Tear Down This Myth

Scott Jennings is a GOP strategist who appears regularly on CNN's News Night with Abby Phillip and  is a potential entrant into the 2026 Republican primary to replace retiring Senator Mitch McConnell. There are other likely candidates for the nomination but it would be foolish to sell Jennings short because he is a favorite of Donald Trump, whose Administration he defends exceptionally well at every turn.

He's very skilled, on television and on X Twitter, at selling an alternate reality.

I've been with the President recently. I've watched him in these meetings.

Let me state plainly: There is no chaos.

Unlike the previous administration, there's no doubt who's running the country, and it's President Donald J. Trump. pic.twitter.com/saDy7p33aB

— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) May 3, 2025

Donald Trump may be running the country. But evidence to the contrary keeps accumulating as

Donald Trump gave a completely incoherent response to a question about his crackdown on Harvard University and ended up ranting about fictional riots.

During a phone interview with NewsNation Wednesday, Stephen A. Smith, the firebrand sports pundit turned political commentator, asked the president to expand on a comment he’d made about Harvard University, which has seen $2.2 billion in government grants frozen by the current administration.

Smith asked Trump what he would say to those who view his attacks against the Ivy League school as “an attack on academic freedom, rather than a defense of fairness.”

“Well, I say this. We had riots in Harlem, in Harlem, and frankly if you look at what’s gone on—and people from Harlem went up and they protested, Stephen, and they protested very strongly against Harvard. They happened to be on my side,” Trump said.

“You know I got a very high Black vote. You know that? Very, very high Black vote. It was a very great compliment to me,” Trump continued.

The president appeared confused about the subject of the question, ranting about Harlem instead of Harvard and inventing a fictional riot in support of his war on higher education.

Trump’s stumped response is particularly disturbing because, crucially, Smith repeated the word “Harvard” three times in asking his question, and was responding directly to something Trump had just mentioned. Halfway through the question, Trump seemed to realize his mistake, but then felt it necessary to comment on the support of Black voters, which was at that point entirely off topic.

There have been concerns over Trump’s cognitive decline since he first started to deliver weaving, nonsensical stump speeches on the presidential campaign trail. Now his divorce from reality manifests mostly in his disastrous economic policy, as the president is more or less kept away from making lengthy addresses.

Last October, a senior lecturer at Cornell University's Psychology Department and Weill Cornell Medicine Psychiatry Department remarked

What’s alarming is how the rate of Trump’s bizarre speech and political decisions have been increasing. He gave an answer about childcare to the Economic Club of New York so incoherent that even his supporters were concerned. Last week he got cognitively lost in a rally and began to talk about the ‘eight circles’ that Biden filled up with journalists. No one on his staff has been able to explain the reference.

Trump has shown evidence of dementia for the past year as indicated by his strange gait, phonemic paraphasia—when he begins a word and can’t finish it—and decline in the complexity of his words and concepts. This limited capacity explains his poor debate performance, but there are two more disturbing signs of his decline.

Since when? In February, 2017 the NYC, NY office of Donald Trump's doctor, Harold Bornstein, was raided by Trump's personal bodyguard, a lawyer at the Trump Organization, and a third man, and the president's medical records were stolen.

On Saturday, November 16, 2019 President Trump was suddenly whisked away to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for a still-unknown reason.

Four days after an apparent assassination attempt of presidential candidate Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania in July last year

the public is still in the dark over the extent of his injuries, what treatment the Republican presidential nominee received in the hospital, and whether there may be any long-term effects on his health.

Trump’s campaign has refused to discuss his condition, release a medical report or records, or make the doctors who treated him available, leaving information to dribble out from Trump, his friends and family.

In an interview five weeks ago, psychologist Dr. John L. Gartner explained

When we’re diagnosing dementia, what we need to see is a deterioration of someone’s own baseline of functioning. What we see that a lot of people don’t appreciate is that when Donald Trump was younger in the 1980s, he was actually quite articulate. He spoke in polished paragraphs; now he has difficulty even finishing a sentence. His thoughts were logical and related: now they’re tangential. He goes off on these ramblings where he is confabulating things – weird things in which he’ll talk about Venezuelans and mental hospitals, and then he’ll talk about sharks and batteries or the late, great Hannibal Lector and Silence of the Lambs. And why is he talking about Hannibal Lector – a fictional character who was not great; he was a murderer, a serial killer. It makes sense in Trump’s mind but these are really random associations. And there is an accelerating rate of decline….

He is losing his capacity for coherent speech. We’ve collected dozens and dozens of Trump’s phonemic paraphrasias, in which you use sounds in place of an actual word  (a hallmark of brain damage and dementia).  What happens is that someone is trying to say a word and then they get the first part out but they have to end it or create one because they can’t remember the rest. Trump will say something like ‘mishiz’ for missiles, or “Chrishus” for Christmas, because he can’t complete the word. Then we see also a lot of semantic paraphrasias, in which he uses a word incorrectly, as in “the oranges of the situation” because it rhymes with “the origins of the situation.” This is not within normal limits; his basic ability to use language is breaking down.

So there is that verbal deterioration. And then there is the physical deterioration. He used to be quite graceful, and now he uses a wide-based gait typical of frontotemporal dementia, sometimes he swings his right leg in a semi-circle. He also has trouble getting up the ramp; he has trouble doing physical things.

 And sometimes Trump is lucid or articulate. On other occasions, he is baffling or incoherent. It's that way with an individual suffering from an ailment, whether physical, mental, or psychological. It was that way with President Joe Biden, also; it's why General Mark Milley in October of 2023 could maintain "I engage with him frequently, and (Bidenis) alert, sound, does his homework, reads the papers reads all the read-ahead material, and is very, very engaged in issues of very serious matters of war and peace and life and death."

Biden probably declined from that point to his June, 2024 debate with Donald Trump. However, his bizarre performance that night probably was due to an individual in decline- as Trump clearly has been- who had a very bad night, which was interspersed with many good days. For some reason, President Trump's diminished state has not received 5% of the scrutiny which President Biden drew.

It is highly unlikely that Donald Trump is running the country in the manner Scott Jennings wants us to believe. However, it is not his responsibility as a shill of the President to reveal the true state of the politician he publicly venerates. Moreover, Jennings knows that much of the source of the spell Trump has cast on the public derives from the perception of Trump as strong and powerful and whether right or wrong, always in charge. It's time for the Democratic Party, which must oppose this dangerous man, or an inquisitive media to tear down this myth..

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