Sundays

Failing the test

The beginning of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment [MoCA]—Good luck!

Tonight at 6:00 p.m. ET I’m hosting the latest episode of Ask Mary Anything within Reason over at the Mary Trump Media YouTube channel. Please leave your questions in the comments. I hope to see you later!

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It seems that some people, at least in corporate media, are starting to pay attention to Donald's increasing difficulties being coherent, completing a thought, staying on point, and connecting dots. Now, he's never been a particularly articulate person in the first place, but there is a vastly noticeable difference between the way he talked in the past and how he talks now. But although he’s worse, he’s not different. After all, this is a man who for years now has been bragging about passing a very basic cognitive test.

The truth of the matter is that Donald Trump has been “failing the cognitive test” for a very long time. He's been failing other tests as well: He's a failure as a human being—he has no empathy; he is a failure as a moral being—he is amoral.

But I want to focus on the cognitive issues. When Donald was still in office, then-White House doctor, and sadly, now-Congressman Ronnie Jackson (who in addition to being just a horrible person, is also something of a quack) had Donald take the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA). This is essentially a screening exam that's administered when doctors think their patients might be suffering from early stages of dementia or Alzheimer's.

If you take the MoCA, you're supposed to pass it. Everybody who is cognitively intact is supposed to pass it. A score of 26 out of 30 is considered normal. If your doctor thinks you need to take that means they think there might be some cognitive issues. One question asks the patient; another to draw a cube. It's absurdly easy—and it’s meant to be.

A couple years ago, Lawrence O'Donnell asked me what it meant that Donald was bragging about something so insignificant, and I said that his bragging about passing the cognitive test was failing the cognitive test.

We can look at much of Donald's performances over the last few years as similar kind of failures. For example, while his reaction to the 2020 election and his inciting of an insurrection were moral and characterological failings, they also pointed to this psychological and emotional inability to deal with reality. The recent debate—and the way he’s been talking about the debate—have similarly been cognitive failures. By claiming a massive victory, he’s not just trying to spin the massive loss Vice President Kamala Harris handed him, he’s trying to alter a psychologically unbearable reality. He actually said last week that one of the reasons he believes he won so resoundingly is because of how the audience reacted to the debate in real time. There was, in fact, no audience at the last debate.

Donald's fear of failure is so intense and deep that he needs to create a delusional system so that he can convince himself and other people that his lies are truth, that his version of events is not just preferable, but actual even when that is not the case at all.

We have a choice to make and it seems to me that it’s an obvious one. A neuropsychiatrist put it this way a few months ago when President Biden was still in the race: The difference between President Biden and Donald Trump is that the former is aging while the latter is dementing.

For reasons that are beyond my comprehension, enough people thought that normal aging was somehow worse than dementing—perhaps because Donald was loud and belligerent while Biden was quiet and at times halting—so Biden felt the need to drop out of the race.

The new contest is much to Donald’s disadvantage. Not only is his new opponent almost twenty years younger, but Kamala Harris is also very sharp, very prepared, and very smart. She makes the contrast between what it means to be a normally functioning intelligent person who understands how to make a point, understand nuance, and grasp all sides of the argument that much starker against an incompetent dullard who can’t argue his way out of a paperbag.

Now we have a test to pass again. We failed that test in 2016. We passed by the skin of our teeth in 2020, but we've been backsliding ever since then. The test is this: Who do we want to be as a country? Who do we want leading us? What do we want our leaders to inspire in us? Do we want to be led by somebody who thrives on our division; who champions the worst among us; who believes in, or at least purports to believe in white supremacy and Christian nationalism and his own completely fictional superiority; somebody who would strip this country for parts simply to enrich himself and his family? Or do we want to a leader who will try to unite us; who believes in the fundamental concept of democracy; and who will do everything in her power to strengthen what Donald Trump and the Republican Party have weakened?

That is our test to pass. It is entirely up to us how this goes down. Now, I know, I know that we who believe in democracy are fighting with one hand tied behind our backs because of structural problems that we've never fixed, like gerrymandering and the electoral college. We also have to deal with the fact that one of our two major parties, the Republican Party, has shown itself entirely willing to cheat and steal to stay in power. They don't care if the power they seize is illegitimate, they just care about getting it back at which point they will do anything if they do get it back to keep it.

Not only are the stakes high, the hurdles are, too. But we can do this. There are enough of us to make sure that Donald Trump loses by a massive margin. It may not be a massive margin at the electoral college level because our system is quite frankly anti-democratic in this regard, but we can win that as well. Having a massive popular vote win does matter, though. It sends a message, confers greater political capital, and of course, underscores the increasing absurdity of not settling presidential elections democratically. It also means we’d have a better chance of doing well down ballot—taking over the House, hopefully with a massive margin, and increasing our margin in the Senate, while also flipping state legislatures and governorships.

I said this in 2020 (and try not to think too much about how awful it is that his still needs to be said): we need to make sure that Donald Trump loses badly. And the entire Republican party needs to lose badly as well. We need to show them that a party of fascists and authoritarians has no future in the United States of America, that we don't accept them, and we refuse to entrust them with power.

We failed to do that in 2020. Republicans actually outperformed Donald Trump, which made it impossible for us to do the work that needed to be done in order for this country to become a stronger, more representative democracy. We've been spending the last four years fighting a rear-guard action against fascism while Donald Trump has been allowed to get stronger. Think about that. He didn't do that on his own. He did that with the help of the Republican Party and the corrupt, illegitimate majority on the Supreme Court.

We know what we’re fighting for and against. It’s up to us. And I wholeheartedly believe that we can do this.

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