Our Unwell President

Donald Trump cognitive deficiencies are growing worse. When will the mainstream media start talking about the elephant in the room? Also, an elephant-themed Musical Interlude!

I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality of American politics. If you were sent this email or are a free subscriber and would like to become a paid subscriber, you can sign up here.

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Ramblin’ Man

Photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash

Over the past week, there has been a media feeding frenzy regarding former President Joe Biden’s mental acuity in the latter stages of his presidency. White House staff and Democratic politicians are accused of lying to the American people about Biden’s supposed cognitive decline, and media outlets have speculated that 2028 Democratic presidential aspirants will need to answer for what they said about Biden’s physical and mental health.

What is particularly odd about this media coverage is that it is ignoring the elephant in the room — the current president’s mental acuity and the worrying signs of erratic, impulsive, and incoherent behavior.

For example, on Friday, at a roundtable event in Doha, Qatar, at the tail end of his recent Middle East trip, Trump spoke virtually uninterrupted for 27 minutes. He produced a narrative so disjointed and divorced from reality that it makes Biden’s disastrous June 2024 debate performance look like Martin Luther King delivering his “I have a dream speech.”

I will focus on just one short segment of Trump’s remarks because they capture, in some detail, the president’s inability to adhere to a logical and cogent narrative or even speak in a way that is easily understandable to anyone but himself.

At around the 10-minute mark of his remarks, Trump praised American arms makers. “We make the greatest weapons in the world,” said the president. We make the greatest planes in the world, the greatest missiles and defense systems.”

Trump then quickly pivoted to talking about drones and complained that Iran makes them for $35,000 to $40,000, while US-made drones cost closer to $41 million (Trump is correct about the cost of Iran’s drones, but the most expensive US military drone is the MQ-9 Reaper, which runs $33 million, but many other drones are much cheaper).

It’s then, however, that things really go off the skids. Read for yourself:

The drone is killing tremendous numbers of people. You hide behind a tree, and the drone comes down and it circles you with fire. You don't have a chance. The tree comes down, also, by the way. It's so intense. I mean, you see these trees being knocked down like they're being sawed down by a top-of-the-line timberman, like, you know, Sean Duffy.

If you’re wondering why Trump starts talking about Duffy, hold on … because Trump is about to go on an epic digression.

Do you know that Sean Duffy, the head of the transportation department, who's working right now on the airports and getting a system because Biden didn't do a thing for four years and Pete Buttigieg was the head and he goes bicycling to work -- he takes a bicycle to work. Can you believe -- he's running the biggest air system in the world and he takes a bicycle to work?

And they say he's going to run for president. I don't see it. Who knows, right, but I don't see it.

But when I look at what they've done, it's so horrible what they have done and the work they did do, they wasted billions of dollars on trying to hook up air systems to copper, and they tried to hook up copper to glass. And the glass doesn't work with copper and they had 30,000 different contractors doing 30,000 jobs. And when they put it all together, they spent billions of dollars, it didn't even come close to working. And we're going to be giving out a brand-new system. It's very important. We'll have the best system and we think we know who that system is, but we have a lot of bidding.

But we want one check. We want a unified system. We don't want to have 5,000 contractors in all different places, some digging ditches and some not digging ditches because they want to go by satellite. Satellite seems to be the way to go.

As best I can tell, Trump is talking about an air traffic control modernization plan unveiled by Duffy earlier this month. The plan will, among other things, transition air traffic control systems away from “outdated copper lines to fiber [optic cables]” while also relying on “wireless and satellite technologies.”

If you are wondering why Trump mentions glass, my best guess is that he is referencing the fact that fiber optic cables “transmit data as pulses of light go through tiny strands of glass.”

It’s also possible that Trump is referencing recent problems at Newark International Airport that were apparently “the result of a failure of copper wiring that transmits information from a facility in New York to Newark.”

Trump’s mention of 30,000 different contractors is more confusing. This could reference a more than $2 billion Verizon contract issued during the Biden administration to upgrade copper wires to fiber optic cables. Elon Musk has criticized that contract, saying his Starlink communication would be a better fix. He’s also publicly threatened to end the Verizon contract.

Trump could also be referring to the broadband rural expansion program that was part of the bipartisan infrastructure bill passed in 2018 under President Biden. Republicans have criticized it because the money appropriated was not spent. According to one estimate, “30,000 more broadband technician workers are needed to execute the current amount of planned federal and state broadband funding.” It’s hard to imagine Trump is referencing this data point, but it’s difficult to find another explanation for the 30,000 figure he cites — or, for that matter, the figure of 5,000 contractors.

It’s possible that since there was discussion of transitioning to fiber optic cable in the country’s air traffic control systems, his mind went to rural broadband and the criticisms of the Biden plan to increase access. But to be clear, rural broadband expansion has nothing to do with the Department of Transportation. The Commerce Department is responsible for it.

Whatever the case, Trump’s narrative is so disjointed and incoherent that it simply makes no sense. I’m not exaggerating that I probably spent an hour trying to understand what he was referring to above.

I’m A Lumberjack and I’m Ok

If you’re still wondering why Trump brought up Sean Duffy, here’s your reward.