Friday on MSNBC’s “Deadline,” network political analyst John Heilemann accused President Donald Trump of conducting “himself like an addled old man feeding pigeons in the park.”
Heilemann said, “If you go back to not even the 2015-2016 period, I think if you go back and look at his interviews, the Howard Stern interviews, which had objectionable things in them, if you look at the interviews he gave in the ‘80s and ‘90s and even the early 2000s, they’re a world of difference with how he conducts himself now. And when you read the interviews, or when he gives a print interview which occasionally happens, you look at the transcript and it is just, word salad is the wrong way to describe it. He has a hard time not just prosecuting a complex argument but finishing a sentence. That’s a coherent, single sentence with a subject, verb and an object. He doesn’t do that very well.”
He continued, “And that is not how he was 20 years ago. Not. Again, you can look on YouTube. Look at the old speeches. Whatever you thought of him in his disagreeableness, he was a relatively coherent person giving relatively coherent interviews. I have often said if you met him at a backyard barbecue at a friend’s house, and you walked up and said, I’m sorry about your father or uncle, I had a aunt who had alzheimer’s. I’ve seen what dementia does, because he often conducts himself like a sort of addled old man feeding pigeons in the park. I think that’s a thing that has been progressive. He was like that as a candidate, worse now in the White House. You know what it’s like to be in there. The pressure of the job, even if you’re Trump, even if you’re not present in most governing realities, the pressure and strain are all the things that impact that state of cognitive function.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN