On Morning Joe, Trump "isn't OK"—and "it's getting worse!"

TUESDAY, MAY 2, 2017

They stage the right discussion: This weekend, we googled the topic.

Yesterday morning, we discussed the topic with a friend at the coffee joint.

This morning, Joe and Mika staged that same discussion in the first half hour or so of Morning Joe. They were asking a very good question:

Is Donald J. Trump showing signs of dementia?

At the start of the program, Scarborough keyed the discussion to Trump's recent strings of weird interviews, including but not limited to his comments about the Civil War. Early on, he said this:

SCARBOROUGH (5/2/17): My mother's had dementia for ten years. That sounds like the sort of thing my mother would say today. She would say, "People don't ask that question. Why did we have a civil war?"...That's something that a 5-year-old might ask. But that is not anything that any grown-up that I've ever been around in my entire life would ever let pass from their lips. Because that has been the central question of how did America begin, with slavery as our original sin, and how did we move past that original sin in part through the Civil War.

Mika added this:

"I'm not sure he's OK. I'm not sure he's OK, and you have that feeling with people who are not OK, where it starts to dawn on you that they're not OK."

"And it's getting worse, worse than it has been," Scarborough said. He played tape of Trump from earlier years, showing him at a time when he seemed much more lucid.

Over the weekend, we had the same general reaction to Trump's recent string of weird remarks. For the leading authority's report on dementia, you can just click here.

To watch the first twenty minutes of this morning's show, you can just click this. Some of the program's pundits wanted to engage this discussion. Others avoided the topic.

We'll only add this:

Our national discourse has been demented for much of the past twenty-five years. Very major national figures made crazy remarks about Candidate Gore in 1999 and 2000. All others agreed not to notice this crazy downward spiral.

Now we seem to have the real thing. This is a very dangerous situation.

We built this culture of lunacy over time. Very major "liberal" figures were very deeply involved.