For several days MAGA Republican President Donald Trump was less active on social media and absent from public appearances, leading to public speculation about an unreported health crisis.
To counter such concerns, right-wing media began pushing the narrative of how healthy the 79-year-old POTUS is.
However Fox News' senior medical analyst, Dr. Marc Siegel, laid it on a bit too thick, earning him ridicule and negating any Trump health claims he made.
On Tuesday, Siegel declared:
"President Trump doesn’t use a teleprompter. He talks just clearly. You’re sitting there mesmerized as he talks."
Except Trump does use a teleprompter when his handlers need him to stay on topic. Whenever he wanders off-script or speaks off the cuff, he babbles about sharks, windmills, Hannibal Lecter, lies about his uncle teaching the Unabomber, gold paint versus gold leaf, etc...
A recent article in The Guardian was titled, "He has trouble completing a thought."
The Guardian stated:
"For more than a year Trump, 79, has exhibited odd behavior at campaign events, in interviews, in his spontaneous remarks and at press conferences."
"The president repeatedly drifts off topic, including during a cabinet meeting this month when he spent 15 minutes talking about decorating, and appears to misremember simple facts about his government and his life."
Harry Segal—senior lecturer in the psychology department at Cornell University and psychiatry department at Weill Cornell Medicine—countered Siegel's praise of Trump when he spoke to The Guardian, saying there should be serious questions about the POTUS' mental acuity, citing Trump's tendency toward confabulation.
Segal stated:
"It’s where he takes an idea or something that’s happened and he adds to it things that have not happened."
Recalling Trump's easily disproven lies about his uncle John Trump's connection to Ted Kaczynski, Segal noted:
"The story makes no sense whatsoever, but it’s told in a very warm, reflective way, as if he’s remembering it. This level of thinking really has been deteriorating."
People might be mesmerized, but not because of Trump's clarity or eloquence. It seems more akin to a train wreck that people can't turn away from.
On Tuesday, Fox News' Siegel decided to bash Democratic President Joe Biden to try to bolster Trump, saying:
"We had a guy doing, we called them gaffes, but he didn’t know where he was."
People pushed back on the Fox News narrative.
Fox News/Facebook
Fox News/Facebook
Fox News/Facebook
Fox News/Facebook
Fox News/Facebook
Fox News/Facebook
John Gartner—psychologist, author, and assistant professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University Medical School—said of Trump:
"What we see are the classic signs of dementia, which is gross deterioration from someone’s baseline and function. If you go back and look at film from the 1980s, he actually was extremely articulate."
"He was still a jerk, but he was able to express himself in polished paragraphs, and now he really has trouble completing a thought and that is a huge deterioration."
Unfortunately for right-wing mouthpieces like Siegel, people have eyes and ears. All they need to do is watch or listen to Trump to counter Siegel's claims.
