Forgetting Joe Biden

Donald Trump has lost it – but then again, I don’t think he ever had it. The president has become dramatically unhinged on several occasions recently. Coupled with his statements about shark electrocution, apparent confusion about where and how groceries are sold, tariffs, Russia, China, immigration and a variety of other topics, Trump often sounds like an escapee from a mental ward run by Nurse Ratched.

As the depleted White House press pool gathered Wednesday in the Oval Office, NBC’s Peter Alexander attempted to ask President Donald Trump a very simple question about the Boeing 747 Trump said the government of Qatar gave him as a gift.

Trump went nuts. “Number one you don’t have what it takes to be a reporter. You’re not smart enough,” Trump yelled at Alexander, who has spent more years reporting than Trump has spent in politics. “You’re a terrible reporter,” he concluded.

He then tried to lecture South African President Cyril Ramaphosa on “white genocide” in South Africa. He forced Ramaphosa to look at a four-minute propaganda film to push a conspiracy that South Africa is engaged in racially targeted killings.

All Ramaphosa could do was say he was sorry that he didn’t have a plane to give him.

This was not America’s finest hour.

Earlier on Tuesday, Trump blew up at a reporter on Capitol Hill who asked him a question about his so-called big, beautiful bill. The reporter asked him to respond to a statement by Representative Andy Harris, a Republican representing Maryland’s First District: “Andy Harris said that you didn’t adequately convince enough people to vote for the bill?”

Trump, visibly upset, asked the reporter who he worked for, to which the reporter replied “NOTUS,” which stands for News of the United States.

“Who?” Trump replied. “I don't even know what the hell that is. Get yourself a real job.”

Later, when meeting with Republican members of Congress, Trump melted down, according to several congressmen who were present, and unleashed an expletive-laden warning against further gutting Medicaid. Whatever else, just be sure to know Trump’s rants can’t disguise the fact that this horrendous budget bill will take money out of the mouths of the poor and pour it into the bloated mouths of the rich.

At 1:34 a.m. Monday morning, Trump found himself awake and rage-tweeting about Kamala Harris and Bruce Springsteen, threatening to investigate both of them after Springsteen said on a Manchester, England, stage last week that the Trump administration was “corrupt, incompetent and treasonous.”

Trump is angry, apparently unstable and growing visibly worse by the day. His comments about former President Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis were muddled, angry and accusatory, including references to “auto pens” and cognitive tests. Maybe he was just promoting Jake Tapper’s new book. Maybe he is getting a cut.

“Look at politics today,” former Missouri Republican Senator John Danforth told me Wednesday. “Every politician associated with the president always looks angry.” The 88-year-old former senator is currently working for the group “Our Republican Legacy” and trying to “drag the party back toward the center and our traditional values.” Perhaps his success can best be measured by how often he interacts with the current senator from Missouri, Republican Josh Hawley. “I haven’t spoken to him in seven years,” Danforth said.

Hawley is not only a part of the Trump machine, but one of its leading advocates in the Senate.

Hawley infamously raised his fist and pumped it for Donald Trump on January 6. After a recent spate of disastrous storms, Hawley found himself this week in Congress begging for FEMA aid for his state – after Trump’s DOGE cuts have rendered FEMA a political eunuch.

“We are desperate for assistance in Missouri,” he told Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. “FEMA assistance will be the only assistance,” he emphasized. Because of DOGE cuts, FEMA recently reported it is understaffed, underfunded and probably couldn’t handle the coming hurricane season.

DOGE, as run by Elon Musk — who is apparently on his way out the Trump door – has been criticized by Democrats and Republicans alike; Sen. Danforth among them. “The effect that DOGE thing is going to have on the national debt is negligible. It's very small. It could be worth doing, but it should be done with a scalpel, not with a meat axe.”

Trump, meanwhile, still hasn’t dealt with the storms that killed at least 28 people when tornadoes struck Kentucky, Missouri, and Virginia last Friday. Yet he was swift to criticize former President Joe Biden’s recent prostate cancer diagnosis. So was his vice president, whose reaction was certainly wooden. "Whether the right time to have this conversation is now or sometime in the future, we really do need to be honest about whether the former president was capable of doing the job," JD Vance insisted.

One of Trump’s interchangeably moronic adult sons even ridiculously asked why Biden’s wife, Dr. Jill Biden (who has a doctorate in education), didn’t diagnose the former president’s cancer earlier. “What I want to know is how did Dr. Jill Biden miss stage five metastatic cancer," the businessman wrote above the post, "or is this yet another coverup???"

The Trump team’s only response to anything is to blame Biden and draw attention away from the ineptitude, corruption and anger that continues to tear the country apart and is clearly the responsibility of the befuddled huckster living at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. And if you think Biden’s administration was complicit in hiding his cognitive decline, take a look at those who work for Trump.

“They’ve gotten to the point where the facts are solely what is said by the President,” former Bill Clinton press secretary Joe Lockhart explained to me recently on “Just Ask the Question.”

The greater threat is “that future presidents from both parties will take their cues from Trump because he’s been effective at manipulating the press to his benefit.”

If you are concerned about Biden’s cognitive abilities when he was president, why can’t you spend the same amount of energy on Trump, who is currently the president? I don’t want to wait until Jake Tapper writes a post-mortem book about Trump and then goes on another mea culpa tour to publicize it. If you think we made a mistake about Biden, fine.

But, we dare not make the same mistake about Trump. Trump is a danger to Democracy; a blithering idiot and those around him do not care. They take advantage of it. People like Stephen Miller feed Trump what they want him to hear and Trump spits it out. For they all know the bottom line that guides everything: It’s only a fact if Trump says it is.

That is a frightening and sobering realization. When our reality has less to do with our shared experiences and facts, and more to do with the prejudices of a single (warped) mind, we all suffer.

Trump doesn’t believe in an empirical reality based on facts and science, but only on what he proclaims to be factual and true. The morons and monsters on his staff, in his cCabinet and kissing his, ahem, ring in Congress are all complicit in his corruption of reality in order to hold on to power and money.

How far have we fallen?

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I grew up believing in a free press. During this administration, The Washington Post, The L.A. Times, ABCFOX News and, CBS News, have all bent a knee to Donald Trump. This week I read a CNN headline saying Trump’s “credibility” is on the line. What credibility? The man told more than 30,000 lies during his first four years in office. He’s not getting better. And everyone who owns the media isare kissing Trump’s, ahem, ring.

Trump’s meltdown in the Oval Office on Wednesday is just the latest indication that the land of the free and the home of the brave are a fiction from our past. Today, we are the land of the entitled led by the demonically befuddled. Why is it that the richest are like visitors to a family barbecue who take 90 percent of the food and refuse to share with the rest of us?

The rich get tax cuts, healthcare and preferential treatment. The rest of us get screwed and have to watch a four- minute film in the Oval oOffice that pretends that white farmers in South Africa are the victims of genocide. “He’s saying to white people that you’re being oppressed, which is ridiculous,” Danforth said.

There is no fact that Trump won’t bend, no rule he won’t break, and no law he won’t ignore. We haven’t even talked about every judge who rules against him being accused of political activism.

Our founding fathers’ overriding concern was the concentration of political power in a few hands. Today, it is distilled into the hands of one man: an aging septuagenarian who doesn’t even know that his greatest responsibility is to uphold the Constitution. He swore an oath to it, but he is too far gone to either acknowledge that or admit to it. He wants his options open so he can make transactions that only favor him and his family business. So, stick around and enjoy his multi-million dollar, taxpayer-subsidized military parade to celebrate his birthday on June 14.

“That really is a serious problem for America,” Senator Danforth said. “It's important to understand that problem. I'm not sure what to do about it. But it is important to understand that it is the case that a lot of power has been concentrated in a very few hands. And with regard to executive orders, a lot of political power has been concentrated in the hands of one person.”

Who is appealing to our better angels? It’s all anger all of the time from a White House that is trying to control the economy through tariffs and silence anyone opposed to them. His supporters? Danforth says they can be reached – but not from the far left. “With Trump it isn't that they're just delighted with him, but they view him as the only alternative. They think that the country is going down the drain and their kids are being taught all kinds of things in elementary school that they don't like. They think the left is just shoving the rest of the country into the arms of Donald Trump.”

Donald Trump. The aging, cognitively dysfunctional monarch-wanna-be who screams at reporters, threatens entertainers and prosecutes those who oppose him runs this country while being fed a steady diet of intellectual drivel from his loyal henchmen. Forget Joe Biden. Concentrate on Trump.

“You know, it's not to say that Trump is just some kind of ogre,” Danforth said. It's just saying, well, I mean, take him at his word. He's ignorant.”

The truth is that Donald Trump and his entire administration are both.