When the President announced that he had "aced" his cognitive test, on July 10th, I jolted awake from a nap in my chair. Within minutes I had drafted an essay pointing out two things: The test is very easy to pass, and Trump's doctors had to have had a damn good reason to give him the test
Legitimate reasons could be that they feared he had had a stroke, or that they were concerned about signs of the onset of Alzheimer's. From a medical perspective, there had to be a concrete reason.
In the weeks since, various journalists have picked up on these two points -- that the test is simple and there has to be a valid reason to take it.
In the process, the content of the test has emerged for all to see. It is pathetically easy to score 100 percent on this test. Most first graders could probably ace it, save perhaps for this one question:
"Count backwards from 100 to zero by seven."
This should be an easy task for most adults, since you just subtract seven 14 times until you end up at two. Some neurologists might want you to bring it home and go all the way to -5, I suppose, but most say "that's enough" once you get to 44 or so.
Too bad for Trump that someone didn't explain to him that this is not the sort of accomplishment you brag about when you are running for elected office. It's rather like saying "I aced the weight test," i.e., you were able to step up on the scale and stay there long enough to yield a result.
But let's return to the likely reason Trump had to take the test at all. Doctors often use the test to detect mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a state not necessarily serious enough to affect your daily life -- yet -- but a cause for concern.
The test is administered frequently to stroke patients and at least once a year to Alzheimer's patients, who tend to lose two to four points per year.
In Trump's case, we know he probably was given the test during a mysterious weekend visit to Walter Reed hospital earlier this year that has never been explained. One possibility is that his White House doctor saw that he was confused and wanted to rule out a stroke.
Until this mystery is cleared up, people like me are going to keep raising the question.
In the meantime, kudos to Chris Wallace of Fox News for pushing Trump on the test results. Chris is following in the footsteps of his dad, Mike Wallace, who BTW wrote the introduction to a book I co-authored with Dan Noyes called "Raising Hell: How the Center for Investigative Reporting Gets the Story" in 1983.
The book didn't sell all that well, but it was used as a textbook by journalism professors for years. In it, we described the methodology behind eight of our early investigations at CIR and documented some of the impacts they had.
How reporters do the work we do is one of my main motivations for writing a memoir. Given the role we play in a democratic society, we need to bring as much transparency to our process as we can.
One of the trickiest aspects of our work is when we have to rely on confidential sources. When that happens, we have to have a good reason, such as the source's physical safety or job security.
When we do so, we are asking readers to trust us. But we understand that that can be very hard for readers to do. How can you tell we don't have an agenda or our sources don't have an agenda that remains hidden from view?
This is particularly difficult when the story focuses on a controversial public figure, such as the President. Our current one is dead certain that there are people out to get him and I'm sure he is right.
That's why a story about him has much greater credibility when it is based not on confidential sources but on his own words. And that is why he is in trouble on the cognitive test; he's brought it all on himself.
Psychoanalysts have many theoretical explanations for such self-destructive behavior, but they all remain unproven.
***
So on to the scariest threats facing us now, far worse than Covid-19.
(1) Trump is loudly claiming the election will be rigged and that he won't concede if he loses. Never before has a President lost and refused to concede. If this happens it will provoke the worst constitutional crisis in our history.
Ultimately, under that scenario, the Supreme Court would have to decide who won.
(2) Now Trump is threatening to unleash federal forces to more cities, beyond Portland. "We're not going to let New York and Chicago and Philadelphia, Detroit and Baltimore and all of these, Oakland is a mess. We're not going to let this happen in our country. All run by liberal Democrats," Trump said.
Former Salon and Nation correspondent Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times quotes Yale historian Timothy Snyder: “'Be wary of paramilitaries. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.' In 2017, the idea of unidentified agents in camouflage snatching leftists off the streets without warrants might have seemed like a febrile Resistance fantasy. Now it’s happening.
"According to a lawsuit filed by Oregon’s attorney general, Ellen Rosenblum, on Friday, federal agents “have been using unmarked vehicles to drive around downtown Portland, detain protesters, and place them into the officers’ unmarked vehicles” since at least last Tuesday. The protesters are neither arrested nor told why they’re being held.
"There’s no way to know the affiliation of all the agents — they’ve been wearing military fatigues with patches that just say “Police” — but The Times reported that some of them are part of a specialized Border Patrol group “that normally is tasked with investigating drug smuggling organizations.”
"The Trump administration has announced that it intends to send a similar force to other cities; on Monday, The Chicago Tribune reported on plans to deploy about 150 federal agents to Chicago. “I don’t need invitations by the state,” Chad Wolf, acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said on Fox News Monday, adding, "We’re going to do that whether they like us there or not."
"Rep. Joaquin Castro worries that since the agents are unidentified, far-right groups could easily masquerade as them to go after their enemies on the left. “It becomes more likely the more that this tactic is used,” he said. “I think it’s unconstitutional and dangerous and heading towards fascism.”"
I pray Trump will not do these terrible things. Because if he does, and this is no exaggeration, that will be the beginning of the end of our democracy.
"Life As We Knew It"
Goodbye that's all there is to it
Life as we knew it ended today
-- Kathy Mattea
-30-
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