Trump, Troops, and the ‘Dementia’ Bombshell

Pritzker accuses Trump of dementia an explosive clash over troops According to The Chicago Tribune, Illinois Governor J.B. pritzker delivered one of the most extraordinary rebukes of a sitting president in modern times, accusing Donald Trump of deploying troops to Chicago and Portland not out of necessity, but because of dementia and obsessive fixations. This is a man who's suffering dementia, pritzker said. That's his quote. Claiming Trump doesn't read and is using, quote, the power of the military to do his bidding. The remarks came as the White House moved forward with sending 300 Illinois National Guard troops over the governor's objections and an unprecedented use of federal power over a state's own guard. Trump responded by suggesting he might invoke the Insurrection Act, a 200 year old law allowing presidents to to deploy the military domestically, last used in the 1992 Los Angeles riots with the governor's consent. Back then, using it against a state's will would mark a historic break from post civil rights era norms. Pritzker's words were an escalation, but so was Trump's move. America's federal state tensions haven't looked this combustible in decades. What's the real message here? Governor Pritzker says Donald Trump has flat out dementia. He doesn't know. I don't know. But it is time that the very same people who said, oh look, Joe Biden's so old, he's crazy, he's doing crazy stuff, start taking a closer look at Donald Trump, whether he's clinically possessing the disease of dementia or not. He's doing crazy, bizarre things every single day. Let's go a little bit deeper here. Normally, I would say it's not becoming of a governor to make amateur medical evaluations of someone who's not a patient, especially if you're not a doctor and Pritzker is not a doctor. But when you see the rhetoric that comes out of Trump's mouth on a daily basis, on anybody and everybody who disagrees with him, it does call for new rhetorical techniques. Now, Governor Pritzker is someone who is said to be very interested in running for president in 2028, assuming Trump hasn't used troops to shut down polling places or cancel the election. And he's gaining a lot of credibility with things like this. There is a massive hunger in the Democratic base for leaders to call out Trump to ask to at least match some of the rhetoric Trump is using. No one in the Democratic Party, I think, really wants a Democratic leader to just be as vile and as nasty and to just lie constantly as Trump does. But they do want a toughness. And Pritzker is helping himself with this rhetoric that normally might be written off as too extreme, as beyond the pale, as just too much. It's all of a sudden seeming quite reasonable and making Pritzker seem, frankly, statesmanlike in this current environment. What Trump is doing is extraordinarily unprecedented in the United States. It's absolutely bizarre, and the fact that so few people are really commenting on it. Pritzker says, quote, we're not going to war with the federal government, but we'll win in court. They don't want American citizens fighting American citizens because that's not what Americans signed up for when they joined the military or the National Guard. It truly is a bizarre situation. Trump suggested invoking the Insurrection act last year in 1992, but the governor wanted it invoked back in 1992. This governor is saying, look, our crime rate is lower than it's been in decades in Chicago now. You may say, well, Chicago is really high crime. I've never yet met someone who was so insistent that crime was out of control in Chicago, who'd been there in the last year or two. Every time I go, it's one of the most beautiful places in the world. Is there crime? Yes. Is it higher on average than other cities in America? Yes, but it is going down. Generally, when a problem is going down, you don't then say, it's become a bigger crisis than ever before, and now it involves, we need to solve the problem by sending in the military. The crime is lower than it was than it was when Trump was in power. The first term of office. Didn't seem to occur to him then, to do this. It's truly a bizarre situation that is getting worse every day. I commend Governor Pritzker for starting to treat this seriously and getting attention. I have no idea if Donald Trump has dementia. Pritzker also mentioned that Trump doesn't read. Well, I've seen him read a teleprompter. We know he is. He is able to read there. There have been rumors floating around for years that he is essentially illiterate and isn't able to read. I don't believe that. I think he does read. I don't think he's the most intellectually curious person in the world. I don't think he's reading Grant's autobiography Late at Night in the White House, but I don't think he literally can't read. I'm not a doctor, so I'm not going to comment on whether or not he is, is showing early signs of dementia, although he's going to be 80 in less than a year. So anyone who does study dementia will say, wow, the odds of him having dementia are dramatically going up. Again, I'm not giving him the diagnosis that he has. I don't really know. But I do think, especially members of his own party need to do. But frankly, Democrats did not that long ago. There's a problem in any political party where you give the leader the benefit of the doubt. You sort of ignore criticism. You say, well, that's just partisan sniping. Democrats were guilty of that in the last several years of the Biden administration. Oh, don't listen to those people talking about how old he is. But finally, it was Democrats who forced Biden to step down. It was finally Democrats saying in the front page of the New York Times and other places, you're too old. You're not with it. You're not fit to be president anymore. Last time I checked, George Clooney, Bill Maher, these were not top operatives of the Republican Party. They're liberal Democrats. They're Democrats who contribute millions of dollars to Democratic causes and to Biden himself. And they were the ones saying, hey, you're too old. You don't have it upstairs anymore. You've lost more than a step. And Republicans certainly agreed with that. They were talking about that for years. It's if it's sauce for the goose, it's sauce for the gander. It's time for more and more Republican, not just J.B. pritzker, but Republicans to say, oh, wait a minute, this guy is increasingly spouting nonsense. He's increasingly spouting and tweeting gibberish. He's increasingly doing things that no political figure, left, right, center, any party have ever suggested before, because they're, frankly, bizarre. Which may be a signal whether it's official mental degeneration or just his expiration date is here. And I don't mean literally, I mean his abilities as a leader are no longer at play. It's time for an honest conversation in this country about that. And unfortunately, I don't see at least half of the electorate and their leadership willing to have that honest conversation the way, frankly, Democrats did have that conversation a year ago and did something about it. They took the hook and pulled Biden off the scene.