IF TRUMP IS LOSING IT, DOES THAT EVEN MATTER?

The New Republic's Jason Linkins asks:

Linkins comes to the familiar conclusion:

The president is fully checked out because he’s old, enfeebled, and his brain is slowly turning into pasta e fagioli.

But he adds a twist: The administration is lawless and brutal because Trump is in decline.

At least I think that's what Linkins is saying. Quoting a recent Atlantic article about Trump's increasing disengagement, Linkins writes:

The vacuum Trump is leaving in the White House needs to be filled, and it’s being filled by “enablers” rather than people who might “[moderate] some of his more extreme impulses.” Or, as someone less committed to euphemism euthanasia might put it, it’s being filled by utter ghouls: a Pentagon head who’s in over his head and spiraling out as he commits war crimes, a Health and Human Services secretary who’s bringing Lysenkoism back, an FBI director crashing out because no one brought him a cool jacket to wear—and all the rest hopped up on völkisch nationalism, pulling Black people out of their cars in Minneapolis and warring with Sabrina Carpenter.

Comparing this administration to the previous one, which was led by a president whose aging process got far more attention, Linkins writes:

Those who served in Biden’s inner circle aren’t going to be remembered fondly, but no matter how enfeebled the president was, the country did not have the same problem we do now. The Biden White House wasn’t packed stem to stern with people dedicated to looting the country, terrorizing children, turning masked goons out onto the streets of American cities, or using the Department of Homeland Security’s social media presence to—as administration sources told Zeteo—“intentionally use popular music from vocally anti-Trump performing artists in order to trigger a negative response from a famous liberal and provide further amplification of neo-Confederate memes.”

Linkins seems to be suggesting that all this is happening because Trump is in decline. But is it? I'm not certain that's what he's saying because, quoting The Atlantic, he refers to these people as "enablers." If they're Trump's enablers, that means they aren't running wild because a feeble president can't stop them -- it means they're doing precisely what he wants them to do. Which is it?

I think it's the latter. I don't know the precise extent of Trump's mental and physical impairments, but I think if they could be magically cured, his White House would be doing exactly what it's doing now.

This is the administration he wanted eight years ago: a Justice Department that acts like his personal legal team, a thuggish crew of racists and anti-immigrant extremists, a team largely plucked from right-wing TV and dedicated to his aggrandizement. He might be sleeping through what they're doing, but they're doing what he wants.

And while they're alienating the rest of America, they're doing what the MAGA base wants. If Trump were to die tonight, I suspect that President Vance would keep nearly all of his policies in place -- the tariffs would probably be diminished or abandoned, and Vance might do a better job than Trump of pretending to take affordability seriously, but the ICE raids and the boat bombings and the sucking up to Vladimir Putin and the European far right would continue uninterrupted. There might be fewer pardons of white-collar criminals, but the crypto and AI industries would still be allowed to do whatever they want. Vance might not talk about windmills, but he'd put his thumb on the scale for fossil fuels. And the social media shitposting would, if anything, worsen.

The press will maintain its double standard on aging presidents for two reasons. One is obvious: The press has been browbeaten by GOP ref-workers for decades and is much more reluctant to criticize Republicans than Democrats. Mainstream journalists have operated for years on the assumption that if a Trump utterance seems bizarre or inappropriate to them, it's because they're elitist liberals who don't understand Trump's plainspoken, elemental connection to Real Americans.

But the other reason is that when Trump is awake, he can seem tireless. Linkins quotes a Guardian story in which a Johns Hopkins Medical School professor says that Trump "really has trouble completing a thought." But when Biden seemed to have trouble completing a thought, his voice dropped to a whisper and his words trailed off into silence. Trump just keeps talking. Here's The Washington Post on Trump's appearance yesterday at an event connected to the Kennedy Center, where performers will be honored tonight in a ceremony hosted by Sylvester Stallone:

In his 37-minute remarks, Trump mused about the Kennedy Center’s renovations, Stallone’s career, the New England Patriots, the UFC fight set to be staged at the White House next year, his recent golf outing with renowned golfer Gary Player, crime in American cities and the Biden administration’s policies, among other topics.

He just talks, and it usually makes some kind of sense, even though his pronouncements are often based on lies and misinformation (but it's misiniformation millions of Fox viewers also believe). Trump's energy might derive from multiple Diet Cokes or Adderall, or he might simply be invigorated whenever a captive audience allows him to indulge his obsessions. But the result is that he seems more vigorous than Biden did. Even his sexist and racist outbursts seem vigorous. And that's why the press corps won't put him in the same category as Biden.

In any case, this is the presidency Trump wanted when he first ran. If he doesn't finish his term, I don't think very much will change between now and January 2029.