Trump denies 'mini-strokes' sent him to Walter Reed

[yaxomoxay]

I get that in general but not when it comes to already being on the job.

I am seriously battled. I mean, should FDR have revealed his ailment? How about Nixon and his love for alcohol? How about JFK who needed all sort of meds?

so the chance of a 25th Amendment removal even temporarily would probably rest on his being absolutely unable to make a brief public appearance when it was expected.

Remember that the XXV does not remove a president, but in general I'd expect a cabinet to be quite partisan.

 

[Eric]

I am seriously battled. I mean, should FDR have revealed his ailment? How about Nixon and his love for alcohol? How about JFK who needed all sort of meds?



Remember that the XXV does not remove a president, but in general I'd expect a cabinet to be quite partisan.

It sounds like most didn't know he was in a wheel chair but I wonder how much it would've impacted him since he was already that way for much of his life, one would think there may have been some acceptance knowing what led to it. To me, it's very different than seeing someone walking live on a stage and then passing out.

 

[DT]

On topic: clearly, especially having seen this close up with family, he's had some sort of event(s). He's always been a bit word salad-y, and even when we was young, had all those weird pronunciation affectations - and obviously, the guy is 74, so probably slowing down a bit - but there's way too many speech aberrations, physical signs, a friend of mine has a brother who's neuro doc, and he says, without question, there's been a non-trivial medical change.

 

[User.45]

Anyone wondering about the Walter Reed trips...

From TheHill


This, from the same man who emphatically denied he paid off Stormy Daniels.



https://www.twitter.com/i/web/status/1300811758051954695/

Trump's a projector, so now I'm certain he had TIAs indeed.

I have always believed he’s suffered a series of TIAs and possibly a larger stroke. It would account for his gait, balance, and speech.

I love that you used the correct terminology. It is very unlikely for him to have had a large stroke. In reality, TIAs/mini strokes don't really exist. It's mainly a remnant from the CT era where small infarcts were not picked up. These days we just MRI everyone and pick up 2-3mm infarcts. I could imagine him getting a clot buster tPA, but it's kind of a stretch.

I totally thought he had dementia though, based on his awful speech patterns. But that should have progressed by now. I think he does have ADHD, but his biggest cognitive impairments stem from the combination of his malignant narcissism and short attention span.

The sleep, yeah... my over-optimistic watchword while working 80-hour weeks in my 30s and 40s was that you can get away without sleeping as long as you eat, and you can skip eating as long as you get some sleep. So burning both ends of that set of candles occasionally did get me into zombie states on weekends. I started paying a lot more attention around age 55.

Before residency, I was in really good shape and slept about 5.5-6H a night (2H less than my wife). I used to use this time to read science and it was great! Then residency really messed me up. 70H work weeks the first year, and drove 1.5H each day for half a year. Once fell asleep for a second behind the wheel and I told my wife we need to break lease and move before I die. The year after was even worse, averaging between 80 and 100H a week. I slept 15-17 hours every weekend day for about 3 months after I finished I thought I had narcolepsy, but it turned out to be just "sleep debt". (All the narcoleptics I've known/diagnosed in my life were residents...)

Anyways, we now know that we don't "need" less sleep with age. We are just unable to sleep longer. Trump's sleep patterns don't impress me. He's also objectively fat (obese, i.e. his BMI is 30). People with that BMI have a much shorter life expectancy and poorer cognitive performance. So I agree, physically Biden has much better parameters and predictors of longevity.

 

[Renzatic]

I always wondered what is the right balance between disclosing presidential health and keeping it private.

I don't think we need to hear the most minute of details of the president's condition, but if it does look like it could lead to a potential change in the structure of our government, we should be informed of the basics.

 

[Renzatic]

As I mentioned in another thread, Americans can’t understand the decimal system, I think that a “normal” political campaign would make many heads explode.

Wait. Decimals? You mean the commie dots those other people use in their numbers?

I'm sorry. I have no need for the commie dots. Your 0.4's disgust me. Give me a 7/16ths, or give me death!

 

[lizkat]

I am seriously battled. I mean, should FDR have revealed his ailment? How about Nixon and his love for alcohol? How about JFK who needed all sort of meds?

Remember that the XXV does not remove a president, but in general I'd expect a cabinet to be quite partisan.

Yeah but not to the point where the ability of the president to function is being faked a day at a time. First of all eventually they may be caught out in case of a progressive illness. Second, it's dereliction of duty if the president cannot serve and it's not a matter of a temporary situation like getting some stents put in or whatever.

Forget this version of the GOP though. They to me are like the relatives of King Fahd when some docs phoned up US counterparts to ask how best to keep him alive after he'd had a stroke so debilitating that he had lost all control of bodily functions, while they sorted whether his half-brother would be permitted to launch a rule of Saudia Arabia by regency until Fahd's eventual death.

Now I don't know how far Trump would have to deteriorate before the GOP would finally ask Pence to step in for Trump, but word salad and apparent loss of some motor function here and there aren't their red line, that's for sure. The problem with a guy who's a late stage narcissist with other medical issues is that arc of narcissism is just as likely to cause his implosion as some cardiovascular issue. It would not be pretty if that happened in public. At least with Twitter someone can finally pull the plug (and if you look through those tweets, he's not writing them all by any means). But if a collapse is public, well. That's on the GOP. Just another notch in their belts of infamy and I don't think they'd even care. They may try to make a martyr of him though. That has crossed my mind.

With Nixon... yeah he couldn't serve some of the time at the end and Haig and Kissinger were doing the work while the stresses of the Watergate coverup took their toll on the President. We're still not in an era where impairment by a substance dependence will trigger a call for the 25th A... even if or maybe especially if Congress has long had its special AA meetings.

As for JFK, it's not clear to me we know whether his steroids and painkillers impaired his fitness to serve and if so, at what intervals and for how long. Of course back then there was a whole lot more we didn't know at the time about pols in high offices, thanks to gentlemen's agreements with a good ol' boy's press back then. Women on the side, for instance.

Today the press isn't on board with keeping secrets like that, and they don't like being sold a line of BS about a trip to an outside hospital by a President either. I don't blame them. I think it was a mistake for Trump to put a fake lid on that event but unless the cabinet and Congressional leaders cared to step in, that was his call so we're stuck with it... and so are the GOP, and Trump's docs and advisors and campaign strategists if it blows up between now and November.