"Jacked-Up Joe" vs. "Dementia Don"

Fox News admits: a) Biden doesn't have dementia; and b) Biden at 81 is still capable of "lapping" Trump.

The prospective matchup for this year's Presidential election was known long before Super Tuesday.

And if you believed the primary season hype from Fox News and The New York Times, you knew exactly what to expect: a one-sided, almost-too-painful-to-watch Trump-Biden rematch.

Resting in a rocking chair in the Blue Corner, "Sleepy Joe," the now doddery and dementia-ridden 81-year-old current champ, stubbornly refusing to throw in the towel and insisting he be allowed to get back into the ring for one last slugfest.

Prowling the Red Corner, the seemingly ageless, fake-tanned, trash-talking "Donny Dynamo," looking sharp in his new gold sneakers, impatient to deliver a quick knockout punch.

Thursday night threw the promoters' plans into disarray

Even as President Biden delivered his "home run" State of the Union speech, Fox News was scrambling to come up with language to characterize Biden's energy, passion and sustained coherence as negatively as possible for its hardcore viewers.

Neither Biden's assured delivery nor his confident handling of the heckling slobs in the MAGA audience could be attributed to any of the available dementia or Alzheimer's drugs.

So Fox News quickly settled on the idea that Biden was "juicing" with some kind of Presidential performance-enhancing drugs. PEDs that the Trump team, apparently, doesn't have access to.

Sean Hannity renamed President Biden "Jacked-Up Joe." And Jesse Watters compared the President's performance to that of an old horse that had been doped up to such degree that it "fires out of the gate and laps everybody."

Two key points implicit in this new analysis:

• Biden doesn't have dementia.
• Even at 81 years old, "old horse" Biden is still capable of lapping the lumbering Trump on Trump's best day (however long ago that was).

As Jonathan Alter wrote on Substack:

It wasn’t just the passion and fight he brought to one of the better-crafted SOTUs I’ve seen in the last 40 years... It was that Biden proved that he has the strength, endurance, and mental agility to be an effective president. Earlier in the day, Republicans released what seemed to be a devastating short ad showing him stumbling and confused. Then, after the speech, they said he was too intense and aggressive. Which is it, guys?

As I wrote in the script for my latest YouTube short: "President Biden's powerful State of the Union speech silenced doubts about his mental fitness and shifted...

... focus to Trump's increasingly apparent mental decline."

The only candidate with cognition concerns is "Dementia Don"

Even if the mainstream media has downplayed Trump's increasingly feeble mental state, it has become a frequently trending topic on social media.

The Lincoln Project has been saying "Trump Is Not Well" since 2020.

On Twitter, Meidas Touch Senior Digital Editor @Acyn documents many of Trump's brain glitches in real-time.

I wrote about the possible reasons for Trump's mental deterioration—including, in addition to possible dementia, the effects of drug abuse, cardiovascular disease, and his 2020 hospitalization for life-threatening Covid—in Trump's Damaged Brain a few days ago.

That article quoted at length an interview given to Salon by psychologist Dr. John Gartner. Since then, other experts, including clinical psychologist and friend-of-this-newsletter Dr. Vince Greenwood, have given additional observations to Salon's Chauncey Vega.

Among Dr. Greenwood's comments to Salon:

On Trump mixing up people's names:

Trump has displayed this kind of confusion with increasing regularity over the past few years. It is meaningful because the confusion of people, in contrast to the occasional forgetting of names, is a sign of early dementia, as noted by the Dementia Care Society.

On the clinical significance of Trump's phonemic paraphasia:

In his speech in North Carolina, Trump said “migrant cime” leaving out the “r”; and was unable to say “Venezuela” which came out sounding like “Venezwheregull.” These are examples of what we call phonemic paraphasia which is associated with underlying brain damage... We all stumble over and mispronounce words occasionally. This is not what is going on with Trump. The incidence of these kinds of mistakes takes him into this realm of phonemic paraphasia, which is a sign of underlying brain damage, not just aging. Even when compared to his speech of a few years ago, you can observe a noticeable difference. When you compare it to his speech as a middle-aged man, the shift is radical and ominous.

On the clinical significance of Trump's semantic paraphasia:

Trump has also been displaying another kind of paraphasia, called semantic paraphasia, also associated with cognitive deterioration. (Semantic paraphasia involves choosing incorrect words). Last week in his South Carolina speech, he said, “soup pie cane” when he meant to say “supply chain,” and “lady, lady, lady,” when he meant to say “later.” As a younger man Trump’s linguistic style might be characterized as glib but was not marked by the use of the substitution of incorrect words. Semantic paraphasia is a qualitative marker - not of aging - but of underlying disease.

On Trump's loss of vocabulary:

Loss of vocabulary is not a correlate of normal aging. If anything, there appears to be a slight increase in vocabulary as one gets into their seventies and eighties. It is noteworthy that Trump exhibits a markedly declining vocabulary with overreliance on superlatives over the years. He has gone from what might be described as possessing a somewhat sophisticated vocabulary to one sorely lacking in suppleness.

On the evidence that Trump is exhibiting more than age-related decline:

The key question at the moment regarding Trump’s fitness is the following one. Is there a significant change in his cognitive baseline and are the changes markers of disease rather than normal decline linked to aging? In my professional opinion, the answer to that two-part question is yes. Trump has shown a noteworthy decline in his linguistic competency from his previous baseline, and the decline exposes clinical signs of disorder, not simply aging.

We can only hope the mainstream media will finally start taking Trump's mental deterioration as seriously as Trump's own inner circle does.

Because Team Trump is worried about his mental decline

As Jonathan Lemire noted on MSNBC's Morning Joe this week:

"We are seeing it night after night on the rally stage, where he seems to even just lose control of the English language. Mika [Brzezinski] cringes, I can't help it either at the end of that clip. His team knows, but they're just forging forward."

To reiterate what I wrote on March 3: My recent two-part interview with Dr. Vince Greenwood made clear how scary it would be to allow mentally competent Trump back into the White House. But it's perhaps even more terrifying to imagine a mentally feeble Trump being manipulated as the puppet of an anti-democratic party of religious extremists equipped with "detailed plans to implement their fascist vision."

Four more years of "Dementia Don" would be a disaster America might not survive.

The good news: "Jacked-Up Joe" is tougher and smarter than his opponent—and fighting to win. He has no plans to relinquish his title belt yet.

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Here's a YouTube video based on my 6 March article "Better With Biden":

Here's a YouTube video based on my 29 February article "The Crime that Stole an Election":

Here's a YouTube video based on my 8 February article "The Victim they Shared":