Trump descended a ramp extremely carefully at the end of his West Point speech today pic.twitter.com/uMG3KyB1V1
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 13, 2020
I'd consider this significant if we hadn't been talking about the president's troubles with ramps and stairs since at least 2017, when the story below appeared on CNN.
At the time, there was talk that Trump had bathmophobia -- a fear of stairs or slopes. He's clearly quite careful when walking down steps or ramps, which might be explained by simple knee trouble (I'm speaking from personal experience here: my kneecaps go out of alignment when I bend my knees, and as a result I'm as careful as Trump when I walk down a flight of stairs or a steep hill). But what about Trump's decision to take a golf cart 700 yards uphill from an ancient amphiteater to a piazza in the hilly Sicilian town of Taorina, where the 2017 G7 was held, a short trip the other leaders made on foot? Did the president not have the stamina to make the climb, or was he afraid of the incline?
But please note that we've been talking about this for years. There's much speculation that Trump's walking difficulties at West Point were signs of worsening health problems, or even of dementia. I'm not sure he seemed any more tentative on the ramp yestarday than he was in similar situations in 2017.
The same is true for Trump's two-handed water drinking.
Trump still hasn't totally figured out how to drink water pic.twitter.com/IO8CDXmD9i
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 13, 2020
That's hard to understand -- but here's a 2017 video from Newsweek on the same subject.
And are we going to talk about Trump struggling with "MacArthur"?
"McGarther" -- Trump also repeatedly had trouble with General Douglas MacArthur's name pic.twitter.com/HLSwbol2yL
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 13, 2020
Well, here's a story about slurred words from -- again -- 2017.
Trump probably has impairments we'll never know about. But he's been like this for nearly an entire term. If he's deteriorating, it's not a rapid deterioration.
Trump's ignorance, laziness, lack of empathy, bigotry, narcissism, amorality, unwillingness to read and learn, Dunning-Kruger certainty that he's the smartest man in the world are the real problems, along with his head full of Fox News propaganda and his alliances with such loathsome human beings as Mitch McConnell, Leonard Leo, and Vladimir Putin. Let's not get hung up on Trump's neurological state.
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