Political Posts

[Parsad]

On 8/2/2025 at 11:29 AM, Gregmal said:

It’s just another classic waste product of the government, overrun by inefficiencies and errors that would never fly in the private sector…enabled by sympathizers whom are OK pissing away tax payer funds on “its the best we have” junk. 
 

If the best we have is pretty useless…get rid of it. I’ve never once placed any weight whatsoever on the BLS data. Like I honestly don’t think there’s been even one instance where it came into play with respect to my investment process or decision making. 

 

Sure, that's fine.  But don't put in your own puppet, and that's what he's doing.  Cheers!

[Parsad]

On 8/2/2025 at 3:53 PM, Spekulatius said:

The Republican party is owned just like the Democrats. Doesn’t make a difference if you like it or not - everyone is in the same boat.

 

Here is to Allegiance to Trump:

 

 

Hail Caesar!  Where the hell is Brutus when you need him?!  Cheers!

[Parsad]

On 8/2/2025 at 10:12 AM, 73 Reds said:

Well, to your credit, your investments are much more logical than your political commentary.  Stick to your strengths.

 

No offense Dwy00, but that was one of the funniest things I've ever heard out of Red's mouth!  Cheers!

[Parsad]

11 hours ago, changegonnacome said:

On about every metric you can think of….he, the GOP won the congress, the senate & WH by historically narrow margins….if that’s your definition of a “dismantled” or “obliterated” Democratic Party the facts don’t agree with you….if so when the Democrats win the House by a wider margin in the Midterms…I look forward to talking about  the GOP being dismantled then!

 

Yes, this!  This is the stuff that the Democrats need to stop saying.  Forget margins...look at all of the shit-disturbing he's doing...all the policies he's getting pushed through.  If Democrats had stopped some of their infighting, they might have gotten more shit done.  Trump is managing it while there is infighting!

 

Winning the mid-terms is one thing...getting shit done is another.  Even though Trump's only gotten 9 trade deals done, he's getting what he wants out of almost all of them...or at the very least something, either investment funds pouring money into the U.S. or access to restricted markets.  

 

The Democratic party as is, isn't going to do shit until they return to the middle or find someone like Obama...and I don't see any other Obama's out there!  Cheers!

[Parsad]

11 hours ago, 73 Reds said:

Why do you always talk out of both sides of your mouth?  No one here is judging Trump's presidency before it is over.  Good luck with your predictions - that's all they are.  Yet it is beyond dispute that he single handedly dismantled the Democratic Party, he succeeded in finally discrediting a corrupt main stream media, he has destroyed woke culture in the US,  he totally dominates the World narrative (no, every US President didn't have this ability), he nearly always gets what he wants when it comes to policy regardless of what you or anyone else may think and with only a marginal majority in congress, and the best part - he drives people like you batshit crazy.  There are folks on this board who believe Trump is stupid.  Stupid people don't have these abilities.  But people lacking common sense let their ideologies and personal hatred control their lives.   

 

No, Trump is stupid!  There is no doubt about that.  How he graduated from Wharton, I'll never know, but the man's IQ must be around 110. 

 

What he doesn't lack is street smarts.  He doesn't have the physique for a fist fight, but he knows how to handle himself when he's fighting and bullying with words.  He understands scare tactics, bluffing, suing the shit out of people, starting fights and frankly has incredible stamina for his age when it comes to this shit.  He knows his brand, he knows how to appeal to his base, and he knows when to TACO so that things don't turn on him.  

 

The man is street smart...definitely not book smart!  Do you really want him for a leader?  No.  But he may be what was needed to really stir shit up and straighten things out...including the Democratic Party!  I think he's got Canada and much of the world refocused...on their own self-interests and increasing trade with each other...maybe a shake up like this is what the world needed and the fallout from it will both benefit and harm the U.S. in different ways.  But you reap what you sow and Trump is the one planting the weeds and daisies!  Cheers!

[gfp]

You guys can call him "not book smart" all you want but I, for one, am excited for the drug prices to go down by 1500% !

 

 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2025/08/02/trump-says-he-will-get-drug-prices-down-by-1500/

 

 

Edited August 4, 2025 by gfp

[John Hjorth]

2 hours ago, gfp said:

You guys can call him "not book smart" all you want but I, for one, am excited for the drug prices to go down by 1500% !

 

Great to see this first thing on a Monday morning! 

[dealraker]

Looks like Buffett has gone fully crybaby too.   Damn!

 

“The pace of changes in these events, including tensions from developing international trade policies and tariffs, accelerated through the first six months of 2025,” Berkshire said in its earnings report. “Considerable uncertainty remains as to the ultimate outcome of these events.”

“It is reasonably possible there could be adverse consequences on most, if not all, of our operating businesses, as well as on our investments in equity securities, which could significantly affect our future results,” it said.

[dealraker]

The second and third paragraphs make me chuckle.  There nothing that can stop some of us's deep belief that Trump is instantly solving all problems with macho male gusto while others of us think of him is most likely (everything with me is probability based) nothing but a guy with out-of-control anxiety and panic who feels threatened at all times about all things.  

 

He's the man of our times for sure.   Actually somewhat funny written New Yorker piece:

 

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/08/11/the-politics-of-fear

[John Hjorth]

20 minutes ago, dealraker said:

Looks like Buffett has gone fully crybaby too.   Damn!

 

“The pace of changes in these events, including tensions from developing international trade policies and tariffs, accelerated through the first six months of 2025,” Berkshire said in its earnings report. “Considerable uncertainty remains as to the ultimate outcome of these events.”

“It is reasonably possible there could be adverse consequences on most, if not all, of our operating businesses, as well as on our investments in equity securities, which could significantly affect our future results,” it said.

 

It's on p. 31 in the 10-Q, about mid page :

 

[adventurer]

6 hours ago, gfp said:

You guys can call him "not book smart" all you want but I, for one, am excited for the drug prices to go down by 1500% !

 

 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2025/08/02/trump-says-he-will-get-drug-prices-down-by-1500/

 

 

He brought down egg prices by 400% too. A true leader! 

[73 Reds]

11 hours ago, Parsad said:

 

No, Trump is stupid!  There is no doubt about that.  How he graduated from Wharton, I'll never know, but the man's IQ must be around 110. 

 

What he doesn't lack is street smarts.  He doesn't have the physique for a fist fight, but he knows how to handle himself when he's fighting and bullying with words.  He understands scare tactics, bluffing, suing the shit out of people, starting fights and frankly has incredible stamina for his age when it comes to this shit.  He knows his brand, he knows how to appeal to his base, and he knows when to TACO so that things don't turn on him.  

 

The man is street smart...definitely not book smart!  Do you really want him for a leader?  No.  But he may be what was needed to really stir shit up and straighten things out...including the Democratic Party!  I think he's got Canada and much of the world refocused...on their own self-interests and increasing trade with each other...maybe a shake up like this is what the world needed and the fallout from it will both benefit and harm the U.S. in different ways.  But you reap what you sow and Trump is the one planting the weeds and daisies!  Cheers!

Really surprised at you, Sanjeev (not so much others here).  Parsing "book" smarts and "street" smarts to try and demonstrate "stupidity" reflects your own emotion and misses the mark entirely.  I suppose you're right about one thing - you will never know how he graduated from Wharton with that type of thinking.  

Edited August 4, 2025 by 73 Reds
words

[Gregmal]

1 hour ago, John Hjorth said:

 

It's on p. 31 in the 10-Q, about mid page :

 

Well, if anyone is familiar with how large public companies(and even small ones) and their legal teams produce the "risk factors" section of a Q or a K, this should be seen as pretty standard and unspectacular....however, through a different set of colored glasses....oh let the mind run free LOL

Edited August 4, 2025 by Gregmal

[John Hjorth]

1 minute ago, Gregmal said:

Well, if anyone is familiar with how large public companies(and even small ones) and their legal teams produce the "risk factors" section of a Q or a K, this should be seen as pretty standard and unspectacular....however, through a different set of colored glasses....oh let the mind run free LOL

 

Right, Greg [ @Gregmal ],

 

Good point. I'll try to look up in earlier 10-Ks and 10-Qs if there are even any changes in all that repetivitive stuff in these types of documents at that particular place, that - at least for my ovn personal part, - I tend to ignore and skip.

[Gregmal]

15 minutes ago, John Hjorth said:

 

Right, Greg [ @Gregmal ],

 

Good point. I'll try to look up in earlier 10-Ks and 10-Qs if there are even any changes in all that repetivitive stuff in these types of documents at that particular place, that - at least for my ovn personal part, - I tend to ignore and skip.

Surely. Any modestly, let alone highly paid attorney outfit is tasked with following daily events and manufacturing as many "cover thy ass" bullet points for the next Q's report, as humanly possible. It's just standard operating procedure for public companies. The main reason being, is that theres multiples of their peers, often lower quality and far hungrier ones, that are just waiting for the opportunity to use said daily news events, as a justification to launch highly lucrative class action lawsuits on behalf of shareholders whom were "mislead" or "harmed" by apparently not knowing or being warned of said "risks"....

 

So again, while Im sure some want to believe that everything in the world and everyone in it have big daddy Trump on their mind at all times, I'd challenge that mainly, public companies and their legal advisors, do public company things, namely obsess over disclosing "risks"(AKA future liability mitigation), with this being more of that, than Buffett himself sending the loyal soldiers smoke signals from Omaha or whatever. Frankly, I'd be surprised if Buffett even had much to do with writing this. 

Edited August 4, 2025 by Gregmal

[dealraker]

So the conversations here on the deck at the lake yesterday - actually Saturday - were quite interesting.  As mentioned on the Pinterest thread we had 13 young men and women from the graduate program at UNCC down to the lake house - and also two university professors (part time professors - full time architects).   All are now graduate school "graduated" and either employed or looking.  Luckily our young man (family but not my son) that we raised was quickly employed by a firm dealing with commercial in Salisbury, NC, not far away.

 

But most are not employed and the two architecture professors chant that this was by far the worst hiring season that the program has witnessed since the mid 70's (oil shortage recession) and/or early 80's (20% interest rates).  Tariff fear (not necessarily the actual outcome of tariffs) was the stated reason all the firms are giving the school, professors, and students.

 

Along with the discussion of job issues was a discussion of the literally thriving housing and commercial building going on from Charlotte all the way along the "I-85" corridor to Raleigh/The Triangle (Durham, Chapel Hill, Raleigh).  I can vouch for this in my area of Lexington, NC (next door to the Salisbury mentioned above and halfway between Charlotte and Raleigh/Triangle) as we are bursting out the seams of growth-growth-growth in all areas.  Interestingly a $65 mil sport complex just got announced and the land bought from a member of my investment club...a short distance from my home and the nearly 450 acres my nephew and I bought.

 

So housing...interest rates...etc.   What's the story here people?  Are lower rates going to "out-shine" tariff effects and tariff fear or what?  My lord we are booming here.

Edited August 4, 2025 by dealraker

[73 Reds]

8 minutes ago, dealraker said:

So the conversations here on the deck at the lake yesterday - actually Saturday - were quite interesting.  As mentioned on the Pinterest thread we had 13 young men and women from the graduate program at UNCC down to the lake house - and also two university professors (part time professors - full time architects).   All are now graduate school "graduated" and either employed or looking.  Luckily our young man (family but not my son) that we raised was quickly employed by a firm dealing with commercial in Salisbury, NC, not far away.

 

But most are not employed and the two architecture professors chant that this was by far the worst hiring season that the program has witnessed since the mid 70's (oil shortage recession) and/or early 80's (20% interest rates).  Tariff fear (not necessarily the actual outcome of tariffs) was the stated reason all the firms are giving the school, professors, and students.

 

Along with the discussion of job issues was a discussion of the literally thriving housing and commercial building going on from Charlotte all the way along the "I-85" corridor to Raleigh/The Triangle (Durham, Chapel Hill, Raleigh).  I can vouch for this in my area of Lexington, NC (next door to the Salisbury mentioned above and halfway between Charlotte and Raleigh/Triangle) as we are bursting out the seams of growth-growth-growth in all areas.  Interestingly a $65 mil sport complex just got announced and the land bought from a member of my investment club...a short distance from my home and the nearly 450 acres my nephew and I bought.

 

So housing...interest rates...etc.   What's the story here people?  Are lower rates going to "out-shine" tariff effects and tariff fear or what?  My lord we are booming here.

You own JOE, right?  

[dealraker]

20 minutes ago, 73 Reds said:

You own JOE, right?  

Yes.  I bought one time a couple of years ago in the $36 range.

 

But the builders supply recently bought a bunch (it was not my decision - but I was the one who enlightened my family who made the decision - but that was a couple years ago) at around $41.  Interestingly when Joe was bought my cousin related this buy to his decision to buy Loews at $50 not too long ago.  He expressed his liking of the out-of-sight out-of-mind uniqueness and well-run nature of both.

Edited August 4, 2025 by dealraker

[cwericb]

Can anyone (Right or Left) read this article and not be concerned? ..............

He has trouble completing a thought’: bizarre public appearances again cast doubt on Trump’s mental acuity

Donald Trump’s frequently bizarre public appearances, which this month have seen the president claim, wrongly, that his uncle knew the Unabomber and rant unprompted about windmills on his recent trip to the UK, have once again raised questions about his mental acuity, experts say.

For more than a year Trump, 79, has exhibited odd behavior at campaign events, in interviews, in his spontaneous remarks and at press conferences. The president repeatedly drifts off topic, including during a cabinet meeting this month when he spent 15 minutes talking about decorating, and appears to misremember simple facts about his government and his life.

During his presidency, Joe Biden was subjected to intense speculation over his mental acuity – including from Trump. After Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June 2024, when he repeatedly struggled to maintain his train of thought, scrutiny over Biden’s fitness eventually led to him not running for re-election.

Trump, however, has largely been saved the same examination, despite examples of confusion and unusual behavior that have continued throughout his second term and were on full display on his recent trip to the UK.

 

Over the weekend Trump, during a meeting with the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, abruptly switched from discussing immigration to saying this: “The other thing I say to Europe: we’ve – we will not allow a windmill to be built in the United States. They’re killing us. They’re killing the beauty of our scenery.”

Trump proceeded to speak, non-stop and unprompted, for two minutes about windmills, claiming without evidence that they drive whales “loco” and that wind energy “kills the birds” (the proportion of birds killed by turbines is tiny compared with the number killed by domestic cats and from flying into power lines).

The abrupt changes in conversation are an example of Trump “digressing without thinking – he’ll just switch topics without self-regulation, without having a coherent narrative”, said Harry Segal, a senior lecturer in the psychology department at Cornell University and in the psychiatry department at Weill Cornell Medicine.

For years, Trump has batted away questions about his mental acuity, describing himself as a “stable genius” and bragging about “acing” exams – later revealed to be very simple tests – which check for early signs of dementia.

But Democrats have begun to more aggressively question the president’s fitness, including Jasmine Crockett, the representative from Texas, and California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and this week alone offered multiple examples of Trump exhibiting odd conduct.

Asked about the famine in Gaza on Sunday, Trump seemed unable to remember the aid the US has given to Gaza, and forgot that others had also contributed.

Trump claimed the US gave $60m “two weeks ago”. He added: “You really at least want to have somebody say thank you. No other country gave anything.

“Nobody acknowledged it, nobody talks about it and it makes you feel a little bad when you do that and you know you have other countries not giving anything, none of the European countries by the way gave – I mean nobody gave but us.”

Trump seemed to not realize or remember that other countries have given money to Gaza – the UK announced a £60m ($80m) package in July, and the European Union has allocated €170m ($195m) in aid. And the Guardian could not find any record of the US giving $60m to Gaza two weeks ago. In June, the US state department approved a $30m grant to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a group backed by Israeli and US interests which has been criticized by Democrats as “connected to deadly violence against starving people seeking food in Gaza”.

The White House did not respond to questions about Trump’s claimed $60m donation.

Segal said another characteristic of Trump’s questionable mental acuity is confabulation. “It’s where he takes an idea or something that’s happened and he adds to it things that have not happened.”

 

A high-profile example came in mid-July, when Trump claimed his uncle, the late professor John Trump, had taught Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, at MIT.

Trump recalled: “I said: ‘What kind of a student was he, Uncle John? Dr John Trump.’ I said: ‘What kind of a student?’ And then he said: ‘Seriously, good.’ He said: ‘He’d correct – he’d go around correcting everybody.’ But it didn’t work out too well for him.”

The problem is: that cannot possibly be true. First, Trump’s uncle died in 1985, and Kaczynski was only publicly identified as the Unabomber in 1996. Second, Kaczynski did not study at MIT.

“The story makes no sense whatsoever, but it’s told in a very warm, reflective way, as if he’s remembering it,” Segal said. “This level of thinking really has been deteriorating.”

Aside from the confabulation, there have been times when Trump seems unable to focus. During the 2024 campaign there was the bizarre sight of Trump spending 40 minutes swaying to music onstage after a medical emergency at one of his campaign rallies. Trump’s rambling speeches during his campaign – he would frequently drift between topics in a technique he described as “the weave” – also drew scrutiny.

The White House removed official transcripts of Trump’s remarks from its website in May, claiming it was part of an effort to “maintain consistency”. It is worth reading Trump’s remarks in full, however, to get a sense of how the president speaks on a day-to-day basis.

At the beginning of July, Trump was asked, “What is the next campaign promise that you plan to fulfill to the American people?” He then rambled about meeting foreign leaders and removing regulations, adding:

I got rid of – just one I got rid of the other night, you buy a house, they have a faucet in the house, Joe, and the faucet the water doesn’t come out. They have a restrictor. You can’t – in areas where you have so much water they don’t know what to do with it. Uh, you have a shower head the shower doesn’t uh, the shower doesn’t, you think it’s not working. It is working. The water’s dripping out and that’s no good for me. I like this hair lace and [sic] – I like that hair nice and wet. Takes you – you have to stand in the shower for 20 minutes before you get the soap out of your hair. And I put a, a thing – and it sounds funny but it’s really not. It’s horrible. And uh, when you wash your hands, you turn on the faucet, no water comes out. You’re washing whole – water barely comes out it’s ridi – this was done by crazy people. And I wor – wrote it all off and got it approved in Congress so that they can’t just change it.”

“Any fair-minded mental-health expert would be very worried about Donald Trump’s performance,” Richard A Friedman, a professor of clinical psychiatry and the director of the psychopharmacology clinic at Weill Cornell Medical College, wrote in the Atlantic, after a stumbling performance from Trump in his debate against Kamala Harris last September.

He added: “If a patient presented to me with the verbal incoherence, tangential thinking, and repetitive speech that Trump now regularly demonstrates, I would almost certainly refer them for a rigorous neuropsychiatric evaluation to rule out a cognitive illness.”

At a recent cabinet meeting called to discuss the flooding tragedy in Texas, the war in Ukraine and Gaza, the bombing of Iran, and global tariffs, Trump went on a 13-minute monologue about how he had decorated the cabinet meeting room.

After talking about paintings which he said he had personally selected from “the vaults”, Trump said. “Look at those frames, you know, I’m a frame person, sometimes I like frames more than I like the pictures,” and added he had overseen the cleaning of some china.

As department heads, including the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, waited to be dismissed so they could go and do their jobs, Trump continued:

Here we put out – you know these, these lamps have been very important actually, whether people love them or not but they’re if you see pictures like Pearl Harbor or Tora! Tora! Tora!, you see movies about the White House where wars are being discussed, oftentimes they’ll show those lamps or something like those lamps, something that looks like them. Probably not the reals, because I don’t think they’re allowed to – this is a very important room, this is a sacred room, and I don’t think they made movies from here.

You never know what they do. But they were missing, er, medallions. See the medallions on top? They had a chain going into the ceiling. And I said: ‘You can’t do that. You have to have a medallion.’ They said, ‘What’s a medallion?’ I said: ‘I’ll show you.’ And then we got some beautiful medallions, and you see them, they were put up there, makes the lamps look [inaudible] so we did these changes.

And when you think of it, the cost was almost nothing. We also painted the room a nice color, beige color, and it’s been really something. The only question is, will I gold-leaf the corners? You could maybe tell me. My cabinet could take a vote. You see the top-line moldings, and the only question is do you go and leaf it? Because you can’t paint it, if you paint it it won’t look good because they’ve never found a paint that looks like gold. You see that in the Oval Office.

Er, they’ve tried for years and years. Somebody could become very wealthy, but they’ve never found a paint that looks like gold. So painting is easy but it won’t look right.”

The White House pushes back aggressively on the issue of Trump’s mental fitness.

“The Guardian is a left-wing mouthpiece that should be embarrassed to pass off deranged resistance leftists as ‘experts’. Anyone pathetic enough to defend Biden’s mental state – while being labeled as unethical by their peers – has zero credibility. President Trump’s mental sharpness is second to none and he is working around the clock to secure amazing deals for the American people,” said a White House spokesperson, Liz Huston.

So do his political allies. “As President Trump’s former personal physician, former physician to the president, and White House physician for 14 years across three administrations, I can tell you unequivocally: President Donald J Trump is the healthiest president this nation has ever seen. I continue to consult with his current physician and medical team at the White House and still spend significant time with the president. He is mentally and physically sharper than ever before,” said the Republican congressman Ronny Jackson.

In April, Trump’s White House physician, Dr Sean Barbabella, wrote that the president “exhibits excellent cognitive and physical health and is fully fit to execute the duties of the commander-in-chief and head of state”. He said Trump was assessed for cognitive function, which was normal.

That report hasn’t stopped people from questioning Trump’s mental acuity.

“What we see are the classic signs of dementia, which is gross deterioration from someone’s baseline and function,” John Gartner, a psychologist and author who spent 28 years as an assistant professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, said in June.

“If you go back and look at film from the 1980s, [Trump] actually was extremely articulate. He was still a jerk, but he was able to express himself in polished paragraphs, and now he really has trouble completing a thought and that is a huge deterioration.”

Gartner, who during Trump’s first term co-founded Duty to Warn, a group of mental health professionals who believed Trump had the personality disorder malignant narcissism, warned: “I predicted before the election that he would probably fall off the cliff before the end of his term. And at the rate he is deteriorating, you know … we’ll see.

“But the point is that it’s going to get worse. That’s my prediction.”

 

Quoted from The Guardian, August 2025.

 

 

[Spekulatius]

Not a fake story as it’s in German media also. The AFD tries to silence and now expel Tim Schramm who volunteered from Ukraine.

 

The Russian loving AFD does not like what he is saying  about the war in Ukraine.
https://tvpworld.com/88030843/germanys-afd-moves-to-oust-politician-who-fought-for-ukraine

[SharperDingaan]

5 hours ago, dealraker said:

Looks like Buffett has gone fully crybaby too.   Damn!

 

“The pace of changes in these events, including tensions from developing international trade policies and tariffs, accelerated through the first six months of 2025,” Berkshire said in its earnings report. “Considerable uncertainty remains as to the ultimate outcome of these events.”

“It is reasonably possible there could be adverse consequences on most, if not all, of our operating businesses, as well as on our investments in equity securities, which could significantly affect our future results,” it said.

 

Uncle Warren just told you, in the clearest way possible, to swing trade BRK over the next quarter or so. Could be via a direct sale (at today's high price) and repurchase (at tomorrow's likely low price) that triggers taxes, sale of BRK covered calls, &/or puts on the S&P/NASDAQ and Russell 2000 Index.

 

'Cause if Uncle Warren thinks that most all the blue-chips within the BRK universe, are at risk ..... what does that say about the lesser quality names in the Russell 2000 Index? magnified by the Russell 2000 Beta

 

May you do well!

 

SD

 

  

[SharperDingaan]

1 hour ago, cwericb said:

Can anyone (Right or Left) read this article and not be concerned? ..............

He has trouble completing a thought’: bizarre public appearances again cast doubt on Trump’s mental acuity

Donald Trump’s frequently bizarre public appearances, which this month have seen the president claim, wrongly, that his uncle knew the Unabomber and rant unprompted about windmills on his recent trip to the UK, have once again raised questions about his mental acuity, experts say.

For more than a year Trump, 79, has exhibited odd behavior at campaign events, in interviews, in his spontaneous remarks and at press conferences. The president repeatedly drifts off topic, including during a cabinet meeting this month when he spent 15 minutes talking about decorating, and appears to misremember simple facts about his government and his life.

During his presidency, Joe Biden was subjected to intense speculation over his mental acuity – including from Trump. After Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June 2024, when he repeatedly struggled to maintain his train of thought, scrutiny over Biden’s fitness eventually led to him not running for re-election.

Trump, however, has largely been saved the same examination, despite examples of confusion and unusual behavior that have continued throughout his second term and were on full display on his recent trip to the UK.

 

Over the weekend Trump, during a meeting with the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, abruptly switched from discussing immigration to saying this: “The other thing I say to Europe: we’ve – we will not allow a windmill to be built in the United States. They’re killing us. They’re killing the beauty of our scenery.”

Trump proceeded to speak, non-stop and unprompted, for two minutes about windmills, claiming without evidence that they drive whales “loco” and that wind energy “kills the birds” (the proportion of birds killed by turbines is tiny compared with the number killed by domestic cats and from flying into power lines).

The abrupt changes in conversation are an example of Trump “digressing without thinking – he’ll just switch topics without self-regulation, without having a coherent narrative”, said Harry Segal, a senior lecturer in the psychology department at Cornell University and in the psychiatry department at Weill Cornell Medicine.

For years, Trump has batted away questions about his mental acuity, describing himself as a “stable genius” and bragging about “acing” exams – later revealed to be very simple tests – which check for early signs of dementia.

But Democrats have begun to more aggressively question the president’s fitness, including Jasmine Crockett, the representative from Texas, and California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and this week alone offered multiple examples of Trump exhibiting odd conduct.

Asked about the famine in Gaza on Sunday, Trump seemed unable to remember the aid the US has given to Gaza, and forgot that others had also contributed.

Trump claimed the US gave $60m “two weeks ago”. He added: “You really at least want to have somebody say thank you. No other country gave anything.

“Nobody acknowledged it, nobody talks about it and it makes you feel a little bad when you do that and you know you have other countries not giving anything, none of the European countries by the way gave – I mean nobody gave but us.”

Trump seemed to not realize or remember that other countries have given money to Gaza – the UK announced a £60m ($80m) package in July, and the European Union has allocated €170m ($195m) in aid. And the Guardian could not find any record of the US giving $60m to Gaza two weeks ago. In June, the US state department approved a $30m grant to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a group backed by Israeli and US interests which has been criticized by Democrats as “connected to deadly violence against starving people seeking food in Gaza”.

The White House did not respond to questions about Trump’s claimed $60m donation.

Segal said another characteristic of Trump’s questionable mental acuity is confabulation. “It’s where he takes an idea or something that’s happened and he adds to it things that have not happened.”

 

A high-profile example came in mid-July, when Trump claimed his uncle, the late professor John Trump, had taught Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, at MIT.

Trump recalled: “I said: ‘What kind of a student was he, Uncle John? Dr John Trump.’ I said: ‘What kind of a student?’ And then he said: ‘Seriously, good.’ He said: ‘He’d correct – he’d go around correcting everybody.’ But it didn’t work out too well for him.”

The problem is: that cannot possibly be true. First, Trump’s uncle died in 1985, and Kaczynski was only publicly identified as the Unabomber in 1996. Second, Kaczynski did not study at MIT.

“The story makes no sense whatsoever, but it’s told in a very warm, reflective way, as if he’s remembering it,” Segal said. “This level of thinking really has been deteriorating.”

Aside from the confabulation, there have been times when Trump seems unable to focus. During the 2024 campaign there was the bizarre sight of Trump spending 40 minutes swaying to music onstage after a medical emergency at one of his campaign rallies. Trump’s rambling speeches during his campaign – he would frequently drift between topics in a technique he described as “the weave” – also drew scrutiny.

The White House removed official transcripts of Trump’s remarks from its website in May, claiming it was part of an effort to “maintain consistency”. It is worth reading Trump’s remarks in full, however, to get a sense of how the president speaks on a day-to-day basis.

At the beginning of July, Trump was asked, “What is the next campaign promise that you plan to fulfill to the American people?” He then rambled about meeting foreign leaders and removing regulations, adding:

I got rid of – just one I got rid of the other night, you buy a house, they have a faucet in the house, Joe, and the faucet the water doesn’t come out. They have a restrictor. You can’t – in areas where you have so much water they don’t know what to do with it. Uh, you have a shower head the shower doesn’t uh, the shower doesn’t, you think it’s not working. It is working. The water’s dripping out and that’s no good for me. I like this hair lace and [sic] – I like that hair nice and wet. Takes you – you have to stand in the shower for 20 minutes before you get the soap out of your hair. And I put a, a thing – and it sounds funny but it’s really not. It’s horrible. And uh, when you wash your hands, you turn on the faucet, no water comes out. You’re washing whole – water barely comes out it’s ridi – this was done by crazy people. And I wor – wrote it all off and got it approved in Congress so that they can’t just change it.”

“Any fair-minded mental-health expert would be very worried about Donald Trump’s performance,” Richard A Friedman, a professor of clinical psychiatry and the director of the psychopharmacology clinic at Weill Cornell Medical College, wrote in the Atlantic, after a stumbling performance from Trump in his debate against Kamala Harris last September.

He added: “If a patient presented to me with the verbal incoherence, tangential thinking, and repetitive speech that Trump now regularly demonstrates, I would almost certainly refer them for a rigorous neuropsychiatric evaluation to rule out a cognitive illness.”

At a recent cabinet meeting called to discuss the flooding tragedy in Texas, the war in Ukraine and Gaza, the bombing of Iran, and global tariffs, Trump went on a 13-minute monologue about how he had decorated the cabinet meeting room.

After talking about paintings which he said he had personally selected from “the vaults”, Trump said. “Look at those frames, you know, I’m a frame person, sometimes I like frames more than I like the pictures,” and added he had overseen the cleaning of some china.

As department heads, including the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, waited to be dismissed so they could go and do their jobs, Trump continued:

Here we put out – you know these, these lamps have been very important actually, whether people love them or not but they’re if you see pictures like Pearl Harbor or Tora! Tora! Tora!, you see movies about the White House where wars are being discussed, oftentimes they’ll show those lamps or something like those lamps, something that looks like them. Probably not the reals, because I don’t think they’re allowed to – this is a very important room, this is a sacred room, and I don’t think they made movies from here.

You never know what they do. But they were missing, er, medallions. See the medallions on top? They had a chain going into the ceiling. And I said: ‘You can’t do that. You have to have a medallion.’ They said, ‘What’s a medallion?’ I said: ‘I’ll show you.’ And then we got some beautiful medallions, and you see them, they were put up there, makes the lamps look [inaudible] so we did these changes.

And when you think of it, the cost was almost nothing. We also painted the room a nice color, beige color, and it’s been really something. The only question is, will I gold-leaf the corners? You could maybe tell me. My cabinet could take a vote. You see the top-line moldings, and the only question is do you go and leaf it? Because you can’t paint it, if you paint it it won’t look good because they’ve never found a paint that looks like gold. You see that in the Oval Office.

Er, they’ve tried for years and years. Somebody could become very wealthy, but they’ve never found a paint that looks like gold. So painting is easy but it won’t look right.”

The White House pushes back aggressively on the issue of Trump’s mental fitness.

“The Guardian is a left-wing mouthpiece that should be embarrassed to pass off deranged resistance leftists as ‘experts’. Anyone pathetic enough to defend Biden’s mental state – while being labeled as unethical by their peers – has zero credibility. President Trump’s mental sharpness is second to none and he is working around the clock to secure amazing deals for the American people,” said a White House spokesperson, Liz Huston.

So do his political allies. “As President Trump’s former personal physician, former physician to the president, and White House physician for 14 years across three administrations, I can tell you unequivocally: President Donald J Trump is the healthiest president this nation has ever seen. I continue to consult with his current physician and medical team at the White House and still spend significant time with the president. He is mentally and physically sharper than ever before,” said the Republican congressman Ronny Jackson.

In April, Trump’s White House physician, Dr Sean Barbabella, wrote that the president “exhibits excellent cognitive and physical health and is fully fit to execute the duties of the commander-in-chief and head of state”. He said Trump was assessed for cognitive function, which was normal.

That report hasn’t stopped people from questioning Trump’s mental acuity.

“What we see are the classic signs of dementia, which is gross deterioration from someone’s baseline and function,” John Gartner, a psychologist and author who spent 28 years as an assistant professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, said in June.

“If you go back and look at film from the 1980s, [Trump] actually was extremely articulate. He was still a jerk, but he was able to express himself in polished paragraphs, and now he really has trouble completing a thought and that is a huge deterioration.”

Gartner, who during Trump’s first term co-founded Duty to Warn, a group of mental health professionals who believed Trump had the personality disorder malignant narcissism, warned: “I predicted before the election that he would probably fall off the cliff before the end of his term. And at the rate he is deteriorating, you know … we’ll see.

“But the point is that it’s going to get worse. That’s my prediction.”

 

Quoted from The Guardian, August 2025.

 

 

 

 

The long straddle looks more brilliant every day, and a big payday increasingly likely! Surrounded by a healthy sycophant population, it's really just a matter of time until there is a public 'Biden' moment ...  the man does love twitter...  and twitter does love to go viral  

 

SD

 

[73 Reds]

2 hours ago, cwericb said:

Can anyone (Right or Left) read this article and not be concerned? ..............

He has trouble completing a thought’: bizarre public appearances again cast doubt on Trump’s mental acuity

Donald Trump’s frequently bizarre public appearances, which this month have seen the president claim, wrongly, that his uncle knew the Unabomber and rant unprompted about windmills on his recent trip to the UK, have once again raised questions about his mental acuity, experts say.

For more than a year Trump, 79, has exhibited odd behavior at campaign events, in interviews, in his spontaneous remarks and at press conferences. The president repeatedly drifts off topic, including during a cabinet meeting this month when he spent 15 minutes talking about decorating, and appears to misremember simple facts about his government and his life.

During his presidency, Joe Biden was subjected to intense speculation over his mental acuity – including from Trump. After Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June 2024, when he repeatedly struggled to maintain his train of thought, scrutiny over Biden’s fitness eventually led to him not running for re-election.

Trump, however, has largely been saved the same examination, despite examples of confusion and unusual behavior that have continued throughout his second term and were on full display on his recent trip to the UK.

 

Over the weekend Trump, during a meeting with the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, abruptly switched from discussing immigration to saying this: “The other thing I say to Europe: we’ve – we will not allow a windmill to be built in the United States. They’re killing us. They’re killing the beauty of our scenery.”

Trump proceeded to speak, non-stop and unprompted, for two minutes about windmills, claiming without evidence that they drive whales “loco” and that wind energy “kills the birds” (the proportion of birds killed by turbines is tiny compared with the number killed by domestic cats and from flying into power lines).

The abrupt changes in conversation are an example of Trump “digressing without thinking – he’ll just switch topics without self-regulation, without having a coherent narrative”, said Harry Segal, a senior lecturer in the psychology department at Cornell University and in the psychiatry department at Weill Cornell Medicine.

For years, Trump has batted away questions about his mental acuity, describing himself as a “stable genius” and bragging about “acing” exams – later revealed to be very simple tests – which check for early signs of dementia.

But Democrats have begun to more aggressively question the president’s fitness, including Jasmine Crockett, the representative from Texas, and California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and this week alone offered multiple examples of Trump exhibiting odd conduct.

Asked about the famine in Gaza on Sunday, Trump seemed unable to remember the aid the US has given to Gaza, and forgot that others had also contributed.

Trump claimed the US gave $60m “two weeks ago”. He added: “You really at least want to have somebody say thank you. No other country gave anything.

“Nobody acknowledged it, nobody talks about it and it makes you feel a little bad when you do that and you know you have other countries not giving anything, none of the European countries by the way gave – I mean nobody gave but us.”

Trump seemed to not realize or remember that other countries have given money to Gaza – the UK announced a £60m ($80m) package in July, and the European Union has allocated €170m ($195m) in aid. And the Guardian could not find any record of the US giving $60m to Gaza two weeks ago. In June, the US state department approved a $30m grant to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a group backed by Israeli and US interests which has been criticized by Democrats as “connected to deadly violence against starving people seeking food in Gaza”.

The White House did not respond to questions about Trump’s claimed $60m donation.

Segal said another characteristic of Trump’s questionable mental acuity is confabulation. “It’s where he takes an idea or something that’s happened and he adds to it things that have not happened.”

 

A high-profile example came in mid-July, when Trump claimed his uncle, the late professor John Trump, had taught Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, at MIT.

Trump recalled: “I said: ‘What kind of a student was he, Uncle John? Dr John Trump.’ I said: ‘What kind of a student?’ And then he said: ‘Seriously, good.’ He said: ‘He’d correct – he’d go around correcting everybody.’ But it didn’t work out too well for him.”

The problem is: that cannot possibly be true. First, Trump’s uncle died in 1985, and Kaczynski was only publicly identified as the Unabomber in 1996. Second, Kaczynski did not study at MIT.

“The story makes no sense whatsoever, but it’s told in a very warm, reflective way, as if he’s remembering it,” Segal said. “This level of thinking really has been deteriorating.”

Aside from the confabulation, there have been times when Trump seems unable to focus. During the 2024 campaign there was the bizarre sight of Trump spending 40 minutes swaying to music onstage after a medical emergency at one of his campaign rallies. Trump’s rambling speeches during his campaign – he would frequently drift between topics in a technique he described as “the weave” – also drew scrutiny.

The White House removed official transcripts of Trump’s remarks from its website in May, claiming it was part of an effort to “maintain consistency”. It is worth reading Trump’s remarks in full, however, to get a sense of how the president speaks on a day-to-day basis.

At the beginning of July, Trump was asked, “What is the next campaign promise that you plan to fulfill to the American people?” He then rambled about meeting foreign leaders and removing regulations, adding:

I got rid of – just one I got rid of the other night, you buy a house, they have a faucet in the house, Joe, and the faucet the water doesn’t come out. They have a restrictor. You can’t – in areas where you have so much water they don’t know what to do with it. Uh, you have a shower head the shower doesn’t uh, the shower doesn’t, you think it’s not working. It is working. The water’s dripping out and that’s no good for me. I like this hair lace and [sic] – I like that hair nice and wet. Takes you – you have to stand in the shower for 20 minutes before you get the soap out of your hair. And I put a, a thing – and it sounds funny but it’s really not. It’s horrible. And uh, when you wash your hands, you turn on the faucet, no water comes out. You’re washing whole – water barely comes out it’s ridi – this was done by crazy people. And I wor – wrote it all off and got it approved in Congress so that they can’t just change it.”

“Any fair-minded mental-health expert would be very worried about Donald Trump’s performance,” Richard A Friedman, a professor of clinical psychiatry and the director of the psychopharmacology clinic at Weill Cornell Medical College, wrote in the Atlantic, after a stumbling performance from Trump in his debate against Kamala Harris last September.

He added: “If a patient presented to me with the verbal incoherence, tangential thinking, and repetitive speech that Trump now regularly demonstrates, I would almost certainly refer them for a rigorous neuropsychiatric evaluation to rule out a cognitive illness.”

At a recent cabinet meeting called to discuss the flooding tragedy in Texas, the war in Ukraine and Gaza, the bombing of Iran, and global tariffs, Trump went on a 13-minute monologue about how he had decorated the cabinet meeting room.

After talking about paintings which he said he had personally selected from “the vaults”, Trump said. “Look at those frames, you know, I’m a frame person, sometimes I like frames more than I like the pictures,” and added he had overseen the cleaning of some china.

As department heads, including the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, waited to be dismissed so they could go and do their jobs, Trump continued:

Here we put out – you know these, these lamps have been very important actually, whether people love them or not but they’re if you see pictures like Pearl Harbor or Tora! Tora! Tora!, you see movies about the White House where wars are being discussed, oftentimes they’ll show those lamps or something like those lamps, something that looks like them. Probably not the reals, because I don’t think they’re allowed to – this is a very important room, this is a sacred room, and I don’t think they made movies from here.

You never know what they do. But they were missing, er, medallions. See the medallions on top? They had a chain going into the ceiling. And I said: ‘You can’t do that. You have to have a medallion.’ They said, ‘What’s a medallion?’ I said: ‘I’ll show you.’ And then we got some beautiful medallions, and you see them, they were put up there, makes the lamps look [inaudible] so we did these changes.

And when you think of it, the cost was almost nothing. We also painted the room a nice color, beige color, and it’s been really something. The only question is, will I gold-leaf the corners? You could maybe tell me. My cabinet could take a vote. You see the top-line moldings, and the only question is do you go and leaf it? Because you can’t paint it, if you paint it it won’t look good because they’ve never found a paint that looks like gold. You see that in the Oval Office.

Er, they’ve tried for years and years. Somebody could become very wealthy, but they’ve never found a paint that looks like gold. So painting is easy but it won’t look right.”

The White House pushes back aggressively on the issue of Trump’s mental fitness.

“The Guardian is a left-wing mouthpiece that should be embarrassed to pass off deranged resistance leftists as ‘experts’. Anyone pathetic enough to defend Biden’s mental state – while being labeled as unethical by their peers – has zero credibility. President Trump’s mental sharpness is second to none and he is working around the clock to secure amazing deals for the American people,” said a White House spokesperson, Liz Huston.

So do his political allies. “As President Trump’s former personal physician, former physician to the president, and White House physician for 14 years across three administrations, I can tell you unequivocally: President Donald J Trump is the healthiest president this nation has ever seen. I continue to consult with his current physician and medical team at the White House and still spend significant time with the president. He is mentally and physically sharper than ever before,” said the Republican congressman Ronny Jackson.

In April, Trump’s White House physician, Dr Sean Barbabella, wrote that the president “exhibits excellent cognitive and physical health and is fully fit to execute the duties of the commander-in-chief and head of state”. He said Trump was assessed for cognitive function, which was normal.

That report hasn’t stopped people from questioning Trump’s mental acuity.

“What we see are the classic signs of dementia, which is gross deterioration from someone’s baseline and function,” John Gartner, a psychologist and author who spent 28 years as an assistant professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, said in June.

“If you go back and look at film from the 1980s, [Trump] actually was extremely articulate. He was still a jerk, but he was able to express himself in polished paragraphs, and now he really has trouble completing a thought and that is a huge deterioration.”

Gartner, who during Trump’s first term co-founded Duty to Warn, a group of mental health professionals who believed Trump had the personality disorder malignant narcissism, warned: “I predicted before the election that he would probably fall off the cliff before the end of his term. And at the rate he is deteriorating, you know … we’ll see.

“But the point is that it’s going to get worse. That’s my prediction.”

 

Quoted from The Guardian, August 2025.

 

 

Did "The Guardian" share similar concerns for Biden?

 

Back in the day you could always count on Johnny Carson for pure entertainment, no matter what else happened to be going on in your life or in the World.  He made you want to tune in every night just for laughs.   The "politics" thread of COBF is the closest thing I have found to "Carson" and it just keeps getting better and better.

 

 

[cubsfan]

4 minutes ago, 73 Reds said:

Did "The Guardian" share similar concerns for Biden?

 

Of course not!  Joe's mental decline was far too obvious.

 

Not much difference between this rag and the Washington Post.

They continually display their anti-Trump as well as anti-semitic bias like clockwork.

[Gregmal]

Nope. It's actually the gold standard and "the best we have" and we are obliged to respond every single time one of the TDS people takes the bait.....it does get tiring....whew!