” to music from what was evidently a playlist; in interviews, he refused to answer questions, instead going wildly off-subject, lobbing insults and demeaning journalists at the Wall Street Journal.

With less than three weeks left until November 5th, we seem to be in a race to see whether Trump’s meltdown will be too complete–and too impossible for even MAGA to ignore– before the election, or whether America will risk the unthinkable by electing him and then waking up to the reality that we’ve really elected JD Vance.

Heather Cox Richardson has focused upon that prospect, noting that–even if Trump wasn’t so obviously losing it–he’s 78 years old. The likelihood of a senile 78-year-old serving a full term is, to be charitable, low.

Trump’s issues make it likely that a second Trump presidency would really mean a J.D. Vance presidency, even if Trump nominally remains in office.

Currently an Ohio senator, J.D. Vance is just 39, and if voters put Trump into the White House, Vance will be one of the most inexperienced vice presidents in our history. He has held an elected office for just 18 months, winning the office thanks to the backing of entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who first employed Vance, then invested in his venture capital firm, and then contributed an unprecedented $15 million to his Senate campaign.

Vance and Thiel make common cause with others who are open about their determination to dismantle the federal government. Although different groups came to that mission from different places, they are sometimes collectively called a “New Right” (although at least one scholar has questioned just how new it really is). Some of the thinkers both Vance and Thiel follow, notably dystopian blogger Curtis Yarvin, argue that America’s democratic institutions have created a society that is, as James Pogue put it in a 2022 Vanity Fair article, “at once tyrannical, chaotic, and devoid of the systems of value and morality that give human life richness and meaning.” Such a system must be pulled to pieces.

Richardson described several other “tech bros” who subscribe to that world-view and support both Trump and Project 2025, which–to use academic language–“operationalizes” it. It is a worldview and a plan that JD Vance wholeheartedly endorses.

Like Thiel, Vance has spoken extensively about the need to destroy the U.S. government, but while Thiel emphasizes the potential of a technological future unencumbered by democratic baggage, Vance emphasizes what he sees as the decadence of today’s America and the need to address that decadence by purging the government of secular leaders. A 2019 convert to right-wing Catholicism, Vance said he was attracted to the religion in part because he wanted to see the Republican Party use the government to work for what he considers the common good by imposing laws that would enforce his version of morality.

Vance would continue the Right’s war on education; Richardson notes that Vance has called American universities “the enemy.” But there’s much more.

Vance wants to dismantle the secular state. He wants to replace that state with a Christian nationalism that enforces what he considers traditional values: an end to immigration—hence the lies about the legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio—and an end to LGBTQ+ rights. He supports abortion bans and the establishment of a patriarchy in which women function as wives and mothers even if it means staying in abusive marriages.

The available evidence suggests that MAGA folks are far less supportive of Vance than they are of Trump, despite (or perhaps due to) the fact that Vance is a far more articulate communicator of their Project 2025 worldview. I wonder how many of them will knowingly vote for a Vance presidency– assuming they are capable of recognizing that probability.

I also wonder how MAGA voters are processing Trump’s increasingly public deterioration. How are they explaining away the bizarre comments about sharks and the “great” Hannibal Lecter, and Trump’s own “beautiful body?” Do they worry about the fact that every economist–liberal or conservative–says Trump’s love-affair with tariffs would tank the economy, increase inflation and impose a huge tax on American families?

Or does their loyalty to Faux News and its clones protect them from even hearing about these things?

And most obsessively of all, I wonder how many of these fearful, angry, and irrational people are there–and how many will vote?

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The Documented Trump

I recently read Joe Conaston’s book “The Longest Con”–a deep dive into political corruption. It was an admittedly partisan dive, focused on Republican officeholders–I’m not naive enough to believe that Democrats are all saintly do-gooders. But Conaston’s reporting did “bring the receipts” as the saying goes; the last quarter or so of the book was a comprehensive list of resources.

When he got to Donald J. Trump, the sleaze went off the scale. From simple laziness and inattention to the job (Trump spent one out of every three days of his presidency on visits to his resorts, hotels and golf courses), to his direction of millions of public dollars to his own businesses (he arguably violated the Constitution by encouraging foreign governments seeking favors from the U.S. to stay at his hotels and resorts), Conaston concluded that Trump kept his business enterprises solvent with taxpayer dollars.

It was a portrait of the grifter as President. 

None of those observations would surprise those of us who follow politics closely. But a recent column in the Washington Post focused on an element of Trump’s tenure that did surprise me, although it was obvious once Matt Bai, the author of the article, pointed it out: unlike virtually every other President, Trump didn’t show signs of aging while in office.

Watch any video of Biden four years ago, and you’ll have the odd sensation of having turned back the clock by a decade at least. It was the visual effects of Biden’s aging, rather than evidence of any cognitive decline, that doomed his candidacy from the moment he appeared on the debate stage in June.

Why does the presidency have this effect? It’s not the late nights and endless flights (although they probably doesn’t help). It’s the physical burden of awesome responsibility. Every decision seems to involve bad options and worse; some cost livelihoods, others, actual lives. Add to this the toll it all takes on a family (in Biden’s case, the very public prosecution of his only surviving son), and you can see why a normal person isn’t built to withstand it.

But this is where Trump is truly not normal. I’m trying not to be cruel here, but it’s not exactly breaking new ground to say that he seems to lack for something innately human: the basic capacity to internalize other people’s pain. As president, Trump never betrayed remorse or apologized, never seemed to take personally the 800,000 Americans who died of covid-19 on his watch. Tragedy breeds in him only defiance. Trump’s motto might be: “Don’t worry, be angry.”

At another point in the essay, Bai points to a behavior that reinforces Conaston’s perspective on what really matters to this very twisted man:

When Trump and his children talk about the sacrifices their family made to serve the public, they aren’t talking about his anguished nights spent roaming the halls of the White House. They’re talking about money.

The point is that empathy and self-doubt — the feeling that we’re failing to meet the critical needs of others — are the things that really take a toll on us. Whereas clinical callousness may well be a fountain of youth — from which Trump has been guzzling his entire life.

This analysis goes a long way toward explaining why people thought of Biden as much older than Trump, despite the fact that, at 78, Trump is less than 4 years younger, and is now the oldest person ever to run for President. Anger and hostility can manifest as energy. Not caring about others–certainly not the people he was elected to serve–protected Trump against the dramatic aging we almost always see in Presidents after they’ve served a term. 

What anger and extreme entitlement/narcissism cannot mask, however, is increasing senility– loss of even the minimal control Trump was once able to muster. After Biden’s withdrawal and the surge in support for Harris, an increasing number of articles have asked whether Trump is “losing it.” (That assumes he ever had “it,” but I quibble.)

As one such article noted,

Today in New Jersey, Trump tricked reporters into covering a “press conference” that turned out to be a lengthy speech to his supporters at his golf course. Low-energy Trump read from a thick binder that included a string of outrageous lies, including the ridiculous claim that more than 100% of new jobs created in the U.S. are going to migrants….

“He lacks self-control. He lacks discipline,” Republican donor Eric Levine told the New York Times. He’s focused on a “very strange victimhood and grievance,” said Republican strategist Liam Donovan.

Yet millions of Americans will vote for this deteriorating con man–presumably, because he gives them permission to be as hateful as he is.

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Is Justice Scalia Senile?

The legal community has been buzzing since Justice Scalia issued one of his dissents last Tuesday.

Justice Antonin Scalia’s factual error has been called “unprecedented” by legal experts. As Talking Points Memo noted,

It’s common for the Supreme Court to make typographical corrections and insubstantial edits to a decision after its release. But it’s exceedingly rare to see a factual error that helps form the basis for an opinion. Legal experts say Scalia’s mistake appears to be wholly unprecedented in that it involves a justice flatly misstating core facts from one of his own prior opinions…

Scalia was dissenting from a 6-2 decision upholding the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate cross-state coal pollution. To help back up his judgment, he cited a 9-0 opinion he wrote in 2001 called Whitman v. American Trucking Association. But the EPA’s stance in that case was the exact opposite of what Scalia said it was in Tuesday’s opinion.

Scalia has been a polarizing figure in the legal community, often criticized for using his obvious brilliance to twist precedent and law in order to get his preferred result. Critics note that his professed “originalism” is employed very selectively in service of his ideological preferences. Tuesday’s error, however, is of an entirely different order.

And that raises some eyebrows–and questions.

Where were his law clerks? Didn’t they alert him to the error? How could he misstate facts from a decision that he himself had written —and not just misstate some peripheral matters, but totally mischaracterize the parties basic positions?

Scalia has become more irascible in recent years; more contemptuous of longstanding Court rules and dismissive of the ethical guidelines that apply to others in the judiciary. This latest behavior raises a troubling question: is the Justice getting senile? And if so, what–if anything–can we do about it?

When the Court was first established, lifespans were shorter.  The average tenure of a Supreme Court Justice through 1970 was 14.9 years. Among those who’ve retired since 1970, it has jumped to 26.1 years.

Maybe we should consider a 20 year term for Justices. Long enough to shield them from political pressure, but not long enough to risk having them serve well into their dotage.

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