Donald Trump's Beautiful Broken Brain

Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark points out Donald Trump's inability to retain information from one minute to the next, as shown in his interview with Fox's Chris Wallace last Sunday.

[T]he most worrisome moment comes when Trump hands Wallace the chart that the president claims shows "number one low mortality fatality rates."

Wallace shows the audience the chart. This is it:

Leave aside the fact that the chart Trump is using omits a number of relevant countries. Even among the countries it does count, it does not show the United States with the lowest mortality rate in the world. There are, depending on how finely you slice it, clearly two countries with lower mortality rates.

In other words, the president of the United States is looking directly at a line graph, but is not able to interpret it correctly. ...

I'm not sure that there's any explanation for this exchange that isn't deeply worrisome for America.

The entire interview paints a disturbingly clear picture of Trump's mental deficiencies, his cognitive decline, and his astounding inability to admit anything he has done is less than completely perfect.

Trump bounces from back and forth from saying the US has "the lowest" mortality rate to claiming he "heard" it was "one of the lowest". He accuses Wallace of saying the US "had the worst mortality rate", when Wallace actually said (only 57 seconds earlier) the "seventh highest".

When Trump insists (again) that more testing means more cases, Wallace tells him that testing is up 37%, but new cases are up 194%. ("The virus has spread. The positivity rate has increased.") Trump stares blankly, clearly having no clue what Wallace is saying, before babbling that many of those cases are merely people with the "sniffles" who got better in a day, but it's still counted as a case.

And then there is this exchange:

WALLACE: Let's start with the surge of the coronavirus across the country in recent months. You still talk about it as, quote, "burning embers." But I want to put up a chart ... As you can see, we hit a peak here in April, 36,000 cases ... and now since June it has gone up more than double. One day this week 75,000 new cases. ... [T]his isn't burning embers ... This is a firestorm.

TRUMP: No, no. But I don't say — I say flames, we'll put out the flames. And we'll put out in some cases just burning embers. We also have burning embers. We have embers and we do have flames. Florida became more flame- like, but it's — it's going to be under control. And, you know, it's not just this country, it's many countries. We don't talk about it in the news. They don't talk about Mexico and Brazil and still parts of Europe, which actually got hit sooner than us, so it's a little ahead of us in that sense. But you take a look, why don't they talk about Mexico? Which is not helping us. And all I can say is thank God I built most of the wall, because if I didn't have the wall up we would have a much bigger problem with Mexico.

Yeesh.

"It's going to be under control." ... Just like the virus will end "one day". ... Trump never says which year (or decade) that might be or how many hundreds of thousands of Americans will be dead by that glorious day, but . . . the day will come.