5 times Trump showed signs of possible mental decline & isn't fit for the White House
| 01/23/24
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Donald Trump and other Republicans have spent years claiming Joe Biden is unfit to be president because he's supposedly showing signs of "dementia," but it is Trump himself who seemingly can't keep facts straight and is constantly mixing up people's names while on the campaign trail. Sometimes, the call is coming from inside the house.
While the 77-year-old politician boasts that he has "aced" the cognitive tests he's been given, he can't remember the names of his fellow politicians — even the one who currently resides in the White House — and doesn't seem to have a clue that we fought in World War II over 70 years ago.
His possible cognitive decline is seemingly becoming more apparent everyday and his glaring mistakes have become so frequent that #TrumpisNotWell is currently trending on X (formerly Twitter), so let's look back at Trump's most recent errors that have people questioning his mental acuity and fitness to be president.
Trump, fixated on Nikki Haley, apparently confusing her with Nancy Pelosi... https://t.co/KILTDTaHyk
— Abby D. Phillip (@abbydphillip) January 20, 2024
Last week, Trump seemed to mix up his Republican nomination rival Nikki Haley with California Rep. Nancy Pelosi during a rally in New Hampshire where he was grandstanding about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capital.
After insulting Haley for how few people she had drawn to her campaign rallies, Trump started insulting Pelosi about her response to the insurrection but kept calling her Haley over and over again. “By the way, they never report the crowd on Jan. 6. You know Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, you know, they — do you know they destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence, everything, deleted and destroyed all of it. All of it,” Trump claimed, according to The Hill. “Because of lots of things … like Nikki Haley is in charge of security — we offered her 10,000 people, soldiers, National Guards, whatever they want. They turned it down. They don’t want to talk about that. These are very dishonest people.”
Not only did Trump get the names mixed up, but all of his facts were wrong, too. Pelosi was not leading security during the attacks, and the Speaker of the House — the position Pelosi held at the time — is not in charge of the National Guard. “On Jan. 6th, the Speaker, a target of an assassination attempt that day, was no more in charge of Capitol security than Mitch McConnell was,” then-Pelosi spokesperson Drew Hammill told The Associated Press in July 2021. “This is a clear attempt to whitewash what happened on Jan. 6th and divert blame.”
Paul Froggatt/Shutterstock; Octavio Hoyos/Shutterstock
Trump has mixed up President Biden and former President Obama so often that he even had to post a disclaimer on Truth Social explaining that these flubs were intentional.
Just a few days ago, Trump mixed the two up during an appearance on Fox News. He was talking to Sean Hannity about the necessity of giving presidents immunity when he said, "Because when he leaves office, the opposing party, president, if it's the opposing party, will indict the president for doing something that should have been good, like Obama dropped missiles, and they ended up hitting a kindergarten or school or the apartment house, a lot of people were killed."
Earlier this month, Trump made a similar mistake when he claimed he was ahead of Obama in the polls when he meant to say Biden. "As you know, crooked Joe Biden and the radical left thugs have weaponized law enforcement to arrest their leading political opponent, and leading by a lot, including Obama — I'll tell you what," he said during a Washington D.C. summit, Business Insider reports.
In this same speech, he also mixed up Obama and his 2016 presidential election opponent, Hilary Clinton. "With Obama, we won an election that everyone said couldn't be won," he said.
ICYMI: Donald Trump 🍊 has solved climate change with some damp forests!pic.twitter.com/J9mthoh5Eu
— Forward Blue (@forwardbluepac) September 30, 2023
In a bizarre attempt to talk about preventing fires in California's roughly 33 million acres of forest, Trump suggested keeping them "damp" at a Republican convention in Anaheim last September, Business Insider reports.
"They say that there's so much water up north that I want to have the overflow areas go into your forests and dampen your forests, because if you dampen your forests you're not gonna have these forest fires that are burning at levels that nobody's ever seen," Trump said.
Trump confuses Biden for Obama and then says Biden is “leading us into WWII”
— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) September 16, 2023
pic.twitter.com/xhSz7Pva5U
Last September, at a speech at the Pray Vote Stand summit in Washington, D.C., Trump claimed that Biden is “cognitively impaired” before warning that the current president would lead up into WWII — you know, the war that our grandparents fought in.
“We have a man who is totally corrupt and the worst president in the history of our country, who is cognitively impaired, in no condition to lead, and who is now in charge of dealing with Russia and possible nuclear war,” Trump said, New York Magazine reports. “Just think of it. We would be in World War II very quickly if we’re going to be relying on this man.”
Vladamir Trukenich/Shutterstock; Preecha Buathong/Shutterstock
At a rally in South Carolina last year, Trump went on another rant about wind turbines, this time claiming that “windmills” were killing whales by “driving them crazy.”
“They are washing up ashore,” Trump said, according to The Guardian. “You wouldn’t see that once a year – now they are coming up on a weekly basis. The windmills are driving them crazy. They are driving the whales, I think, a little batty.”
Ariel Messman-Rucker is an Oakland-born journalist who now calls the Pacific Northwest her home. When she’s not writing about politics and queer pop culture, she can be found reading, hiking, or talking about horror movies with the Zombie Grrlz Horror Podcast Network.
Ariel Messman-Rucker is an Oakland-born journalist who now calls the Pacific Northwest her home. When she’s not writing about politics and queer pop culture, she can be found reading, hiking, or talking about horror movies with the Zombie Grrlz Horror Podcast Network.