Trump is Not Senile

Following the war on Iran and Trump's usual erratic comments, another round of "the President is senile!" has ripped through mainstream politics. Senior Democrat Jamie Raskin has called for a full cognitive assessment of the President in light of recent behaviour. I hate to break it to folks clinging to the Trump-in-decline thesis, but there is nothing about him that suggests any kind of impairment. There is no difference between Trump now, Trump during his four years out of office, Trump in his first term, and Trump before then. That he seemingly has little impulse control and brow beats others into submission is entirely explicable by his upbringing, his gilded life, and the fact he's unaccustomed to dealing with people who say no.

This allegation comes up time and again. Why? Some of it can be explained by Trump's refusal to abide by the politesse of establishment politics. Consider the idiocies of George W Bush and, before him, Ronald Reagan. They were outrageous in their own ways, but there were certain rules of the game that they either abided by or paid lip service too. Trump's greatest crime among some layers of centrist opinion in his first term was that he was rude. And we can measure this by how some of the policies he introduced were continued and, in some cases, reinforced during Joe Biden's tenure without anywhere near as many complaints from those quarters. But then, for centrists its only appearances that matter. To deviate from political norms can only be explained by senility. That this is simply Trump being "grab them by the pussy" Trump is beyond their comprehension.

Also, talking about Trump's sanity means avoiding asking more awkward questions. Such as how it is that the American system keeps churning up dummies and granting them the highest office. Across the right, it's not just Trump and his cabinet of horrors, but look at the state of current and former GOP representatives. Lindsey Graham, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin, an assortment of names that do not connect with intellect or erudition. The question isn't whether Trump is suitable or not, but why do people like Trump - the stupid, the ignorant, the aggressive - keep on getting elected and keep on succeeding? Centrists prattling on about Trump's senility never ask this question. And, in fact, they go on about his cognitive health so much that it appears to be a mix of avoidance and cope, precisely so they don't ever have to ponder why this is the case.

Ultimately, it comes down to the impasse of ruling class politics. On the one hand, there is technocratic centrism which offers technical, managerialist half-explanations for why things are as they are. They don't bother trying to justify ours as the best of all possible worlds. It's just "reality", and it should be left to the experts to make "trade offs" and get on with the complex problem of governing. And on the other, there is hard right, authoritarian politics. It too doesn't bother trying to spin excuses for their system. Instead it manufactures scapegoats and enemies in an orchestrated effort to misdirect dissatisfaction. It too, ultimately, stumps for the same interests and the same class relations as the centrists. It's just that their politics requires a big personality - a demagogue or a clown, it doesn't matter which - to front the show.

In Trump's case, there is a certain alignment between the fact that he is, seemingly, beyond accountability and the position of the United States in the global system. As its power declines in the world, as former satraps are showing independence, it has dispensed with the formalities of international law and has accrued immense damage to its soft power, particularly among its traditional allies. Increasingly, the US state is but a transparent front for the maintenance of oligarchical power and does this fully in the knowledge no one can stop them. Trump's personality and behaviour is the perfect fit for this era of American decline. A six-time bankrupt overseeing the bankruptcy of American values, a braggart and self-fancied hard man surrendering the Strait of Hormuz in a war of aggression he began, and a billionaire - through his and his family's troughing - demonstrating without a care in the world who and what the United States really stands for. This is a world of pure, naked class power. Trump has no airs or graces, every day he testifies to the real nature of the world. And it says everything about the feeble-mindedness of centrism and the interests it caters to that they take baseless allegations about Trump's senility over the truths his very person parades. Why bother speculating about the state of the President's brain when the politics provides the best explainer for his destructive behaviour.

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