GOP too mired in 'incoherent QAnon babble' to see Trump's cognitive decline: analyst

MAGA supporters have become so wrapped up in "incoherent QAnon babble" that they are incapable of noticing former President Donald Trump's rapidly deteriorating mental state — at least, that's what Salon writer Amanda Marcotte suspects.

This comes as the former president, now in his late seventies and almost as old as President Joe Biden himself, comes under scrutiny for his recent slip-ups, including confusing Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi and appearing to confuse his own wife with GOP lobbyist Mercedes Schlapp — both of which Trump has angrily tried to claim were intentional.

You need only watch Trump's recent speeches to understand this, wrote Marcotte, like the one on Monday after the Supreme Court let him back on the ballot in Colorado: "After a few semi-coherent, if gross, remarks about how he was 'honored' by the ruling, Trump launched straight into a stream of paranoid jabber more appropriate for someone having a psychiatric episode on a city bus than for a major presidential candidate. He started rambling about how he wanted 'immunity' for all his crimes, claiming that without that, 'You really don’t have a president, because nobody that is serving in that office will have the courage to make, in many cases, what would be the right decision — or it could be the wrong decision.' By the time he got to defining 'migrant crime' as a 'new category of crime,' both MSNBC and CNN were cutting away."

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And this is just one instance, she added — in that same speech, he ranted about how long it takes to wash his hair. And in a previous speech over the weekend, he devolved into gibberish and seemed to think Barack Obama was still president.

"Most people who hear Trump speak these days get uncomfortable 'Grandpa needs a nap but I worry he's going to bite me' vibes," wrote Marcotte. "But that doesn't seem to be registering at all with most Republican voters, at least not the ones who show up at his rallies. He could be up there prattling on about how a whale and a windmill are to blame for 'The Apprentice' getting low ratings, and they'd keep cheering like he was the reincarnation of George Washington and George Wallace at the same time."

This goes beyond simple partisanship, she concluded: Republicans "have lost the ability to notice when someone isn't making sense, because they've fried their minds with right-wing propaganda." And at the end of the day, "Many more voters are likely to tune in closer to Election Day, and many will be shocked by seeing what more politically conscious folks have seen over the last couple of years: A guy who didn't have a lot of mental resources to begin with shedding brain cells by the minute."