On top of everything else, the cancer ward was Number 13

There’s a bit in The Simpsons where Mr. Burns, the cartoonish evil, i.e., highly realistic, plutocrat who is both incredibly old and apparently immortal, has his survival explained by the fact that he has so many diseases at once that none of them can manage to kill him, since they somehow end up cancelling each other out.

An analogous thing about Donald Trump is that he is so incredibly evil and incompetent and lazy and stupid and unfit to be president in every conceivable way that any individual example of how this is the case somehow doesn’t end up counting, because of all the others. I mean if Trump were a normal president — and yes even a Republican — the increasingly evident fact that he’s in serious age-related cognitive decline would be a huge crisis. Instead, we’re reduced to op-ed writers pointing out from time to time that this isn’t even really a story:

During President Donald Trump’s announcement that he’s sending the National Guard to Washington, DC, to fight a crime wave that isn’t real, it became clear he has caught Sleepy Joe Biden’s much-ballyhooed cognitive decline.

I’m not sure how it happened. I imagine the liberals figured out a way to make a concerning lack of mental acuity contagious.

But whatever the cause, hearing the president ramble incoherently during a nationally televised news conference on Monday, Aug. 11, left no doubt: The man’s brain has turned to oatmeal.

For starters, on two occasions Trump told reporters he will be meeting in days with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Russia. The meeting will be held in Alaska, which, unless Trump has given away one of America’s states to Putin, is very much not in Russia.

A mistake like that from President Biden would have prompted Republicans to launch a congressional investigation into his competency and CNN’s Jake Tapper to pen a book on the presidential competency scandal of a generation. Two mistakes like that from Biden would have effectively spun the U.S. news media into a months-long cyclone of speculation and hysteria. . .

Asked a specific question about whether other cities like Chicago and Los Angeles might expect similar action involving the use of the National Guard to combat crime, Trump said, in part, this:

“But when I look at Chicago and I look at LA, if we didn’t go to LA three months ago, LA would be burning like the part that didn’t burn. If you would’ve allowed the water to come down, which I told them about in my first term, I said, ‘You’re going to have problems, let it come down’. We actually sent in our military to have the water come down into LA. They still didn’t want it to come down after the fires. But that was it, we have it coming down. But hopefully LA is watching. That mayor also, the city is burning, they lost like 25,000 homes. I went there the day after the fire, you were there, and I saw people standing in front of a burned-down home. Their homes were incinerated, they weren’t like, even the steel, literally it was all warped, literally disintegrated because of the winds and the flames like a blow torch. They were standing on this beautiful day, maybe a couple of days after, we gave it a little time because of what they had suffered. Almost 25,000 homes. And you see what’s happening now, they didn’t give their permits. I went to a town hall meeting I said we’re going to get you the federal permit, which are much harder.”

Several things are probably going on here.

First, Trump was probably of fairly average intelligence in his youth, but anybody who listens to any sort of extensive interview with him from 30 or 20 or even ten years ago will be struck by how badly he’s deteriorated in terms of basic coherence in the last few years, and even since his first term. The claim that “he’s always been like this” is just flagrantly untrue, and makes me think the people who make it are either liars or simply haven’t spent any time actually comparing “this” to Trump’s former abilities, modest as they were.

Second, the effects of age on cognition, while of course highly individual, are nevertheless fairly predictably terrible. When Biden was president there were all sorts of pragmatic reasons for ignoring the fact that an eightysomething president is a horrible idea, all other things being equal, but the crazy-making thing about Trump is that this horrible idea is just thrown onto the raging tire fire of all the other reasons why Donald Trump as president is such an insanely horrible idea. But at this point it’s a more than sufficient reason for why Donald Trump as president is a total disaster all by itself, and it’s getting worse all the time, as these things do.

Third, the human mind is like any other part of the human body — the problem with kids these days is all this Cartesian dualism — in that if you don’t exercise it, it deteriorates quickly, especially as one ages. Gerontologists note that an excellent predictor of basic health and survival prospects among the elderly is, can a person walk a quarter mile unaided? If the answer is no, that’s real bad.

ETA: Commenter Tom Hilton makes a crucial observation:

I would add a fourth thing, which is that the practical impact of Trump’s cognitive decline is vastly greater than that of Biden’s. While President Biden surrounded himself with competent people with good intentions, so that the business of government chugged along very nicely regardless of his own possible incapacities, Trump has surrounded himself with (and bullied Republicans in Congress into becoming) lickspittle lackeys who jump to enact his every demented whim. Biden could have governed reasonably well even if he lapsed into a persistent vegetative state, because he had people who knew what they were doing. Trump in his most lucid moments is a catastrophe because he doesn’t.

At this point Donald Trump can’t do the equivalent mental exercise of a quarter mile walk and clearly feels no inclination to even try, and that’s real bad.

This is a paragraph from the first chapter of The Triumph of Stupidity:

Before considering the many types of stupidity, we should consider the fact that every smart person has been stupid, and will be again.  The plot of Daniel Keyes’s celebrated story “Flowers For Algernon,” in which a mentally disabled man is given an operation that temporarily transforms him into a brilliant scientist, before he regresses back to his original state, is so powerful because it is merely an intensified and foreshortened version of so many ordinary life stories.  (The smartest man I have ever known, who was also the greatest federal judge of his generation, is now in a nursing home, his mind more feeble than that of a toddler).

Just this morning I found this amazing clip of an interview with Edward Teller about Johnny von Neumann. It’s less than four minutes long and very much worth watching to the end.