Friday, January 24, 2020

Trump: "With Me, There's No Lying." He Also Spoke Of Thomas Edison In The Present Tense (Edison Died 88 Years Ago).

President Donald Trump, at a press conference in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday, January 22, 2020:
With me, there's no lying.
Right. ... Well, I have to go now, Donald, because I'm due back on the planet earth. The reality-based community knows Trump is rapidly closing in on at least 17,000 publicly-uttered lies in the last three years.


WaPo:
[N]early 70 times he has claimed that a whistleblower complaint about the call was inaccurate. The report accurately captured the content of Trump's call and many other details have been confirmed. Nearly 100 times, Trump has claimed his phone call with the Ukrainian president was "perfect," even though it so alarmed other White House officials that several immediately raised private objections. ...

As Trump approaches a tough reelection campaign, his most repeated claim — 257 times — is that the U.S. economy today is the best in history.
I wish there were stats for the last nine presidents (back to Nixon), because we could use some context. But you'd probably have to confine the examined statements to speeches and press conferences, to create a level playing field.)

Also: In an interview on Wednesday with CNBC's Joe Kernen while in Davos, Switzerland, Trump appeared to believe (a) Thomas Edison is still alive (he died in 1931) and (b) the wheel was invented by Americans (which is almost understandable, since Trump thinks the US has been around for thousands of years (sharing with Italy a "cultural and political heritage dating back to Ancient Rome"), but the wheel was actually invented by the Mesopotamians about 5,500 years ago).
Kernen: Tesla's now worth more than GM and Ford. Do you have comments on Elon Musk?

Trump: Well -- you have to give him credit. I spoke to him very recently, and he's also doing the rockets. He likes rockets. And -- he does good at rockets too, by the way. I never saw where the engines come down with no wings, no anything, and they're landing. I said I've never seen that before. And I was worried about him, because he's one of our great geniuses, and we have to protect our genius. You know, we have to protect Thomas Edison and we have to protect all of these people that -- came up with originally the light bulb and -- the wheel and all of these things. And he's one of our very smart people and we want to-- we want to cherish those people.
Chris Cillizza, CNN:
For the entirety of Donald Trump's presidency, I have gone through the transcript of a good number of the speeches and interviews he has given. In doing that, one thing has become crystal clear to me: He is one of the least articulate -- if not the least articulate -- politicians ever to make it onto the national stage. ... [H]e lacks the ability to speak extemporaneously in anything close to an effective manner. ...
Trump's comments "sparked concerns about [Trump's] mental health among attorneys, former government officials and a Yale University psychiatrist," according to Salon's Igor Derysh.

Maya Wiley, a former attorney for the ACLU and NAACP, told MSNBC's Brian Williams that she found Trump's statements
both sad and disturbing. I do have to wonder what that means for him cognitively and whether or not something is going on. ... To speak about Thomas Edison as if he is still alive is simply something that is scary. ... We should be very concerned about his health.
Williams replied: "You're not the first person to say that." ... Edison died in 1931, by the way.

Yale psychiatry professor Bandy X. Lee says Trump's comments show a "marked worsening" of his mental state.
He is less able to stay with a topic, to find complex words, to form complete sentences. And the content of his words is becoming more impoverished, if not nonsensical. Connecting the present to a distant past or to history is common in progressive dementia, and while dementia is still not a diagnosis we can make without detailed medical records, these are serious signs of deterioration we should not ignore. ... His impairment should be very clear to everyone ... [I]t is inhumane, either for him or for ourselves, to continue to prop up this man as being normal.

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