COGNITION(S): A ramble concerning what Mother Trump said!

THURSDAY, JANUARY 22, 2026

Also, the U.S. owns the moon: As we type, the madness is general over what remains of the American nation, such as it ever has been.

In fairness, we speak of the colloquial madness, "madness" not being a medical term. 

Perhaps we're actually speaking of a general inanity. But we're also speaking of what may seem to signal an array of possible cognitive failure(s).

What can we possibly mean by this introductory muddle? Hold on for a tiny portion of the toad's rollicking, sub-rational wild ride:

Mother loved him best:

The president has now conquered Davos, though mainly if you're watching the Fox News Channel. Before he departed for that locale, he offered these meandering remarks during a painful press event which lasted almost two hours:

PRESIDENT TRUMP (1/21/26): You know, we used to have— When I was growing up, we had in my area in Queens — I grew up in Queens—we had a place called Creedmoor. 

Creedmoor. Did anybody know that? Creedmoor. It was a big—

I said, “Mom, why are those bars on the building?” 

I used to play Little League baseball there, at a place called Cunningham Park. I was quite the baseball player, you wouldn’t believe. 

But I said to my mother, “Mom”—she would be there, always there for me. She said, “Son, you could be a professional baseball player.” 

I said, “Thanks, Mom.” I said, “Why are those bars on the windows?” Big building. Big, powerful building. It loomed over the park, actually.

She said, “Well, people that are very sick are in that building.” I said, “Boy!” I used to always look at that building, and I’d see this big building, big, tall building. It loomed over the park. 

It was sort of—now that I think of it, it was a pretty unfriendly sight. But I’ll never forget—I don’t know if it’s still there. Because they got rid of—most of them, you know, they—the Democrats in New York, they took them down, and the people live on the streets now. That’s why you have a lot of the people in California and other places, they live in the streets. 

They took the mental institutions down. They’re expensive. But I’d say, “Why does that building have those bars?” Boy! It wasn’t normal. You know, you’re used to looking at, like, a window. But this one, you’re looking at all this steel, vicious steel, tiny windows, bars all over the place. Nobody was getting out. It’s called the mental institution. That was an insane asylum.

So it went as he fashioned a weave which seemed to terminate in a suggestion about the best way to handle cases of severe mental illness. Similar disjointed rambles littered his endless array of musings just before he headed off to tackle the possible disintegration of the western alliance.

In this report at Mediaite, the headline focuses on his mother's statement about his great baseball skill. In our view, it was the bizarre side trip through the annals of time which was most striking here. The western alliance was falling apart, and he was reminiscing about a place called Creedmore. 

For the record, the notion that he was a great baseball player has always lived in the president's mind. The claims of his own greatness as a high school player date to at least 2004. 

Was the president headed for the major leagues, as he's been quoted claiming? In May 2020, Slate published this exhaustive study of his array of claims. 

Was the future president on his way to a major league career? Had he been the best high school player in the great state of New York? 

(Trump in 2013: I played football and baseball, sorry, but said to be the best bball player in N.Y. State-ask coach Ted Dobias-said best he ever coached.)

Was he the best player in the state? In the nine high school games for which the author had turned up box scores, his batting average had been .138—and the evidence went downhill from there.

In our view, it was the pointless musings which mattered this week, not the specific recollection of Mother's claim about his baseball prowess. As part of his weave, he was lost in the past. But on and on and on he went, in many other massively fact-challenged pointless, time-wasting diversions.

Still Watters would be an improvement!

Those who watched The Five the past two days were exposed to the gonzo inanity which now prevails, night after night, on our former nation's most watched "cable news" program. Gutfeld and Watters were present each night, with Perino cast as the panelist who isn't completely insane. 

On Tuesday, the panelists seemed to know that yesterday's provisional resolution of The Great Greenland Breakup was already in the bag.  

We were puzzled by the sense of assurance emerging from each of the panelists. But early in that evening's pseudo-discussion, the channel's resident "silly boy" favored the world the analysis transcribed below.

With apologies for the length of what follows, this is what now passes for "news analysis" on a dying nation's most-watched "cable news" program. To watch this clown car excursion take shape proceed, you can start by clicking here:

WATTERS (1/20/26): We have to secure Greenland. It will happen...The United States always secures our interests, economically, militarily, either by force or purchase. 

Louisiana purchase. Alaska. The Philippines. We even got the Marshall Islands after World War II. 

You don’t even know where they are, Greg!

GUTFELD: Yeah. 

WATTERS: We got the moon! I think we own it. 

PERINO: [Laughter]

WATTERS: I know we own it. And when the world changes, we change. 

So globalism is dead. We have to protect our own supply lines, we have to protect ourselves from missiles coming in from China, and we’re going to do it whether they like it or not. Denmark should take the offer. 

GUTFELD: Yes.

WATTERS: Denmark cannot defend or develop the island, and they’re in violation of their NATO obligations because they are sworn to defend all of their territory and they cannot defend it. They live under our security umbrella. 

It's a big, beautiful umbrella, Greg. Do they want to live under it or not? We're offering them 700 billion dollars!

GUTFELD: Yes! A billion per person!

PANEL: [Laughter]

WATTERS: A billion per person! The royal family in Denmark is dying to sell Denmark [sic]. Every European that we're going to grease with the 700 billion is dying to do this deal. It’s like when you find out your great-grandmother has this amazing piece of real estate right on the coast and some big fat developer comes over and makes an amazing offer, and you don’t even go to the property. You’ve never even seen the estate and you don’t have enough money to even build on it. So someone comes here, slaps a check down, and you’re gonna say no?

Once Bessent and Lutnik and Rubio get into a room with all of these guys and knock their heads together, we’re getting Greenland.

GUTFELD: You know, Dana, we are taking Denmark [sic] as is. Like, there's not even any staging at all. We're not asking for any improvements. We're just saying, "We'll take it off your hands. We'll do the work."

PERINO: You're going a step further, saying we're taking Denmark. We don't need Denmark. We're taking Greenland.

GUTFELD: Oh, I'm sorry—Greenland! Same thing, right?

So it went as these cosmic flyweights clowned in their familiar fashion.  For Mediaite's report (including tape), you can just click this.

According to the numbskulls Watters and Gutfeld, we were going to grease a bunch of Europeans to take Denmark off their hands. Bessent was going to knock their heads together. This is public idiocy of the most undisguised kind. 

Fuller disclosure:

Watters slides in and out of a comedic persona as he delivers his braindead statements on this birdbrain "cable news" program. That explains the brief diversion as he seems to claim that the U.S. now owns the moon.

Joining his partner in towel-snapping, Gutfeld seemed to think that we were trying to purchase Denmark, an error which was corrected by The Five's resident den mother. Along the way, the clowning was vast as Watters offered his homely analogy about what you do when you learn that Grandma has left you millions of dollars in the form of an unseen property along the coast.

Is it true that "still waters run deep?" A still Jesse Watters would constitute a giant improvement over this corporate clown cavalcade.

This program is defined by the sheer stupidity it offers its millions of viewers. It got stranger than that in the past two days, but this leads us to the role currently played by Blue America's New York Times.

Corrections by the score: 

Russian strongman Vladimir Putin performs one press event per year. This morning, it almost seems a bit like that in the print editions of the New York Times.

To her credit, fact-checker Linda Qiu is highly visible today. In the wake of the ongoing danger at Davos, the Times offers two extensive fact-checks by Qiu, plus an extensive account of all the people the president insulted in yesterday's speech at that site:

Fact-Checking President Trump’s Davos Speech

For full report, click here

Falsehoods Fueled Trump’s First Year Back in Office

For full report, click here

Here’s a Look at Everything (and Everyone) Trump Targeted at Davos

For full report, click here

The Times is spilling with content today about the president's endless stream of gonzo misstatements. That endless stream of gonzo misstatements has been this person's unrelenting stock in trade over the past fifteen years.

That said, the Times has never brought this astonishing realm of misbehavior into a stringent central focus, whether on the editorial side or in its front-page news reporting. There is no columnist at the Times who has dared to make this unrelenting bizarre misbehavior the stuff of a withering focus.

As for the clown shows staged each day at Fox, the Times doesn't go there at all. The clowning and the ugly behavior (especially on the part of Gutfeld) go on and on and on and on, poisoning what's left of this nation, without any reporting or discussion within the failed New York Times.

(In fairness, Gutfeld has almost wholly stopped comparing the women of The View to horses and cattle and dogs and cows, but also to pigs and whales and "livestock." Presumably, someone above this manifest nutcase—this seemingly damaged human being—finally told him to stop. Just think what might happen if major news orgs reported his gruesome nightly conduct in an accurate manner.)

We haven't even mentioned the latest from the astonishing Karoline Leavitt. But wild misfunctioning of cognition(s), and of various first cousins of same, are general over what's left of this failing nation. 

By now, it's impossible to keep up. The New York Times, and other Blue orgs, don't even pretend to try.

Tomorrow: That scene from Driving Miss Daisy?