Trump's mental decline is undeniable -- so what now?

"Confabulation." It's a word you are going to be hearing a lot in the
coming months.

President Trump has always been willing to mislead people when it was
to his advantage. Even his supporters recognize this. Hence the famous admonition to "take Trump seriously, not literally."

But what Trump is doing now is something different. Confabulation is
sometimes called "honest lying," because the person doing it genuinely
believes what he's saying, even if it is obviously and patently false.
A person confabulates when they are telling completely invented
stories that don't provide them any particular tangible benefit. In
other words, it's not like lying to try and get out of a speeding
ticket.

Confabulation isn't misremembering a date or forgetting something. The
mistakes of memory we are all subject to become confabulation when
people remember false information in vivid detail -- detail so vivid
and complete that people who don't know otherwise often believe what
they are hearing is true.

In older people, confabulation is one of the clearest early signs of
dementia. The day you witness someone confabulate is often the day you
are forced to admit to yourself that a beloved parent needs help, and
that all the little slips and oddities you've been seeing can no
longer be rationalized away.

For Trump, the day we could no longer pretend everything is fine came
on July 15, when he told a lengthy story about his uncle, John Trump,
who he claimed taught at MIT and held three degrees in "nuclear,
chemical, and math." His uncle, according to Trump, once told him how
he had taught Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, and how very smart
Kaczynski was.

Trump's uncle was indeed a professor at MIT, but everything else in
this story is pure confabulation. Trump's uncle didn't have degrees in "nuclear, chemical, and math" -- he had degrees in electrical
engineering and physics. And Kaczynski did not go to MIT at all == he
went to Harvard.

But most telling of all, it is categorically impossible for Trump's
uncle to have told him any such story. Kaczynski became publicly known
as the Unabomber when he was arrested in 1996. Trump's uncle, the MIT professor, died in 1985. In other words, Trump's uncle could not have
told him the story because there was, literally, no story to tell
during his lifetime.

Once you have seen that Donald Trump is confabulating, it cannot be
unseen -- and all sorts of other mildly disturbing incidents suddenly
fall into place.

Difficulty with mathematical concepts is another early warning sign of dementia. Now watch Trump attempting to explain how he is going to
make drug prices go down by "1,000 percent, 600 percent, 500 percent,
1,500 percent." That's complete nonsense, unless drug companies will
be paying patients to accept prescriptions, since reducing drug prices
by 100 percent would mean they were free. Certainly, someone who got a
business degree from Wharton and has spent his life running a company
would know how percentages work.
...
...
Donald Trump is showing all the signs of suffering from dementia. If
this were a neighbor, a parent, or a family friend, you would have no
trouble seeing it. We should not turn our heads just because it is the president.

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/5429516-trump-confabulation-dementia-signs/

dementia

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President Donald Trump completely botched Secretary of Homeland
Security Kristi Noem's name at the White House, instead invoking the
name of a pro-golfer.

https://bsky.app/profile/thedailybeast.bsky.social/post/3lvosrqkzi22b

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On Sat, 02 Aug 2025 21:25:23 -0500, JAB <here@is.invalid> wrote:

Trump's mental decline is undeniable

Climate: Mr. President, Pacific Northwest Water Does NOT Flow To L.A.

Traditionally, U.S. Presidents try to be circumspect and accurate when
fielding press conference questions, relying on information from
experts to avoid misstatements that confuse or misinform the public.
Donald Trump is anything but traditional. His knack for puzzling or
downright false statements is well known from his first term, but in
his second go-round as President, he's outdoing himself-especially
when it comes to the environment and climate.

He castigates wind farms with false claims about their cost (they're
far from the "most expensive form of energy"–-hat's usually nuclear)
or impact on whales (there's no evidence to support his claims they
kill and drive them "loco") and birds (they kill them but housecats,
powerlines and windows are a bigger threat).

But his lack of understanding of where Southern California gets its
water is remarkably poor. Last week, shortly after wandering around
the White House roof, the 79-year-old Commander-in-Chief held forth at
a briefing on what he believes is the source of L.A.'s water: the
Pacific Northwest.

"I’ve been fighting with them for a long time to let the water come
down from the Pacific Northwest, essentially," he said, after an event
on planning for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. "They've got to
allow the full complement of water to come down from the Pacific
Northwest."

He also once again conflated efforts to protect the Sacramento-San
Joaquin Delta smelt, an endangered small fish, with Southern
California water supplies and praised his February decision to release
billions of gallons of water held in reserve from dams in California's
Central Valley after the devastating Los Angeles fires. Not only did
that move not solve the city's water issues, since none of it flowed
to L.A., but it didn't help farmers, as it wasn't released during
planting season. The move's stunning wastefulness was decried by one
scientist as "hydrologic insanity."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2025/08/11/pacific-northwest-water-does-not-flow-to-la/

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