Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics

Posted on July 13, 2024 by Luke Ford

Elle Reeve’s new book just came out. Here are some excerpts:

* You can dabble in racism, hang out on racist websites, read fascist literature, and later come back to the normal world, but when you use your real name in the movement you have passed the point of no return. You can quit, but you can’t leave. No one will forget what you’ve done. The movement takes away your friends and gives you new ones, but they don’t really like you, and they’ll turn on you the moment you become a liability, or “cringe,” an embarrassment. After the movement ruins you, it will laugh at you. You deserve it. You were never really good enough, but the movement had fun while it lasted, You, of course, did not.
At the center of the movement is a group of old men. The old men provide the money — but there is never enough money to do much of anything, and the old men are always pushing the young men to find a new source. When the wealthy inventor Walter Kistler developed an interest in race science in his later years, one of his aides told me a significant part of his job was to stand between Kistler and the grifters who wanted to extract money from him. “He was like a childlike genius — brilliant, but naïve, easily manipulable,” the aide said. “We were basically all policemen… because Walter’s checkbook would be in his pocket and whoever walked in, he said, ‘Okay, here is a check.’ ”
The old men offer validation. They have overlapping clubs and conferences, and when a young man gets an invitation, it’s a sign he has promise. One of those old men was Bill Regnery…

* Richard Spencer calls these old men vampires. “They see something that is alive, and they want to go suck its blood. And then the second they don’t think it’s alive, or it’s objectively dead, they want to move on to something else,” Spencer said. Regnery was Spencer’s chief vampire, and backed him for a decade. When Regnery died in the summer of 2021, Spencer did not go to the funeral.
The old men cultivate young men to be public faces for the movement. They give them just enough praise to get them hooked and working for more.

* [Matt Parrott] mentioned he was antisocial. He’d testified he was an introvert, an accidental revelation of some vulnerability. Afterward, he’d said, “It’s really hard to not be yourself after several hours of that kind of drilling. The real you boils out.”
I tested the waters with one of my favorite questions: Are you left – handed? Parrott said he was. [Matt] Heimbach was left – handed, too, which I’d noticed while looking closely at a photo of him in the middle of a brawl — he had a puffy red left hand. I asked Parrott, in a tone of shamelessly fake casualness, what he thought of the ubiquity of the word “autist” in white nationalism.
It was like whispering the secret password in a fairy tale — the whole side of a mountain opened up. He said he’d been diagnosed with Asperger’s in the nineties, and that Heimbach had, too.

* The movement will get you punched, sued, jailed, divorced, bankrupted. But it will never let you go. Matt Heimbach had a round face with thick black hair and eyebrows, and he was always grinning, but underneath it was a seething anger. “My biggest advice to people in the movement is like, Don’t fucking leave , because there’s no point,” Heimbach said. “If you’re already in, your life is fucked.” It will leave you with no one to confide in but the journalists who’ve exposed what you’ve done.
Heimbach had been blackpilled, trapped in a nihilistic hopelessness that the only thing to look forward to was to watch the world burn. I reminded him that quitting the movement might provide some benefits that he hadn’t considered. When white nationalists kill people, they tend to kill each other. I said quitting would reduce his risk of being one of those killed.

* Heimbach was fired from McDonald’s after management discovered he’d been a professional racist. He read me his termination letter and said, “They never forgive you. They never forgive you…. There’s no expiration date for how long your life will be ruined.” His voice had more edge than usual. “You get to a certain point where everything is just like that Springsteen song, ‘Glory Days.’ You just sit around like, Man, remember 2015?

* [Evan McLaren] spent a decade in white nationalism before coming to the realization he’d been a fool. In 2022, he posted a statement online, saying, “My revulsion for conservatism and the political right wing is total. I reject and disavow my past actions, views, and associations.” He apologized for what he’d done and said he didn’t expect to be forgiven. In conversations with me, he was unsparing: the movement was toxic and destructive and ruined people’s lives. He’d met many people he thought would have serious psychological problems even if they weren’t involved in it.

* “Sometimes when you hate something so much, you’re so motivated that you’ll make these connections, and they might be correct almost despite your motivations,” Richard Spencer told me. He was talking about a rival white nationalist [Greg Johnson] he thought was a vicious gossip. They’d feuded for years. But his rival had once accused him of auditioning to be on the Kremlin’s payroll, and years later Spencer admitted that, in retrospect, that catty bitch was on to something.

* It was March 2022, and I’d called him about the divide among white nationalists over which side to support in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I wanted the lay of the land, but Spencer kept talking about himself.
I’d first spoken to him by phone in 2016, when he was one of the few willing to be associated with the alt – right by name and on the record. Spencer said he was a narcissist, but this made talking to him easier, because he felt no shame and so he didn’t conceal his motivations. But it also meant he often failed to notice telling details about other people and why they did what they did, because his attention was elsewhere, on himself. He’d continued to answer my questions in all the years since, as the fortunes of the alt – right rose and fell, and so did his. There were times he’d gotten so lost in his own monologue that if I interjected an “uh – huh” to show I was listening, he sounded startled, as if he had forgotten someone was on the other side of the call.
* Russia found the far – right activists useful in the United States and Europe. It cultivated relationships with them both online and in real life. Russian trolls had used fake social media accounts and fake news sites to inflame racial tensions and stage protests. The state – controlled TV network RT had interviewed as “experts” a variety of extremists, including Spencer himself. Maria Butina had become intimately close with conservative activists, particularly in the National Rifle Association, before she was convicted in 2018 of acting as an unregistered foreign agent on behalf of Russia. Russia had invited fringe political parties to Crimea to build legitimacy for its annexation.

* Spencer was in a mood to reflect on his marriage in a way he hadn’t been before. “All these things that I overlooked — you look back now and it’s like, Holy shit, she was trying to do something .” He admitted he’d adopted some of Kouprianova’s views as his own. But he thought he was too smart to get played by the Kremlin. “I feel like I am an unrecruitable asset, in the sense that if someone suggests something to me, that makes me almost more skeptical. I march to the beat of my own drum,” he said. “Isn’t it much more easy to work with dumb people who are easily suggestible?”
Spencer and Kouprianova met on Facebook in 2009 and married the next year. He thought she was very smart, but that he was smarter. Most people who’ve met both told me they thought it was the other way around.

* Each told me they suspected the other was suffering from a personality disorder. They’d surreptitiously recorded each other during fights. Kouprianova had accused Spencer of physical and emotional abuse. They fought over child support. Kouprianova’s first lawyer withdrew from the case, in part, the lawyer wrote, because of “your desire for vengeance and taking down the Spencer family.” Some of Spencer’s lawyers dropped him, too.

* “He came across as a shy and nerdy grad student,” she said. “The way he comes across in his John Travolta suits — this really cheesy, sometimes scary, but very extroverted person in the last couple years — that would have been such a turnoff for me.” He knew all these obscure black – and – white Soviet films, and at the time, she thought it was cool he liked what she liked. But looking back, she said, it was all a manipulation, just narcissistic love bombing. He was flooding the zone with these references to impress her, and to drown any second thoughts she might have with affection and attention.
She didn’t see this coming, she said, this obsession with race and eugenics. When they met, Spencer was a libertarian. He’d had a Jewish mentor and dated an Asian – American woman. He told her the political book that had influenced him the most was by Justin Raimondo, a gay antiwar activist. She’d explained it the same way to the Huffington Post : “I didn’t understand the nuances of American politics. I knew he was conservative, but…”

* Spencer did not have the self – control to match his ambition, Kouprianova thought. When she compared his personality to historic political figures, they were more motivated, more organized, more Machiavellian than he was.

* Spencer made an ideal spokesman. He didn’t look like a guy who had nothing in his life to be proud of so he was proud of being white. In crowds, he could project confidence and self – control. That facade faded over time and under pressure. In a smaller group, he could be awkward and self – conscious, and fail to read the room. He once walked into an interview in a hotel room and asked my producer for a cigarette, as if he could smoke in a hotel, and as if he could smoke in the interview like it was the 1950s. He told me he can’t stand it when people don’t like him.

* “I’ve always been very lonely,” Spencer said. As a child, he’d never felt like he was part of the world around him; he couldn’t connect with other kids. Maybe they could sense even back then that he felt superior to them. But Spencer was not good at anything — not math, not English, not sports. He was awkward, goofy. In middle school, his teachers told his parents he wouldn’t be able to go to college, he said, “because I was almost retarded because of my dyslexia.”

In therapy for dyslexia, he’d listened to Mozart and recorded himself repeating words, and then played them back over and over again. He thought it rewired his brain. By the end of high school, he’d caught up to the other kids in math and sports, and he did well on the SAT. But it was not enough. He didn’t get into Princeton.
It stung, even if he knew it was embarrassing to be stung by it. Spencer asked me once why the journalists who wrote about him were so desperate to figure out his origin story. I told him it was probably because the popular image of a racist was a broken – down old man in an Alabama trailer park, but he was upper middle class, and most elite journalists were upper middle class, and so they were confused why someone like them would do what he’d done. He paused for a second, then said it was because he didn’t get into Princeton.

* The first time Matt Heimbach met Spencer was at a hotel room party after a conference. As some guys were leaving on a booze run, Spencer requested bourbon or whiskey — Heimbach didn’t remember what exactly, just that it was fancy. They brought back Mad Dog 2020 and were partying in the room when Spencer returned. “He just looks disgusted and asks, ‘Did you get me my whiskey?’ ” They told him to drink a beer like a real man. “He started to throw a hissy fit. One of the guys was like, ‘Richard, go in the hallway.’ Like ten seconds later, we just hear ka – thump and we run outside…. Richard has been lifted off his feet and is being slammed into the wall by a drunken college white nationalist going, ‘You drink’ — thump — ‘what we give you’ — thump — ‘Richard!’ — thump .” Heimbach remembered Spencer squealing, “Put me down!” He seemed to cherish the memory.

* Spencer was in search of a donor. He’d always wanted a donor. He wanted to run a think tank and publish essays and research on the superiority of white people and the West, and he wanted someone to pay for it who was not his mother. Regnery had founded the National Policy Institute, a white nationalist think tank, a few years earlier as a vehicle for a friend who’d since died. Spencer thought it was an empty shell. After exchanging emails, Spencer flew to Florida and made his pitch. In January 2011, Regnery made Spencer head of NPI and a sister organization, Washington Summit Publishers.
Regnery had a lot of money, but he didn’t want to dump much of it into NPI. Instead, he urged Spencer to find some other external source of funding.

* Spencer brought Kouprianova. She knew her husband wasn’t there to celebrate Murray. He’d talked about other old men, she said, and the possibility they would leave him large donations in their wills. [Walter] Kistler was a prime example: “This guy is in his nineties, so God knows about his state of mind at this stage.” They did see Murray briefly, but she thought he snubbed her husband.
Even so, they had a great time, partying with “all these Seattle society hags,” Spencer said. He felt momentum, like things were coming together. “I was flying high…. I was like, We’re gonna have a billionaire, we’re gonna have a billionaire …”

* Spencer had a contract with Kistler. Eventually, Spencer was offered a $50,000 kill fee. He took it. He bragged to his wife that he’d played hardball and won.

* Greg Johnson, who ran the white nationalist website Counter – Currents, noticed an element of the drama that most of the mainstream media coverage barely touched. “The Russian angle, I think, leads to the most plausible hypothesis for why this conference was shut down: NPI and Radix are Russian propaganda organs; Dugin, the chief speaker, is an ideologue of Russian chauvinism and an apologist for Stalin…. Jobbik, which was also associated with the conference, is pro – Russian, which is rather tricky in a country invaded twice by Russia in the last century,” Johnson wrote. He didn’t like Spencer’s new direction: “He has basically abandoned ethnonationalism and turned into an apologist for Dugin and reactionary Russian chauvinism.”

* Spencer had created the Alternative Right website in 2010, and ran it with a couple of writers for a while. Then he got mad at the writers and killed the site. He wanted to focus on his pretentious journal, Radix , and be the next Nietzsche. But the term “alt – right” was catchy, one white nationalist wrote, because it signaled distance from mainstream conservatism without endorsing national socialism or white nationalism.

* When Spencer finally realized the alt – right wave was swelling, he tried to surf it. Because he was willing to use his real name when few others would, he became the face of it by default.

* Kouprianova thought Spencer enjoyed the negative attention, because it was any attention, and that he wanted to be feared, because it made him feel alpha. She thought he had no sense of self without a reaction from others. People called her Spencer’s beard, and she was in a way — not to make him look straight, but to make him look like he had it together. She felt forced into a role of “Russian Suzie homemaker,” which she resented, because she’d lived abroad and spoke three languages. He told her, You make me look normal.

* Spencer was a draw. He shapeshifted to fit the desires of the people around him. From back in Montana, Kouprianova had watched her husband morph into this flashy, cheesy “alpha” persona. When people called him chubby on the internet, he went on a diet and ate only one meal a day. When they started calling him gay, she said, “all of a sudden these groupies appear, proving to the outside world he’s not.”

* Spencer and Froelich were spotted leaving the afterparty together at Charlottesville 1.0. Gossip spread quickly, and Identity Evropa investigated her. Both she and Spencer denied they’d done anything other than talk. Kouprianova was pregnant with Spencer’s second child — it was not a good look.
Froelich heard another guy, who went by Eli Mosley, was interested in her. “Eli has claimed me,” she texted Spencer. “Did he inform you of his decision? Or full white sharia?” Spencer asked. She said, “I guess white sharia.” Within a few weeks, Mosley was doxxed. His real name was Elliot Kline. He was pudgy, with a reddish beard and his hair cut like Spencer’s, and he liked to say he looked like a potato. Froelich offered him a place to stay for a bit. He never left.
He didn’t have a normal job, and she made the money working at a restaurant. But the texts show they liked the idea of being a power couple.

* Through the summer, Spencer felt euphoric. He was at the height of his power within the alt – right. He bragged to Froelich that people worshiped him like a God, and she watched the teenagers in awe of him at the nazi parties. He told her he was the L. Ron Hubbard of the alt – right, that he was building a new religion.
“You can’t go back,” Spencer told me later. “I just wish I could have asked myself, Do you like these guys? Richard, I know how you feel about ugly people …”
Back in Montana, Kouprianova looked at the photos posted online of the crowd Spencer was hanging around. The elderly men in tweed were gone, and now there were these younger, rougher – looking guys. Every six months there’d be someone new who served as his right – hand man, and now it was Elliot Kline. Kline was named Identity Evropa’s public representative for Charlottesville 2.0, but he also served as Spencer’s representative for its planning. Kline texted Spencer, “This is going to be a violent summer.”
Kline had a reputation as a clout chaser and a name – dropper. In private, he saw Spencer as a useful tool. Kline thought he was smarter and better. He told Froelich he needed to work out more to prepare for Rahowa, or “racial holy war,” she later said under oath. He was building a militia for Spencer, and he would lead them into victory, and then depose him. Once a white ethnostate was established, Spencer would be the first against the wall, Froelich said in a deposition. When a lawyer asked her to state explicitly what that meant, she explained, “That he would put Richard Spencer against a wall and shoot him dead.”
Spencer thought those guys loved him because he was great, not because they wanted to establish a base of power before stomping on his face to seize the crown.

* “The movement is magnetized to shit,” Spencer said. “Any form of shit it sees, it wants to go die on that hill…. It’s just like, Oh look — more shit! Let’s go involve ourselves. Let’s at least endorse it. It’s just so insane.” The alt – right was a shit magnet because some people were attracted to it not despite the stigma around it, but because of it. It was bad, and it made people angry, especially their parents. Spencer had imagined himself as the next Nietzsche, but instead he was the next Marilyn Manson.
After Froelich invited Spencer to the AltRight Discord server, he texted her, “Wow, the forum is insane.” He asked if someone could create an elite room with no shitposting, and she replied, “You are Richard Spencer. All you need to do is demand it and say who you want in and it is yours.” He declined: “It’s better to have intermediaries, like you, then for me to simply demand stuff.”

* [Christopher Cantwell] was also the most emotionally volatile person I have ever met — man or woman, adult or baby. In a few days he would tell me, “I find myself in tears more often than a man my age probably should.” So as a man of “reason,” he framed his emotions, like anger, as a rational response to the news. His voice got higher, and he spoke faster, even as he insisted he was genetically predisposed to appreciating the cold, hard facts of capitalism. He wasn’t going to Charlottesville to debate UVA students about public policy. He was going to create a massive spectacle to provoke an emotional response — to make his enemies afraid, and to make young white guys think he looked cool.

* In the park, Robert “Azzmador” Ray was filming the scene for the Daily Stormer. Azzmador had a gray wizard beard, a thin braid down his back, and a criminal record that began with a 1990 arrest in Dallas for illegally selling an interracial porno tape called Three Way Cum.

* Parrott did not eat right and did not exercise, and most of the time he tried to forget he had a physical body. If there were people eager to punch a nazi in the face, he was a soft target. But Parrott waded through the brawl unpunched. People who wanted to fight were high on adrenaline, and their eyes were searching for other fighters.

* There were about half a dozen guys, among them Elliot Kline, Nathan Damigo, Jason Kessler, and Richard Spencer. They asked one another, What should we do? What should we say? Spencer stood to address his men. They’d been drinking, and when Spencer began ranting, someone in the room was secretly taping.
“We are coming back here like a hundred fucking times! I am so mad! I am so fucking mad at these people! They don’t do this to fucking me! We are going to fucking ritualistically humiliate them! I am coming back here every fucking weekend if I have to! Like this is never over. I win! They fucking lose! That’s how the world fucking works. Little fucking kikes — they get ruled by people like me. Little fucking octoroons — I fucking — my ancestors fucking enslaved those little pieces of fucking shit! I RULE THE FUCKING WORLD! Those pieces of fucking shit get ruled by people like me. They look up and see a face like mine looking down at them. That’s how the fucking world works. We are going to destroy this fucking town!”

There was no pretense of irony, or that this was one big cosmic joke, or that he simply wanted open debate among reasonable people. Spencer sounded sweaty and crazy. A couple guys clapped lightly, and one offered a soft “yeah.” But right there, in that room, Spencer lost the movement.
Evan McLaren, who was then Spencer’s loyal right – hand man, could feel the other guys turn on their icon. McLaren felt a shift in himself, too — maybe it had not been a good idea to make peace with Spencer’s narcissism. So many people had been implicated in so much damage, dozens were bloody and three were dead, but all Spencer cared about was his wounded pride.
Long after he’d quit the movement, and apologized, and moved across the Atlantic Ocean, McLaren smiled as he quoted the rant from memory: “They don’t do this to me .” Spencer’s greatest flaw, in its purest expression, at the climax of the disaster it had created. It had been like watching a villain’s final monologue in a play.

* Unite the Right’s attendees had been so proud to show their faces in public, but activists methodically identified them one by one and published their names on social media. They became pariahs in their towns or colleges or even in their families, and they were fired from their jobs. They were kicked off their own social media accounts, so they couldn’t defend themselves or reach new supporters.

* I learned a lot about Cantwell just by standing in his apartment, saying nothing, as the crew set up our interview. His home was hostile to the human psyche. Every corner was stacked with some kind of object for self – improvement — weights, protein powder, supplements, niche kitchen appliances. He’d printed out signs on computer paper in big bold text that read, “STOP SAYING FUCK,” and he’d taped them under his television, by his bathroom mirror, on his fridge. The windows were covered with blackout curtains. He was slamming Sugar Free Red Bulls and taking huge rips from a vape. When I asked how he slept at night, he leaned his head back, his voice tight as he held the smoke in his lungs, and said, “It’s a struggle.”
The night he’d gotten home from Virginia, he said he noticed a big bottle of whiskey on a shelf, and he took it down and drank it till he blacked out. All he remembered was the hangover the next day. After that lapse, he was trying to control his alcoholism.

* Matt Heimbach and Matt Parrott found themselves in a love triangle. Heimbach was having an affair with Parrott’s third wife, Jessica. The Parrotts had just had their first child, a girl. Heimbach was married to Parrott’s stepdaughter, Brooke, and they had two small boys. This meant that Heimbach was having an affair with a woman who was both his best friend’s wife and his wife’s stepmom. At the time, Heimbach and Brooke were living in a trailer on Parrott’s property in Indiana.
The affair ended, but in early March, according to a police report, Jessica and Brooke decided to test Heimbach’s commitment to ending the relationship. Was it really over? They made a plan: Jessica would try to seduce Heimbach, and Brooke and Parrott would film through a window outside. In one sense, it worked: Heimbach responded to Jessica’s romantic overtures. But as Jessica and Heimbach began to get physical, Brooke got upset and ran away, and Parrott fell through the box he was standing on. Then Parrott ran around the home and confronted Heimbach. He ordered his best friend to leave his property, jabbing Heimbach in the chest with his finger. Heimbach put Parrott in a headlock and choked him out.
When Parrott came to, Jessica was standing over him. He ran into the house, and Heimbach entered. Parrott demanded Heimbach leave, and when he didn’t, Parrott threw a chair at Heimbach. Heimbach choked him out again. When Parrott got himself together, he grabbed his four – month – old daughter, ran to Walmart, Walmart, and called the cops. When police arrived, they heard Heimbach yelling at Brooke to tell the cops everything was fine and ask them to leave. She refused, and Heimbach kicked a wall and grabbed Brooke’s cheeks and pushed her on the bed. Cops entered and arrested Heimbach. Heimbach was already on probation for pushing a Black woman at a Trump rally in 2016. A judge sentenced him to thirty – eight days in jail for violating his probation, and a few months later, Heimbach pled guilty to battery for attacking Parrott.

* The divorce took eighteen months. Kouprianova said it cost her $40,000 in legal fees. Spencer was held in contempt of court for failing to pay $60,000 to the court – appointed investigator who determined the best custody arrangement. Multiple third parties involved in the case said they thought both Spencer and Kouprianova were acting irrationally. Kouprianova had originally decided to move to Winnipeg to be near her parents, but in April 2019, changed her mind and decided to stay in Whitefish. She and Spencer both still live in the same mountain town of 8,500 people.

* Parrott was living in Indiana, in the same town where he grew up, with his three kids and his fourth wife. It was ten years since he’d met Matt Heimbach, who was now living far away with his own two children. A few weeks earlier they’d gotten on the phone to gossip about the movement, and Heimbach reflected, “We really did get mixed up with the most despicable evil stupid motherfuckers in America.” Parrott agreed, but it was worse: “We did, bro. We followed those guys into battle.”
Heimbach had found another job, though he knew that eventually someone would recognize him and he’d be fired again. He’d accepted that the decisions he’d made at nineteen meant he might be stuck in this cycle for the rest of his life. It required some finesse in his personal life, he said. “I have to begin every first date with ‘By the way, you should know…’ Do you know how not sexy that is? To be like, ‘You should read my Wikipedia page before our second date’?”

* In 2022, Richard Spencer told me he was no longer a white nationalist. “I care about civilization more than race,” he said. He hadn’t quit trying to be a public figure, tweeting his commentary on politics and old far – right rivals. The most attention he’d gotten in years came with the revelation that he’d listed his political affiliation as “moderate” in his profile on Bumble, a dating app whose best – known rule is that women speak first.
Spencer would take only limited accountability for his starring role in the “Summer of Hate.” He’d said during the Charlottesville trial that he’d been “slumming it” by hanging out with the alt – right. He’d later told me that in 2016 and 2017, he was the most racist he’d ever been, and that he’d felt pressure to be the most far – right guy in the room.
But at his core, he was who he was. Spencer told me he liked Christian nationalism, because he thought associating the religion with the mania of QAnon would help destroy it. “I hate Christianity, okay?” Spencer said. “I hate Jesus Christ. I would have fucking oppressed that hell out of — I know that I come from Roman blood, the kind of people who would fucking crucify him, who would go in and knock down your stupid fucking temple — that’s who I fucking am , Elle,” he said. “In case there’s any ambiguity about the type of person I am, that is the type of person I am.”
Spencer still wanted to be the guy, but he was thinking bigger than politics. He’d turned his energy to building a cult of Apollo. He thought his new religion would eventually take down Christianity, and with it, its slave morality, as Nietzsche called it, which held that humility and obedience were good and power and wealth were bad. Spencer’s Apollonian cult would value strength, beauty, and intellect.
“Everyone’s like, Oh, we need more democracy, or We need more rights — it’s like, what are you fucking talking about?” he said. “We’ve had more democracy and liberalism and all this Christian Semitic stuff — we have more of that than we’ve ever had. How many Abrahamics are there on the planet at the moment, five billion?… We’ve tried the shit, sister.” He wanted humanity to make a covenant with a better god, like Zeus. But of the race stuff, Spencer said, “You have to move past it.”

Posted in Alt Lite, Alt Right, Richard Spencer | Comments Off on Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics

Journalism’s “Crazy Old Aunt” Helen Thomas and Paradigm Repair

Posted on July 12, 2024 by Luke Ford

Elizabeth Blanks Hindman and Ryan J. Thomas published April 18, 2013:

Veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas abruptly retired in summer 2010 after she gave unscripted remarks widely perceived to be anti-Semitic. This case study applies paradigm repair and attribution theories to explore how mainstream journalists repaired the damage to their profession’s reputation. It concludes that they (1) situated Thomas’s remark against a backdrop of journalistic excellence, subtly reinforcing the point that her career should now come to an end; (2) suggested Thomas’s remarks were caused by senility; (3) condemned her remarks as racist; and (4) raised the norm of objectivity.

On June 7, 2010, the career of veteran journalist Helen Thomas, who had covered the White House since the days of President Dwight Eisenhower, came to an abrupt and ignominious end. The previous month, she had been interviewed on camera by New York rabbi David Nesenoff, who asked if she had any “comments on Israel,” to which Thomas responded, “tell them to get the hell out of Palestine.” When Nesenoff asked if she had “any better comments on Israel,” Thomas replied that “they” (Jews) should “go home” to “Poland, Germany . . . and America and everywhere else.” The interview was posted to the rabbi’s website, RabbiLive.com, on June 3 and quickly attracted media attention and comment. Thomas’s speakers agency, Nine Speakers, Inc., dropped her,2 and her comments were condemned by the White House Correspondents’ Association,3 the Society of Professional Journalists,4 and President Barack Obama, who said her comments were “offensive” and “out of line.”5 On June 7, Thomas announced her resignation from her position as an opinion columnist with Hearst Newspapers and her retirement from journalism effective immediately.6 In her statement, she apologized for her comments, saying they did “not reflect [her] heartfelt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognize the need for mutual respect and tolerance.”7 However, her sixty-year career covering presidential politics was officially over…

To retain good standing within “a group with systematic relations,”10 members must function in accordance with the normative behaviors and standards of the paradigm.

Furthermore, such behaviors become unassailable, for the paradigm “restrict[s] the range of questions deemed appropriate for study,” rendering paradigms as hegemonic. However, they are not impervious; for Kuhn, a paradigm “fails” when the fundamental assumptions on which it is built come into question and are found to be inadequate.

As members of the journalistic paradigm, journalists can be said to be an “interpretive community,” policing their profession and defining, shaping, and reinforcing its norms, values, standards, and practices.

Posted in Journalism | Comments Off on Journalism’s “Crazy Old Aunt” Helen Thomas and Paradigm Repair

So how did the three books on the Biden administration deal with his decline?

Posted on July 12, 2024 by Luke Ford

Christian Lorentzen writes for the July 18, 2024 London Review of Books about the three books that have come out on the Biden administration:

The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future by Franklin Foer.
The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House by Chris Whipple.
The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy after Trump by Alexander Ward.

It’s difficult to divine from the histories of the Biden administration written so far just how active a role the president has played in governing the country…

Whereas accounts of the Trump White House varied from clown show to cesspool, with backstabbing among hacks, mercenaries and scumbags, the histories of the Biden administration present a succession of earnest and credentialled professionals lining up to help the president better the country and the world.

…The issue​ of Biden’s age is not much discussed in these books. Whipple, whose previous books include a study of the job of White House chief of staff, recounts a Zoom meeting between Klain and some of his predecessors during the transition in 2020. Jim Jones, the 82-year-old former chief of staff to LBJ, asked: ‘Could a soon to be 82-year-old man, battered by four years of stress and crisis, serve effectively for another full term as president?’ The question became pertinent in April 2022 when at a ceremony at the White House to unveil a proposed expansion of Obamacare, the former president was mobbed by admirers while Biden, in Whipple’s phrase, ‘looked a little lost’. Republican Senator Rick Scott of Florida said: ‘Let’s be honest here. Joe Biden is unwell. He’s unfit for office. He’s incoherent, incapacitated and confused. He doesn’t know where he is half the time.’ ‘This was, of course, false,’ Whipple insists. ‘Biden was mentally sharp, even if he appeared physically frail.’ Bruce Reed, the deputy chief of staff, told Whipple of a long flight home from Geneva in 2021 during which Biden regaled his jetlagged entourage with old stories, including the one about the time he visited the Kremlin and told Putin he had no soul, until everyone except the president passed out. But Foer writes that Senate Republicans ‘doubted Joe Biden was running his own show. Because of his advanced age, they whispered that he was a marionette, wiggling his arms as Klain manipulated him from above. Aides to Mitch McConnell were blunt in their analysis. They dubbed Klain “prime minister”.’ Tucker Carlson has made Biden’s age one of the central themes of his twerpy routine. Defenders of the president have written off such claims as ‘right-wing talking points’, but like left-wing and centrist talking points, right-wing talking points occasionally have some basis in fact.

A search of Google Scholar July 12, 2024, revealed there have been no academic articles on Joe Biden’s cognitive decline.

Posted in Joe Biden, Journalism | Comments Off on So how did the three books on the Biden administration deal with his decline?

No Country For Old Men

Posted on July 12, 2024 by Luke Ford

So how concerned have scholars been with Joe Biden’s mental acuity over the past six years? Very little. They do hate Trump, however.

I just put “Biden senile” into Google Scholar. The third result is an article from the December 2023 edition of the journal Political Thought (written by German scholars):

Ulrich Haltern is Chair of Public Law, EU Law, International Law and Comparative Law at Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg (Germany) and Martin Flynn Professor of Global Law at the University of Connecticut Law School. He writes:

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN? AMERICA’S ELDERLY PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES AS A CRISIS OF THE BODY OF POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY

The world’s oldest democracy is currently also the oldest with regard to its highest decision-makers.

The question whether a person over 80 can ideally or at least reliably fulfil an office such as president of the US is undoubtedly important, for it is rather worrying that Americans discuss the presidential elections with the same concerns as the question whether their parents should still be driving a car. More interesting, however, is the influence of this kind of gerontocracy on the relation between voters and elected, as well as on the system of democratic representation in general. It is not daring to think that a political system, in which the president is more than twice as old as the average citizen (namely 38 years), lacks sufficient contact with its very population…

However, it remains unexplained why other democracies are not gerontocratic. In Europe, the exact opposite is the case: while the population is getting older, political decision-makers are getting younger and younger. Examples include Volodymyr Zelensky, 45, Great Britain’s Rishi Sunak, 43, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, 46, Spain’s Pedro Sánchez, 51, and Finland’s Petteri Orpo, 53. The latter succeeded Sanna Marin, who had just turned 34 when she got elected in 2019…

The age of American political leaders is alienating younger people from politics. The Economist has shown that the extent to which older voters outrival younger ones is considerably greater in the USA than in other OECD countries. Other studies have proven that the average age of participants in local elections in the USA is 57, almost one generation older than the average eligible voter…

Political identity describes how individuals situate themselves within the political sphere, melding individual and collective identity. Its reference point is the political collective referred to as state or, sometimes, nation.

In the USA, this reference point is much more imagined as an organism than in Europe, where the organic structure of the state has given way to discourse and communication, and where political identity is much more found in the word. The American idea of corporeality − a fusion of body politic and body of the people, reminiscent of the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan in its composite nature − provides the state with a life and a value of its own, as an organic appearance of the people. When we as Europeans set foot on American soil, we cannot escape the manifestations of the idea of this value of its own, however strange they may seem to us, from the flag to the civil-religious rituals such as the Pledge of Allegiance, an oath of loyalty towards the nation and the flag of the United States. The higher idea embodied in the body politic of the state justifies its absolute demands towards the civic body that constitutes it, and the individual puts himself at its service: “Nothing is more typical of the American character than to give everything for a greater cause”, said Barack Obama in his inaugural address. Herein lies an ambivalence of American identity, which, on the one hand, emphasises great individuality and freedom, which should strive under the rule of law, but at the same time wraps this individuality into a great collective narrative…

Since this kind of imaginative space cannot be comprehended by intuition, it requires a powerful myth. In the USA, it is the myth of the revolution, in which the sovereign people, We the People, manifested itself and brought the state into existence. It is this big bang that unleashed political power and liberal self-government (unlike Europe’s revolutions, which politically restricted existing monarchic power), and therefore legitimation and legitimacy revolve around this moment of emergence only. The revolutionaries become the heroic founding fathers that the following post-heroic generations are to keep referring to…

American presidents are not only seen as leaders who coin and implement political programmes, but always also as elements of America’s imagined past, in which the nation recognises itself. The nation wants to be led, but it also wants to see its reflection. This reflection is twofold, corporeal and ideal….

At first, the corporeal reflection is as comprehensible as it is enigmatic. It is comprehensible because the public is endlessly fascinated by looking at presidential bodies and because presidents stage themselves as physically identifiable transubstantiations of the popular sovereign. Barack Obama, for instance, who, being black, did not reflect the majority of Americans, put it the way that American history “has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts — that out of many, we are truly one.” Even more enigmatic it seems that in 2024, two about eighty-year-old men are expected to run for presidency…

Meanwhile, reflection requires positioning oneself in the national narrative of origin. This collective imagination is the corridor of argumentation in which the presidents
have to position themselves in terms of history of ideas. Again, we can learn from Obama. He closely followed Lincoln’s example and adopted his civil religious, morally charged vision of a fusion between the individual and the collective body. Lincoln had fully developed this vision in his Gettysburg speech, in which the semantic of patriotism
and love finds its vehicle, culminating in the theme of sacrifice and not ignoring the willingness to sacrifice oneself. At the very end of his book The Audacity of Hope, Obama
describes how his Washington evening jogging routes lead him to the Lincoln Memorial and the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Lincoln and Martin Luther King play a key role in Obama’s account. He, both actually and figuratively, runs towards the two of them, as if they were present for real (and not only their memorials and memories), or as if Obama was able to transcend time. He is reading Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech and second inaugural address. In his head, he hears King’s famous “I have a dream” speech and sees the audience of 250.000 at the Reflecting Pool. Lincoln, King, Obama and the nation become one, thus wondrously and wonderfully suspending the rules of time and space and sweeping along all Americans.

…If we still want to say something unifying with regard to the representants’ age, then that could be that, in their increasingly senile frailness, they represent the disintegrating state of the American Constitution and its institutions. Only with good will can we still discern the might and glory of the political power that rests on popular sovereign representation and spreads apart there. However, even a quick glimpse reveals that the coat of power has been hanging loosely over brittle bones for a long time, and that the end of legitimate representation and its reliable decisions could soon be nigh. Ruffling up their feathers, but short of breath and emaciated, the staff runs across the scene, freezes, stumbles or forgets the sentence just started, but that does not matter: the political itself has broken in two, and its standard performers do not represent a nation.

I don’t recall feeling a fascination for the bodies of presidents.

Posted in America | Comments Off on No Country For Old Men

I Wish The News Media Had Given Joe Biden As Much Scrutiny As An NFL Coach

Posted on July 12, 2024 by Luke Ford

Imagine if the New York Times and company had covered Joe Biden’s mental acuity with as much scrutiny as the media gave former Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry in his declining years?

The Chicago Tribune published Nov. 6, 1988:

The legendary football coach, known for his fedora and his impassive expression on the sidelines, offered no excuses and few plausible explanations for the Dallas Cowboys` fifth straight loss, which dropped the club`s record to 2-7, the team`s worst start in 25 seasons.

In Dallas, however, many fans and critics thought they knew the reason:

Tom Landry.

He`s ”senile,” sportswriters and fans cried after the 64-year-old coach became confused about the ball`s position in the final seconds of a recent game. The confusion led to a disastrous Dallas error and a 24-23 loss to the Philadelphia Eagles in the final four seconds.

”Petrified cells beneath the funny hat,” one columnist diagnosed, decrying Landry`s quirky play-calling and his refusal to delegate authority to his assistants.

The Chicago Tribune published July 29, 1990:

Dallas sports columnist Skip Bayless labeled Landry ”senile” during the 1988 season when a 3-13 record and a change in ownership ended one of the most remarkable success stories in sports history.

…Calling him ”a prisoner of his myth,” Bayless also writes Landry ”was just a small-town guy with a mild speech impediment who sometimes couldn`t remember the names of his players. . . . The real Landry at times seemed to blank out under pressure on the sideline, forgetting plays or calling ones that didn`t exist or made no sense. . . . Yes, beneath the stoneface facade, the coat and tie, Landry sometimes came unraveled, at the expense of his quarterback. Yet the real Landry was too insecure to ever accept any blame.”

…”God`s Coach” is not on Landry`s shelf.

”No, I don`t read Skip Bayless. I think he`s probably spoken to me about twice in the last four years, so I don`t think he has my feelings or my thoughts,” Landry said.

The one time I was next to Tom Landry was in the locker room after the Dec. 22, 1985 game when the 49ers defeated the Cowboys 31-16 at Candlestick Park. I was a news reporter for KAHI/KHYL radio. I was walking out of the 49ers press conference and towards the visitors locker room. Tom Landry was standing in the hallway talking to several journalists. I stuck my microphone into the mix and heard Tom say, “I haven’t talked to Skip Bayless in four years.”

Ditka remembers Landry botching plays and worse. As the team`s offensive and defensive coordinator refusing to delegate authority, Landry changed a game plan and cost the Cowboys their first Super Bowl in 1970.

”He tried to do it again the next year, and we wouldn`t let him,” Ditka said.

…Pete Gent didn`t understand Landry either. A former Cowboy and author who has made a living writing about the Cowboys, Gent told Bayless: ”What many guys wanted was for Tom to be their father figure. The two guys he had the most trouble with, Duane Thomas and Thomas Henderson, had lost their fathers, and they looked to Tom. But there was this erratic split in Tom`s personality, the business and the religion. Here`s a man dealing in human flesh and crippling injuries, betraying men, possibly lying to them about their physical conditions, deceiving them about why they`ve been released, keeping them ignorant and scared. I just don`t believe a man can preach moral ethics and do what he did.”

Ron Fimrite writes in the Sep. 3, 1990 edition of Sports Illustrated:

Bayless sees Landry, Cowboy president Tex Schramm and personnel director Gil Brandt—all of whom left the organization last year when the team was sold to Arkansas businessman Jerry Jones—as an “unholy trinity.” Schramm, who built the franchise from scratch, is dismissed as a bibulous blowhard whose steadfast promotion of the Cowboys as America’s Team served primarily as a motivational tool for opponents enraged by such presumption.

Brandt, widely credited with introducing computer technology to scouting, is, in Bayless’s hard-eyed view, a phony who knows virtually nothing about either football or technology. Bayless suggests that Brandt lasted 29 years in the game only by calling in markers from college coaches he had treated to favors. And team owner Clint Murchison was, for Bayless, an incorrigible philanderer who sank so low as to steal the wife of one of his employees-Brandt’s, as it turned out…

In one of his newspaper columns cited in this book, Bayless even suggested that the once-revered stone face had grown senile. At his best, says Bayless, Landry wouldn’t have won the “big ones” without quarterback Roger Staubach countermanding his orders and calling his own plays.

A search of Google Scholar July 12, 2024, revealed there have been no academic articles analyzing Joe Biden’s cognitive decline but there have been many articles decrying any notice given to Joe Biden’s cognitive decline.

The Journal of Active Aging released this study in 2020 by S. Jay Olshansky, PhD (Professor of Public Health, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois), Hiram Beltrán-Sánchez, PhD, UCLA, Yang Claire Yang, PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Yi Li, PhD, University of Macao Nir Barzilai, MD, Ingeborg and Ira Leon Rennert Chair in Aging Research, and Director, Institute for Aging Research, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Paola Rode, MD, Former Medical Director of Hematology Oncology, Lahey North Medical Center; and Former Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine, Tufts School of Medicine, and Bradley Willcox, MD, Professor and Director of Research, Department of Geriatric Medicine, John A. Burns School of Medicine University of Hawaii:

…Biden is expected to outlive Trump, even though he is three years older. The reasons are that Biden has an exceptional health profile for a man his age (e.g., ideal Body Mass Index [BMI], physically active, few ability of surviving a full term in office after the election.

* There is no evidence available in the public record to indicate that either candidate is facing a major cognitive functioning challenge—either now or during the next four years. Trump does face an elevated risk of Alzheimer’s disease due to a family history of the disease on his father’s side. It may be tempting to conclude that evidence of cognitive decline does not exist because extensive diagnostic assessments of cognitive functioning have not been completed, and if done, something significant might be revealed.

* …from independent reviews of publicly available medical record data on both candidates by three independent physicians with expertise in aging; it is our conclusion that chronological age is not a relevant factor for either candidate running for president of the United States. Both candidates face a lower than average risk of experiencing significant health or cognitive functioning challenges during the next four years.

Gerontologist Kate de Medeiros PhD published in 2024 in the journal of Age Culture Humanities:

The U.S. presidential elections have been the site of racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and ageism among other problematic issues. While the 2024 U.S. presidential election continues to be fraught with numerous “isms” and accusations, the focus in this essay is on a new and powerful discrediting tactic: the whisper of cognitive decline. Accusations of cognitive decline not only cast doubt on a politician’s ability to think and act clearly—an unpardonable sin in leadership1—but also builds on ageist stereotypes that make such accusations seem credible despite evidence. Ultimately, I argue that because Donald Trump and Joe Biden are wealthy, white, educated men of roughly similar ages, seventy-seven and eighty-one respectively, targeting their cognitive status feeds into social stigmas and fears that are difficult to counter and that, unfortunately, the harm caused by this new level of attack negatively affects older people and people living with neurocognitive disorders…

Although candidate age is still an issue in the 2024 elections, cognitive competence rather than age alone has taken precedence for both candidates. Cries about Biden’s cognitive state have been furthered by Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report regarding Biden’s unauthorized possession of classified documents. Hur writes:

“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory. Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him—by then a former president well into his eighties—of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”

…Throughout the report, Hur notes lapses in Biden’s memory related to how he obtained various classified documents, whether he recalled returning documents to the National Archives, what he told his ghostwriter about the documents, and other details…

As neurologists remind us, everyone forgets, and forgetfulness with age is normal, not an indicator of dementia. Charan Ranganath writes: “Generally, memory functions begin to decline in our 30s and continue to fade into old age. However, age in and of itself doesn’t indicate the presence of memory deficits that would affect an individual’s ability to perform in a demanding leadership role. And an apparent memory lapse may or may not be consequential, depending on the reasons it occurred.”

Yet, questions about Biden’s cognition continue..

On the Trump side, an increasing number of experts are suggesting that he is currently living with dementia (Phillips). For example, a March 2024 article in Newsweek quotes several psychiatrists who claim that Trump is not forgetful, which is not a clear indicator of dementia as mentioned earlier, but rather confuses reality and changes the meaning of sentences midstream, which can be indicators of dementia. Reporter Aleks Phillips writes: “John Gartner, a psychologist and former professor at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, has defended Biden’s forgetfulness as a natural sign of his age, but authored a petition that argues Trump is “showing unmistakable signs strongly suggesting dementia.” He wrote at the start of March that the former president showed “progressive deterioration in memory, thinking, ability to use language, behavior, and both gross and fine motor skills,” adding that he felt “an ethical obligation to warn the public, and urge the media to cover this national emergency.”

Other specialists and professionals are also quoted in the article, supporting the dementia claim…

Social stigmatization, a type of public disapproval of a person or groups based on an attribute such as memory loss, can lead to devaluation and exclusion from social participation… the public scrutiny of the cognitive abilities of the two leading presidential contenders has consequences beyond the election. Discrediting through the suggestion of decline actively contributes to discrimination of older people and people living with a type of neurocognitive disorder, regardless of their age.

Resolute Square claims that “today’s GOP and their media mouthpieces are actively working to end democracy in the United States.”

Brian Daitzman writes June 19, 2024 for Resolute Square:

President Joe Biden’s cognitive health has been under intense scrutiny, particularly by conservative and far-right media outlets. These narratives often misrepresent normal age-related lapses and overlook Biden’s lifelong challenge with a childhood stutter.

Born in 1942, Biden experiences some normal cognitive changes typical of aging, such as occasional forgetfulness or slight pauses in speech. These are common in individuals of his age and do not indicate severe cognitive impairment. More importantly, Biden’s history with a stutter has influenced his speech patterns, leading to pauses as he carefully constructs his words. His stutter, a challenge since childhood, has been a source of mockery during the Trump era.

Dr. Geraldine Williams, a speech pathologist, emphasizes that Biden’s pauses are strategic, reflecting a coping mechanism for his stutter rather than cognitive decline. “His speech patterns are indicative of someone managing a stutter effectively, not someone suffering from dementia,” Dr. Williams explains.

Despite these challenges, Biden’s cognitive health remains robust. His 2023 medical examination described him as “healthy, vigorous, and fit to successfully execute the duties of the presidency.” Cognitive assessments by his physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, confirm that Biden maintains the mental acuity required for his role.

Dr. Leo Gugerty, Professor Emeritus in Psychology at Clemson University, asserts that Biden exhibits strong cognitive capacities crucial for presidential leadership. “His ability to make deliberate decisions, manage complex issues, and demonstrate extensive knowledge is consistent with someone who has preserved critical cognitive functions,” says Dr. Gugerty.

Trump’s Cognitive Decline: Expert Analysis

Observations from Experts

Experts in neurology and psychology have noted signs of cognitive decline in Donald Trump, raising concerns about his mental fitness.

Dr. John Gartner, a psychologist and former professor at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, describes Trump as showing “progressive deterioration in memory, thinking, language, behavior, and both gross and fine motor skills.” Dr. Gartner’s analysis suggests a decline beyond typical age-related changes, pointing to serious cognitive impairments.

Dr. Lance Dodes, a retired professor from Harvard Medical School, adds that Trump’s behavior reflects “gross paranoid psychosis” and “confusion about reality.” Dr. Dodes notes that Trump’s inability to distinguish between reality and delusion is a hallmark of severe cognitive issues, exacerbated by his narcissistic tendencies.

Physical signs also suggest cognitive decline. Trump’s walk appears wide-based, with a noticeable right leg swing. He seems unnaturally immobile when standing still and struggles with coherent speech, often going off on tangents and repeating phrases.

Dr. Elisabeth Zoffmann suggests Trump might have Behavioral Variant Fronto-Temporal Dementia (FTD). “My clinical experience and these collected observations are congruent with the diagnostic criteria for Behavioral Variant Fronto-Temporal Dementia (FTD),” she notes. Dr. Gartner contrasts Trump’s decline with Biden’s normal aging, stating, “Biden’s brain is aging. Trump’s brain is dementing.”

Cognitive and Psychological Defects

Dr. Suzanne Lachmann observes significant changes in Trump’s speech patterns, noting that he often “forgets how the sentence began and invents something in the middle,” resulting in “an incomprehensible word salad.” These patterns suggest severe cognitive impairment, contrasting starkly with his earlier ability to communicate more coherently.

In public appearances, Trump has struggled with word retrieval, often defaulting to vague or incorrect terms. His frequent misstatements, such as referring to “wall mongers” instead of “warmongers” and confusing former and current presidents, illustrate his growing cognitive challenges.

Ramin Setoodeh on Trump’s Memory Issues

Ramin Setoodeh, co-editor-in-chief at Variety, provides firsthand accounts of Trump’s severe memory issues. Setoodeh, who interacted extensively with Trump, notes that the former president often could not remember basic details or even recall Setoodeh during repeated interactions. “Donald Trump had severe memory issues. As the journalist who spent the most time with him, I have to say, he couldn’t remember things. He couldn’t even remember me,” Setoodeh recounts.

Trump’s Mental Illness: Expert Analysis

Malignant Narcissism and Delusions of Grandeur

Experts consistently point to Trump’s malignant narcissism, characterized by a grandiose self-perception and complete disregard for truth and honesty.

Dr. Lance Dodes describes Trump’s mental state as dominated by “severe narcissistic, antisocial character disorder,” manifesting in an inability to tolerate losses and a propensity for destructive behavior when faced with accountability.

Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist, and Donald Trump’s niece, reinforces this view, noting her uncle’s “untreated psychiatric disorders,” including delusions of grandeur and extreme narcissism. Mary Trump describes him as having been “reasonably adept at getting his point across” in his younger years but now exhibiting clear signs of “mental confusion” and an “inability to communicate effectively.”

Cruel Sadism and Lack of Empathy

Trump’s behavior has also been characterized by a lack of empathy and a penchant for cruelty. Dr. Justin Frank, a psychiatrist, describes Trump as a “cruel sadist” who takes pleasure in inflicting pain on others. His policies and public statements often reflect a disregard for the suffering of others, consistent with traits of malignant narcissism.

Donald Trump’s Aberrant Behavior

Donald Trump’s behavior has often been characterized as erratic and unconventional, raising questions about his fitness for leadership. Numerous anecdotes from his presidency illustrate a pattern of aberrant behavior that departs from expected presidential norms.

Ranting About Wind Turbines: In a bizarre speech, Trump ranted about wind turbines causing cancer, a claim without any scientific basis. His obsession with wind turbines’ supposed dangers became a frequent, unfounded talking point.

The Sharpie Incident: During Hurricane Dorian, Trump displayed a map altered with a Sharpie to falsely extend the hurricane’s projected path into Alabama, contradicting official forecasts. This incident, dubbed “Sharpiegate,” epitomized his disregard for factual information.

Covfefe Tweet: Trump’s infamous tweet, “Despite the constant negative press covfefe” left many confused, as the term “covfefe” had no meaning. The tweet remained up for hours, and the White House never clarified its intent, leaving it as a symbol of his erratic communication style.

Injecting Disinfectant: During a press briefing, Trump suggested injecting disinfectant as a potential COVID-19 treatment. This dangerous and scientifically unfounded advice led to public health warnings and ridicule from the medical community.

These anecdotes reflect a pattern of unpredictable and often irrational behavior, undermining confidence in Trump’s capacity for rational decision-making.

The Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) and Trump’s Misleading Claims

Trump’s boastfulness about his MoCA score perfectly illustrates his lack of depth in understanding cognitive assessments. Regularly bragging about his performance on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), Trump seemed to think it was equivalent to an IQ test or the SATs, viewing it as evidence of intellectual giftedness. This delusion reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the MoCA’s purpose. Its tasks—like distinguishing animals or recalling words—assess basic cognitive functions necessary for daily life, not the profound intellectual depth required for the presidency.

Trump reportedly boasted about his MoCA score during White House meetings. An anonymous attendee recalled his overemphasis, noting, “I just remember when I walked out, saying to a coworker, ‘That was nuts,’” in reference to Trump’s lengthy discussion of the test during a crucial campaign meeting.

The Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), developed by Dr. Ziad Nasreddine in 1996, is a tool designed to screen for mild cognitive impairment (MCI). It evaluates memory, attention, language, visuospatial skills, executive functions, and orientation, aiming to detect early signs of cognitive decline. Dr. Nasreddine explains, “The MoCA’s elements are selected with an intent to assess multiple cognitive domains that relate to human memory and brain function.” Scored on a 30-point scale, with 26 or above considered normal, it is a preliminary screening tool, not a comprehensive measure of intelligence or capability for complex tasks.

Dr. Jonathan Reiner criticized Trump’s claims, stating, “It’s a very, very low bar for somebody who carries the nuclear launch codes in their pocket to pass and certainly nothing to brag about.” The MoCA does not assess the high-level cognitive functions required for nuanced decision-making or executive responsibilities. It is designed to identify potential cognitive impairments, not to measure intelligence or suitability for leadership.

The MoCA’s simplicity allows it to screen effectively for cognitive issues but does not gauge the sophisticated abilities required for national governance or crisis management. Trump’s misuse of the MoCA as a measure of intellectual aptitude highlights his misapprehensions and demonstrates his lack of readiness to tackle the multifaceted challenges of the presidency.

False Equivalence and Cognitive Health: Trump vs. Biden

Claims equating the cognitive health of former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden lack a factual basis and serve to obscure significant differences. Cognitive health assessments and observable behavior point to a clear distinction. Trump’s erratic behavior, frequent lapses in speech, and questionable decision-making have raised concerns about his cognitive decline. Specific incidents, such as his difficulty with common words, repeated falsehoods, and erratic public conduct, underscore this decline.

In contrast, despite being older, President Biden has shown no similar cognitive decline.
His administration’s management of complex policy issues and his public speeches indicate intact cognitive function. Leading medical experts, including Dr. Sanjay Gupta, have noted that while Biden’s age naturally raises questions, there is no substantial evidence of cognitive impairment.

Bibliography:

Achenbach, Joel, and Mark Johnson. “What Science Tells Us About Biden, Trump and Evaluating an Aging Brain.” Washington Post, May 18, 2024.

Blake, Aaron. “Our Flawed Comparisons of the Mental Faculties of Biden and Trump.” Washington Post, June 10, 2024.

Devega, Chauncey. “Dr. Lance Dodes on Trump’s Courtroom Antics: ‘Decompensate to the Point of Gross Paranoid Psychosis.’” Salon, November 7, 2023.

Gugerty, Leo. “Biden and Trump May Forget Names or Personal Details, but Here Is What Really Matters in Assessing Whether They’re Cognitively Up for the Job.” The Conversation, June 10, 2024.

Johnson, Ted. “‘Rupert Murdoch’s Sad Little Super PAC’: White House Pushes Back Again at New York Post, This Time Over Biden-Obama L.A. Fundraiser Video.” Yahoo News, June 17, 2024.

Joyella, Mark. “Biographer Says Trump ‘Has Severe Memory Issues’ and ‘He Couldn’t Even Remember Me.’” Forbes, June 17, 2024.

Lewis, Tanya. “The ‘Shared Psychosis’ of Donald Trump and His Loyalists.” Scientific American, January 11, 2021.

Olmsted, Edith. “Trump’s Bizarre New Excuse for His Milwaukee Comment.” New Republic, June 17, 2024.

Parker, Ashley, and Dan Diamond. “A ‘Whale’ of a Tale: Trump Continues to Distort Cognitive Test He Took.” Washington Post, January 19, 2024.

Phillips, Aleks. “Donald Trump Dementia Evidence ‘Overwhelming,’ Says Top Psychiatrist.” Newsweek, March 20, 2024.

Phillips, Aleks. “Donald Trump’s ‘Ability to Communicate Has Deteriorated’: Mary Trump.” Newsweek, March 5, 2024.

Scotten, Marin. “He Couldn’t Even Remember Me: Trump Has ‘Severe Memory Issues,’ Says Author Who Interviewed Him.” Salon, June 17, 2024.

Margaret Morganroth Gullette, a resident scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University, writes in 2024 prior to the June 28 debate:

Everyone who has noticed the ageism in US Presidential politics has an opinion as to (1) whether the incumbent Joe Biden is indeed “too old” and/or (2) how best to rebut the Republican-leaning accusation…

In February 2024, a US special counsel, Robert J. Hur, when recommending that charges be dismissed against President Joe Biden for his alleged mishandling of classified documents, released an inappropriate comment on Biden’s mental acuity. Hur’s report concluded that Biden would “likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” (Doherty and Thompson). Leave aside the condescension. The word “elderly” alone is disparaging in social usage and may be experienced as hurtful to those who feel targeted. Even those rebutting the Hur description scrupulously quoted the slur again. And again.

The rebuttals were forceful. David Moye, writing in Huffpost, announced, “Robert Hur Admits Telling Biden He Seemed to Have ‘Photographic Recall’.” On Vox, another rebuttal, by Andrew Prokop, appeared under the headline, “Robert Hur’s report exaggerated Biden’s memory issues.” In a Congressional hearing, CNN reported, Representative Adam Schiff (Democrat of California) charged that Hur, a registered Republican, had to know that his generalization would be used to demean Biden in his run for re-election. In terms of the rules for special counsels, “You don’t gratuitously add language that you know will be used in a political campaign […] That was a political choice. That was the wrong choice.”

…No doubt, ageism is an unworthy distraction in so pivotal an election, with dictatorship and the end of Social Security as prospects the Republican candidate has already announced. Will “mental acuity” resound six months hence? Republican surrogates will try to keep all the negatives around Biden’s age alive. But there may be another crisis that only a sitting president can handle. On the one hand we have a healthy incumbent with a humorous, friendly, even soothing paternal presence and many recent accomplishments in economics and policy. On the other, a former president who incited an insurrection with lies about his 2020 election defeat, has been charged with 91 separate felony indictments and was convicted of committing fraud and sexual assault. Other questions will be whether democracy, reproductive rights, and similar values matter to more voters than the fearful salience of age.

Posted in Joe Biden, Journalism | Comments Off on I Wish The News Media Had Given Joe Biden As Much Scrutiny As An NFL Coach