Joseph Wyatt: Forget Biden, Trump is falling apart (ÂÒÂ×ÄÚÉä)

He routinely wanders into unaccountable verbal thickets followed by transparent attempts to cover up. The most obvious example? In campaign speeches he trekked from relevant topics onto unmarked side trails, discussions about mobster Al Capone and the vital national security issue of whether it is preferable to be eaten by a shark or die by electrocution.

Later, flailing to explain his perambulations into such strange places, he said that (unnamed) professors had informed him that his rambles were a mark of genius known as “the weave.� When old-time Yankee manager Casey Stengel did it, it was colorful. But coming from a man with the nuclear codes, it’s as comforting as the sound of screeching tires and breaking glass.

The president has fired, then re-hired, tens of thousands of employees at Veterans Affairs, Nuclear Security Commission, CDC, Department of Agriculture, the Nuclear Waste Disposal Agency, FAA and others. He froze, then un-froze, all federal grants and loans. He banned the U.S. from receiving packages from China, then reversed course. It’s the helter-skelter of an administration whose leader isn’t thinking straight.

He replied, “I don’t know,� when asked whether he is required to uphold the Constitution, evidently forgetting his oath of office. In May, when asked a question about his lawsuit against Harvard University, he began talking about Harlem. When, in June, he shared a deranged social media post saying that Joe Biden was “executed and cloned,� the GOP majority on the House Oversight Committee was dithering about the previous president’s functioning.

In July, apparently forgetting that he had nominated Jerome Powell as Federal Reserve chairman, Trump said, “He’s terrible. I was surprised that Biden put him in.� Similarly, he decried the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade deal, evidently losing track of the fact that he had authored it during his first administration. A man can’t “weave� himself out of such synaptic misfirings.

Not long ago, Trump knitted himself into an expansive and confused recollection of the time that his uncle, an MIT professor, had described having Unabomber Ted Kaczinski as a student. But Kaczinski never attended MIT. If grandpa had done that, the assembled relatives would be exchanging knowing glances.

Not long ago, Trump, who constantly sets and re-sets, tariff percentages, said that drug prices will be reduced 1,000%, which would have meant that pharmacies would be paying us to pick up our prescriptions. Recently, he twice said his Alaska meeting with Vladimir Putin would be “in Russia.� In the Oval Office a couple of weeks ago, with the president of Finland right in front of him, he asked where the man was.

Those who have endured the tragedy of an aging family member in the throes of mental deterioration sometimes tell of a heightening of earlier tendencies (narcissism, sociopathy, irritability, paranoia, problematic impulse control), as possible signs of dementia. Now, what should Americans make of Trump’s sales of trading cards showing him as various heroic figures? His late-night rage-posting? His terming it a “hostile act� when a GOP congresswomen demanded release of the Epstein files? His February post, “He who saves the country does not violate the law�? His posting a picture of himself wearing a crown?

Donald Trump might have convinced himself that he is a winner-take-all mental champion, and that Joe Biden is senile. But when it comes to dementia, karma holds the belt.