Great moments in gerontocracy

Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington D.C.’s non-voting congressional representative, is pretty much MIA as Donald Trump engages in a little not so light fascism against the city she is supposed to be representing:

Washington’s locally elected government is under attack from President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans. But the capital city’s self-proclaimed “warrior on the Hill” is nowhere to be seen on the front lines. . .

 Norton — who has represented the city in the House since 1991 — has not been seen in public or otherwise interacted with the media since, even as other elected Democrats stepped forward to defend Washington’s autonomy against Trump’s aggressive new actions.

Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser held an hourlong news conference Monday afternoon in which she was flanked by city public safety officials, but not Norton. Her name was also missing from a joint statement released by members of Congress representing Washington’s suburbs that slammed the police takeover as a “soft launch of authoritarianism.” Several of those lawmakers have since given interviews to POLITICO and other outlets.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Tuesday afternoon he had yet to speak to Norton about a response to Trump’s moves, which were announced Monday morning. The New York Democrat said he hoped to have that conversation later in the day.

Norton did not accept an interview request made through a spokesperson, who declined to identify any other interviews or public appearances she has made since Trump escalated his threats against the city late last week.

What could be going on here?

When Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton, the Democrat and nonvoting delegate for Washington, D.C., attended a recent gala to accept an award honoring her decades-long career in Congress, she appeared to be struggling to read her brief remarks.

Standing onstage at Arena Stage in April, Ms. Norton referred to the “National Environment for the Arts,” lauded the D.C. theater for contributions to “freedom of suppression and democracy” and half-said, half-spelled the name of a former board chair, Beth Newburger Schwartz, as “Ethel N-E-W Burger Schwartz.”

A pall fell over the audience as Ms. Norton stumbled through her speech, according to an attendee. The scene, which was reported earlier by Washingtonian magazine, was all the more jarring because it followed a video montage celebrating Ms. Norton’s many achievements through her three decades in public office, the attendee said.

It served as a vivid reminder of what colleagues and friends said has been a notable decline for Ms. Norton — the civil rights leader and law professor turned congresswoman known as D.C.’s “warrior on the Hill” — that has quieted her voice, leaving her vastly diminished and struggling to fulfill her congressional duties. More than half a dozen of them spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid publicly disparaging her, though some for years have privately pressed Ms. Norton to reckon with her diminution and decide against seeking re-election.

Norton has said twice in recent weeks that she plans to seek re-election, although her staff continues to insist that no decision has been made (she’s 88).

Hey, let’s do a little more amateur medical diagnosis, which as we all know is barred on the Internet by the Goldwater Rule, or the rule about the first person to mention Hitler, or that other one:

Confabulation is sometimes called “honest lying,” because the person doing it genuinely believes what he’s saying, even if it is obviously and patently false. A person confabulates when they are telling completely invented stories that don’t provide them any particular tangible benefit. In other words, it’s not like lying to try and get out of a speeding ticket. 
 
Confabulation isn’t misremembering a date or forgetting something. The mistakes of memory we are all subject to become confabulation when people remember false information in vivid detail — detail so vivid and complete that people who don’t know otherwise often believe what they are hearing is true. 
 
In older people, confabulation is one of the clearest early signs of dementia. The day you witness someone confabulate is often the day you are forced to admit to yourself that a beloved parent needs help, and that all the little slips and oddities you’ve been seeing can no longer be rationalized away. 

For Trump, the day we could no longer pretend everything is fine came on July 15, when he told a lengthy story about his uncle, John Trump, who he claimed taught at MIT and held three degrees in “nuclear, chemical, and math.” His uncle, according to Trump, once told him how he had taught Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, and how very smart Kaczynski was.

Trump’s uncle was indeed a professor at MIT, but everything else in this story is pure confabulation. Trump’s uncle didn’t have degrees in “nuclear, chemical, and math” — he had degrees in electrical engineering and physics. And Kaczynski did not go to MIT at all — he went to Harvard.

But most telling of all, it is categorically impossible for Trump’s uncle to have told him any such story. Kaczynski became publicly known as the Unabomber when he was arrested in 1996. Trump’s uncle, the MIT professor, died in 1985. In other words, Trump’s uncle could not have told him the story because there was, literally, no story to tell during his lifetime.  

Once you have seen that Donald Trump is confabulating, it cannot be unseen — and all sorts of other mildly disturbing incidents suddenly fall into place.

Difficulty with mathematical concepts is another early warning sign of dementia. Now watch Trump attempting to explain how he is going to make drug prices go down by “1,000 percent, 600 percent, 500 percent, 1,500 percent.” That’s complete nonsense, unless drug companies will be paying patients to accept prescriptions, since reducing drug prices by 100 percent would mean they were free. Certainly, someone who got a business degree from Wharton and has spent his life running a company would know how percentages work.

Or take his insistence that former President Obama and his FBI director, James Comey, made up the Epstein files, even though they were long out of office by the time Epstein was most recently arrested in 2019. Again, that’s very troubling, because being unable to correctly process when past events took place is a common feature in confabulation. The same goes for being unable to remember that he himself appointed Jerome Powell as the chair of the federal reserve. 

Of course Trump has always been a pathological liar and compulsive bullshitter, but his most recent ranting does seem to include more pure confabulation, of the sort strongly associated with early dementia. It’s worth noting in this context that Fred Trump, who died of Alzheimer’s disease, began to noticeably slip mentally at just about the same age his son is at now.

Every story about dementia in somebody like Norton, who wields approximately .000001% much political power as Donald Trump, should also include a reminder that Trump seems to be losing his already limited supply of marbles at an accelerating pace.