Trump didn’t definitively demonstate dementia sundowning in debate but I was shocked to see signs that Biden did, By Hal Brown, MSW

If you haven’t read the follow-up to this blog I suggest you read it here.

As someone who was holding off concluding that Trump had dementia until this debate when he’d be sundowning I didn’t note this in the debate. I wrote about this on June 15th.

Trump was his usual malignant narcissistic self and when he unexpectedly saw a diminished Biden he responded like the sadistic bully he is. He verbally punched him again and again with a manic and repetitious unhinged attack filled with his usual lies and projections.

While he seemed “demented” (meaning wild, irrational, and angry) what I didn’t see was definitive signs of actual sundowning indicative of medical dementia. If anything I saw Trump as being more manic than usual. If he believed the lies he told he’s clinically delusional. These psychopatholgies are not dementia.

I was however shocked to see that there were indications of at least very early dementia in President Biden, something I hadn’t even considered before.

Biden came across as off kilter but it was worse than this. He not only missed opportunities to counter-punch Trump but stumbled over his thoughts. Two or three times he referenced an important number, 400,000 and had to correct himself by saying he meant 40 million.

What happened with Biden wasn’t just his stuttering occassionaly. His cognition seemed to pause as if he was struggling to think of what he wanted to say.

There was one time when he seemed to have a “brain freeze” where his face went blank. When talking about the national debt he repeatedly lost his train of thought.

I wondered how he would do on the MoCA dementia screening test Trump bragged about acing. In his after-party when Jill Biden introduced him he told a story which seemed to come out of nowhere. He began his remarks with an anecdote he’s used before (see 2020 Vox article) which he says (perhaps erroneously) was in a John Wayne movie when he used the term “lying, dog-faced pony soldiers” where he is talking to “an Indian chief.” I think he used the term “Indian” not Native American.

There were so many retorts Biden could have used. One came to mind as I was miserably trying to fall asleep last night. After the interchange about who was the worst president Biden could have said sarcastically something about how amazing it was that in the history of the country Americans had the opportunity to watch according to Trump both the worst president in history and the best president in history.

Another missed opportunity came when Trump said he was the one who had heart. Biden could have said that he hardly thought it showed heart when he pulled children out of the arms of their parents and put them in cages.

Then there was Trump bragging about his golf prowess and Biden countering with talking about his own golf handicap. Aside from the fact that many non-golfers don’t know what a 2 hole improvement in a handicap means it was a foolish comeback.

This is an excerpt from “It’s time for Jill Biden to have a hard talk with her husband” in The Washington Post.

How Biden’s most passionate debate moment was defending his golf game. How, when he was served up a softball on abortion — Democrats’ most winning issue — he sputtered an incomprehensible answer about Roe v. Wade having “three trimesters. The first time, is between a woman and a doctor. Second time is between a doctor and an extreme situation. A third time is between the doctor, I mean, between the women and the state.”

Trump has an ad out suggesting Biden has dementia. I begins with a critique of Bidenonmics and then continues “Americans are struggling, Biden’s ignoring our problems. He keeps denying reality. Is it dishonesty or dementia?”The answer to the first part is, of course, that Biden is not being dishonest and if he does have early dementia it would have nothing to do with Biden’s honesty. However, Americans need to know if Biden is either suffering from early dementia which may manifest itself symptomatically only in the evening at this stage or is in other ways is cognitively diminished to the extent he can’t function adequately as president.

Updates:

Biden addressed a crowd at a rally in North Carolina today (below). Whether he was reading from a teleprompter or not he was a very different person than the one we saw last night. This was the Biden we hoped would be at the debate. One reason may be what I am suggesting. It is that he doesn’t present symptoms of early dementia, or some kind of diminished cognition, during the day but when the sun goes down they emerge especially under pressure. This is the well document phenomina of dementia sundowning.