At a rally in Bullhead City, Arizona, on October 14, the President of the United States told a crowd that a swimmer “suffered massive windburn” because a giant in the next lane “swam by her so fast that the wind was unbelievable.” Nobody in the story was named, and he never said where or when it happened.
That was the same speech where he said the “gay national anthem” is a thing, in his words, “actually,” and that his wife told him, “You should not dance off the stage, my darling.” Then he got to the doctors.
According to the IBTimes write-up, he claimed he travels with more doctors than any human being, pointed at a man in the crowd, and said the guy looked ready for a heart attack. If someone got sick in the audience, Trump said, his doctors would leave them alone: “You know what they call them? Collateral damage.” CNN’s Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a former cardiologist to Dick Cheney, called that “completely untrue.” A White House spokesman, Davis Ingle, answered by calling Reiner a “Democrat hack doctor.” Nobody answered the question of why the president said it.
Earlier in the same speech, per IBTimes again, he twice asked “Where’s my doctor?” and then bragged that he’d passed a cognitive test, the one with the lion, the bear, the giraffe and the snake. He said he’d taken it three times.
I’m not a doctor, and I won’t pretend to diagnose a man from a video clip. Neither should you. But I can read a transcript, and these read like the ramblings of someone who is either not well or just doesn’t care whether his sentences go anywhere. Neither one is what I want in the Oval Office.
Fair counterpoint: he has always been a digressive speaker. He has been a digressive speaker for years, and Primetimer notes he told a similar windburn story in 2023. So the honest question isn’t whether he rambles. It’s whether the rambling has gotten worse, and viral clips can’t answer that. A full, independent exam released to the public could.
Here’s what bugs me most, though. The same press corps and the same voters who spent years dissecting Joe Biden’s every stumble now shrug and say “that’s just Trump.” The standard should be the same for both of them. It was never applied evenly, and people on both sides know it.
The constitutional fix is Section 4 of the 25th Amendment, which needs the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet to declare the president unable to do the job, and Congress can overrule a president who objects only with two-thirds of both chambers. Nobody has ever used it against a president’s will. Republicans hold Congress, and the Cabinet is made up of people he picked and can fire. That isn’t a safeguard. It’s a fire extinguisher bolted inside a locked room.
I’ve already written about who he puts in those Cabinet seats, and I still think about the 77 million who voted for this and what they’d say if the same remarks came out of the other party’s mouth.
My two cents: if a candidate from either party said a giant’s wake gave a swimmer windburn and that his doctors treat sick fans as collateral damage, we’d be demanding records by lunch. Hold both sides to the same bar or admit you don’t have one.