The first post I wrote for Delaware Liberal back in January 2017 was about my suspicion that Trump was, in addition to his many character defects and possible psychopathy, showing signs of dementia.
I got pushback from angry people who thought I was trying to absolve him of all his other defects. Their point wasn’t that I was incorrect — how can you be incorrect when you’re talking about probability, not established fact? — but that such a diagnosis, if true, would somehow exonerate him from his criminal behavior. People were arguing not from evidence, but from their desired outcome.
Guess what? They’re still at it. A psychologist named Ian Douglas Rushlau, who practices in King of Prussia, Pa., wrote a Daily Kos “diary” in which he made the same points I did back then. (In fact, in the nearly two years since I wrote, we’ve seen dozens of occasions on which Trump has seemed lost and confused, most recently when he wandered away from the president of Argentina at a G20 group photo op.)
I know you’re not supposed to read the comments — especially at Daily Kos, where the commenters include a higher-than-average number of passive-aggressive SJW snowflakes — but I urge you to have a gander at the large number of people in the comment section who argue against this diagnosis not because of any facts available, but because they don’t want to see Trump use mental incapacity as a defense.
Rushlau was careful to state he wasn’t making an actual diagnosis, that he was talking about public behavior that seems to indicate a mental decline. A bunch of people — lacking Rushlau’s background in the field — put forth other diagnoses, particularly malignant narcissism, which they only learned from other psychologists who were likewise speculating. He might have that disorder, too, but all the people who claim “he was always this way” are doing so without looking at the evidence. Many of them flat-our said they wouldn’t believe it because doing so might let Trump off the hook.
My stance on that is simple: Occam’s Razor. Yes, Trump could have any number of relatively rare psychological conditions, but the most probable cause of his frequent disorientation is the far more common condition of dementia, furthered by the facts of his age and family history. Progressive dismissal of even the possibility falls into the category of science denial — if you believe something isn’t true despite evidence that it is, you’re no better than a climate denier.
One asshole went so far as to claim Rushlau was violating professional ethics by opining on the matter — which, if used to censor people with credentials, has the effect of only letting people who don’t know what they’re talking about do all the talking.
I wish the lesson were simply that Daily Kos is a viper’s pit of left-wing assholes, led by Kos himself. But I’m afraid that Occam’s Razor leads me to the conclusion that many progressives are as unwilling to follow the truth wherever it leads as conservatives are.