You can hate Trump, but saying he may have Alzheimer’s is no way to bring him down

Is Donald Trump OK? Obviously, we all have an opinion on that, and by “all” I mean virtually everyone on earth, but lately there’s been a bit of a spike in people wondering if he is fully compos mentis.

The dozing off in public appearances, the repetitive “weaves”, a possibly even greater estrangement from truth, those mysterious bruises on his hands, the unpredictability, the bursts of online ALL CAPS TARIFF TEMPER TANTRUMS!!! – all have prompted open questions about whether he is medically up to the job.

The latest contribution comes from his niece, Mary Trump, this week, as part of New York magazine’s “good-faith attempt to ascertain the truth about Donald Trump’s health” in an article entitled “The Superhuman President”. She’s known him better than most, and a few years ago wrote a moving memoir about her uncle, her family, including her late father, Fred Trump Jr, and their fortunes.

Estranged from Donald, she told the magazine that her uncle’s “deer-in-the-headlights” expression reminds her of her grandfather in his twilight years. He had Alzheimer’s disease, just as her father did towards the end of his life. Mary Trump says of the president: “Sometimes it does not seem like he’s oriented to time and place.”

Trump himself talked about his family’s health history this week, saying of his father: “He had one problem ... At a certain age, about 86, 87, he started getting, what do they call it?” He pointed to his forehead and looked to his press secretary for the word that escaped him. “Alzheimer’s,” his press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. “Like an Alzheimer’s thing,” Trump said. “Well, I don’t have it.”

The fact is that we don’t know if he does or not. Mary Trump is a psychologist rather than a geriatric specialist, and hasn’t seen her uncle personally for some time – both being Trumps, they’ve been suing each other, and most of their contact is through their attorneys.

You can also explain away most of the “symptoms” detected by observers. Trump is pushing 80, has a low attention span and, understandably, describes some of the meetings he’s involved in as “boring as hell ... I’m going around a room, and I’ve got 28 guys — the last one was three-and-a-half hours. I have to sit back and listen, and I move my hand so that people will know I’m listening. I’m hearing every word, and I can’t wait to get out.”

The infamous “weave” is, perhaps, just like a stand-up comic’s routine for a tour – some well-honed stories, a little under-researched observational humour, a dollop of political incorrectness, and a few rubbish impressions. Every Trump speech is pretty much the same – America was dead… hottest economy in the world… not even close… war would never have started if I’d been president… eggs… gas… radical Marxist Democrats… sleepy Joe Biden… worst president ever… low IQ… Somali gangs… tariffs… $18 trillion… they call it Trump Derangement Syndrome… like nobody’s seen before…”. He’s always been like that and if that makes him demented, then so are most comics. The bruising on the hands seems to be related to him taking medication, which he’s admitted.

So Trump probably isn’t any more mentally impaired than he’s ever been, bearing in mind he’s always been, in the opinion of this armchair psychiatrist, vain, mendacious, obsessive, insecure, puerile, vindictive, deluded, irrational, and over-(or should that be under-?)sexed.

That doesn’t mean he’s mad. Bad, yes, but not necessarily insane. Unfortunately, it doesn’t necessarily mean that his cabinet and Congress can enact the 25th amendment of the constitution of the United States and remove Trump from office (we may safely assume he’d not voluntarily admit he is permanently unable to “discharge the powers and duties of his office”).

He says, absurdly, he “aces” the various cognitive tests the doctors put him through, as if they proved he’s the smartest guy ever to sit in the Oval Office. The fact that he can correctly recall a series of images as “person, woman, man, camera, TV”, as he once boasted, makes him intellectually qualified to lead the free world and there’s not a damn thing any of the rest of us can do about it.

He’s maybe grown a little more uninhibited in the language he uses, ie, he swears more, but that is perhaps because no one dares to reprimand him. There are so many serious criticisms to make of Trump’s policies and conduct in office – not least how his immigration crackdown has been conducted – that we shouldn’t waste our time on cheap speculation.

If America is so concerned about becoming a gerontocracy, a better solution to this problem would be to depoliticise it and for everyone concerned to agree on an upper age limit for the presidency. You need to be 35 or over by inauguration day, so why not, say, 80 or under? A similar age limit for senators might also be helpful.

It would require Congress and the states to agree on a constitutional amendment, but, given that Trump would find it personally offensive, it will have to wait until the torch is passed to a new generation of Americans. That, at least, seems inevitable.