<
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/30/donald-trump-leader-of-the-free-world-president-safeguards>
"Donald Trump’s cognitive skills are amazing. So amazing! So great! So much
better than any other dumb presidential contender you could mention, at least
according to Trump himself, who bragged once again last week of how he had
repeatedly aced what he calls “a very hard test for a lot of people”. (It’s
thought he means a screening tool for mild cognitive impairment in elderly
people.)
Sure, the 79-year-old leader of the free world recently interrupted a cabinet
meeting in the middle of a war to ramble on at length about a conversation he
supposedly had with the head of the Sharpie pen company over supplying bespoke
presidential felt-tips, of which the firm said it could find no record. And
made a baffling joke about Pearl Harbor during a press conference in front of
an alarmed-looking Japanese prime minister. And called the strait of Hormuz the
“strait of Trump”, before adding that that was absolutely deliberate because
“there are no accidents with me”. But anyway, to be clear, his mental state is
great. The greatest!
Just suppose, however, that it wasn’t. Imagine, purely for the sake of
argument, that the 61% of Americans (according to Reuters-Ipsos) who think
their president has become more erratic with age and the 56% who don’t think he
has the mental sharpness now to deal with challenges (according to recent
polling for the
Washington Post) were not wrong. Suppose that, much as they
did with an octogenarian Joe Biden, millions of Americans had sensed something
through their TV screens that genuinely did affect their president’s capacity
to send thousands of young soldiers to their potential deaths in the Middle
East, whether or not that something amounted to a clinical diagnosis.
Imagine they were right to suspect that the lives of countless people around
the world rested in the hands of someone whose judgment might not be entirely
up to this – including the 45 million estimated to be at risk of acute hunger
if farmers can’t get enough fertiliser, a crucial byproduct of a now badly
disrupted Gulf gas industry, to grow food. What would it take, hypothetically,
for the system to challenge an elected president’s will?"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
