Commentary — Of Windmills and Wheels

President Donald Trump’s father died in 1999 from pneumonia, after battling Alzheimer’s disease for six years. About one in seven Americans over age 70 suffers from some form of dementia, including Alzheimer’s. Some early symptoms of dementia include slurred speech,trouble finding words, irritability, lack of restraint, inexplicable lying, impaired judgment and paranoia. A great many experts are becoming concerned that Trump himself is exhibiting these signs.

Peter Wehner was a staff member for Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. On August 18, 2018, Wehner tweeted this: “Mr. Trump was emotionally/psychologically unwell when he became president. His condition is clearly worsening. He’s becoming more volatile, erratic and unstable. At some point he’s going to blow apart. When he does it’ll create a crisis. This won’t end well. Pray for our country.”

On August 19, 2018, former Republican Congressman and current MSNBC host Joe Scarborough responded to that tweet: “Anyone who has known Trump for years, and doesn’t have a stake in his political career or the GOP, says the same. He is unwell and has been getting progressively worse over the past 18 months.”

Trump supporters will argue that all the experts are wrong, that they are just biased against Trump, but Trump’s own words show the mental decline he is experiencing. Here are just a few examples.

Dec. 6, 2019: “People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once. They end up using more water. We have a situation where we’re looking very strongly at sinks and showers and other elements of bathrooms, where you turn the faucet on in areas where there’s tremendous amounts of water, where it rushes out to sea because you could never handle it. And you don’t get any water. You turn on the faucet and you don’t get any water.  You can’t wash your hands practically, there’s so little water comes out of the faucet...you end up using the same amount of water.... There may be some areas where we’ll go the other route - desert areas. But for the most part, you have many states where they have so much water that it comes down - it’s called rain -that they don’t know, they don’t know what to do with it.”

When Trump has to explain that water that comes down is called rain, you know he’s in trouble.

Dec. 21, 2019:  “We’ll have an economy based on wind. I never understood wind. You know, I know windmills very much. I’ve studied it better than anybody. I know it’s very expensive. They’re made in China and Germany mostly - very few made here, almost none. But they’re manufactured tremendous - if you’re into this - tremendous fumes. Gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You know we have a world, right? So the world is tiny compared to the universe. So tremendous, tremendous amount of fumes and everything. You talk about the carbon footprint -fumes are spewing into the air. Right? Spewing. Whether it’s in China, Germany, it’s going into the air. It’s our air, their air, everything - right? So they make these things and then they put them up.”

Again, Trump has to explain that first, we have a world, second, our world is tiny compared to the universe, and third, the air belongs to everyone, facts that should be pretty self-evident. He’s also wrong in his statistics. The Department of Energy reported in 2013 that 72 percent of wind turbine components are made in the U.S.; by now, it’s almost 80 percent. We also export about $400 million of these components, creating thousands of jobs here in America. So wind power is a positive development for America, not the problem Trump, in his confusion, wants to claim it is.

One of the most recent examples of Trump’s decline occurred when Trump was in Switzerland on Jan. 22, 2020. He was discussing entrepreneur Elon Musk.

“He’s [Musk] one of our great geniuses, and we have to protect our genius. You know, we have to protect Thomas Edison, and we have to protect all of these people that came up with originally the light bulb, and the wheel and all of these things. And he’s one of our very smart people, and we want to cherish those people. I spoke to him very recently, and he’s also doing the rockets. He likes rockets. And he does good at rockets, too, by the way. I never saw where the engines come down with no wings, no anything and they’re landing. I said, ‘I’ve never seen that before.’”