'Unintelligible blob': Trump mocked over 'shocking' and 'noticeable' mental decline

Author Jonathan V. Last, editor of the center-right news site The Bulwark, says President Donald Trump is exhibiting what he calls a “shocking” level of “noticeable mental decline,” citing the president’s remarks during his Monday speech to McDonald’s franchise owners and suppliers as his evidence.

Several times he quotes Trump at length, including here:

“But I want to thank, uh, as you know the famous Sundar and Sergey, Sergey Brin. These are two guys that own and run a place called Google. They called me the following day after I did that McDonald’s little um, skit, because it was it wasn’t a commercial. You got it for nothing. It was a skit and they told me that it and I didn’t know them. I just I said, ‘Who are they?’ They own Google. I said, ‘That’s pretty good. That’s not bad.'”

Trump appeared to be referring to his McDonald’s drive-through event last year, which was a photo-op, not a skit or a commercial. It was deemed “condescending” by an MS NOW opinion writer and “blue-collar drag” by “Late Show” host Stephen Colbert.

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“And uh that it received more hits than anything else in the history of Google and that records, it still stands,” Trump said.

Last asks, did the Google CEO and co-founder actually call Trump that day last year?

“Did they tell him that in just twenty-four hours he’d gotten more ‘hits’ than anything else in the history of Google? More than COVID? More than January 6th? More than Taylor Swift? What is a ‘hit’ on Google,” Last asked.

Last quoted Trump again:

“I’ll bet they use real sugar in your Coca-Cola. You know, they didn’t in the United States. I said to the head of Coca-Cola, you got to go to sugar. They do in other countries. And you know what? They went to sugar. Isn’t that nice? I said, ‘You got to go to sugar.’ Just like I said, why is the Gulf of Mexico called the Gulf of Mexico? I said, ‘We’re changing the name.’ And now it’s the Gulf of America. Has nothing to do with McDonald’s, but maybe it does because it’s very nice cycle.”

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Last noted that Coca-Cola “has not reverted to sugar in the flagship product it sells in the United States.”

And he called Trump’s remarks “nonsense.”

He continued into Trump’s comments about the time he served a few customers at a McDonald’s drive-thru, in what was a staged event.

Last quoted Trump telling the McDonald’s event attendees:

“I’ve been on that line many times. Actually, that line was incredible in the commercial. Right. It wasn’t a commercial. It was about, but, they have the line. The people had no idea. So I made the French fries. The guy was really good. He had a great wrist. He was, nyee, ‘Sir,’ he was going like, ‘Sir.'”

“Yeah. It was not that easy but I got it sort of finally. Not the greatest but I pouring it in asking him all sorts of stupid questions but it was very interesting. Amazing, a little thing is not, it’s a little complex, right?”

By the end, Last declared Trump has “a playlist of grievances and stories in his head,” and “what seems to be happening here is that Trump can’t tell his stories apart. He starts talking about flow restrictions on faucets, which brings him to water. But the word ‘water’ triggers another of his obsessions—water supply issues and deliveries to farms in the American West.”

“And,” Last concluded, Trump’s “brain now mushes these two stories together into a single, unintelligible blob.”

The title of Last’s piece is “Sundown.”

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