Two presidents, dementia and the 25th amendment

A friend of mine, who many years ago used to be a nurse caring for dementia patients, has impressed a very important point on me in recent months: Dementia just keeps getting worse. It never gets better.

It seems the United States has now had two presidents in a row around whom stories of diminished capacity and dementia have proliferated. Recently, a contributor to The Hill wrote about President Donald Trump's confabulation regarding his uncle John Trump, long deceased and formerly a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Now it's important to know the meaning of confabulation to understand this anecdote, so here's the dictionary definition:  "the replacement of a gap in a person's memory by a falsification that they believe to be true." The author of the piece in The Hill believes Trump was simply relating something Trump believed to be true from his direct experience.

Here is a summary from that piece:

For Trump, the day we could no longer pretend everything is fine came on July 15, when he told a lengthy story about his uncle, John Trump, who he claimed taught at MIT and held three degrees in “nuclear, chemical, and math.” His uncle, according to Trump, once told him how he had taught Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, and how very smart Kaczynski was.

Trump’s uncle was indeed a professor at MIT, but everything else in this story is pure confabulation. Trump’s uncle didn’t have degrees in “nuclear, chemical, and math” — he had degrees in electrical engineering and physics. And Kaczynski did not go to MIT at all — he went to Harvard.

But most telling of all, it is categorically impossible for Trump’s uncle to have told him any such story. Kaczynski became publicly known as the Unabomber when he was arrested in 1996. Trump’s uncle, the MIT professor, died in 1985. In other words, Trump’s uncle could not have told him the story because there was, literally, no story to tell during his lifetime.

Now here's the kicker:

Confabulation isn’t misremembering a date or forgetting something. The mistakes of memory we are all subject to become confabulation when people remember false information in vivid detail — detail so vivid and complete that people who don’t know otherwise often believe what they are hearing is true.
 
In older people, confabulation is one of the clearest early signs of dementia. The day you witness someone confabulate is often the day you are forced to admit to yourself that a beloved parent needs help, and that all the little slips and oddities you’ve been seeing can no longer be rationalized away.

Even if you like Trump or just like his policies, there will almost certainly come a day in the not-too-distant future, when it will become clear to you that Trump can no longer handle the duties of the presidency.

We are now learning more about the mental decline of former President Joe Biden while he was in office and even in the 2020 campaign. Whatever you think of Biden and his policies, Biden eventually came to accept that he should not continue his run for another term and he withdrew from the campaign.

However difficult it was to convince Biden to abandon his desire for a second term, it will be much, much more difficult to convince Trump to abandon the remainder of his term when his faculties are failing him.

So, what would be the alternative? There is provision for replacing a president when he or she is unable to continue to carry out the duties of the presidency. It's in the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and I'll quote the relevant section in its entirety:

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.

Now, anyone who thinks that the sycophants whom Donald Trump has appointed to the very offices whose occupants would have to vote to tell him, "You're fired!", will, in fact, fire him is simply hallucinating (which is coincidentally another symptom that is sometimes associated with dementia). And even if they did summon the courage to recommend Trump's removal, this is only a recommendation to Congress. It is highly doubtful that both houses of Congress would then muster the necessary votes to remove him since doing so requires a two-thirds majority.

When President Woodrow Wilson suffered a debilitating stroke in 1919 during the third year of his second term, the seriousness of his condition was hushed up. It is often reported that Wilson's wife and his physician ran the federal government after that though that is in dispute.

Whoever you believe ran the country after Wilson's stroke, you will almost certainly be far more unsettled when you consider who might be running the Trump administration when Donald Trump's mind checks out but his body remains in the presidency. Some names to consider include Russell Vought, J. D. Vance, and Donald Trump, Jr. The list is enough to make even the most ardent Trump-hater pray for Trump's good health during the almost three and one-half years left in his term. But then it's also possible that a dementia-addled Trump may continue to govern—until he can no longer remember that he is the president.

Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Resilience, Common Dreams, Naked Capitalism, Le Monde Diplomatique, Oilprice.com, OilVoice, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider and many other places. He is the author of an oil-themed novel entitled Prelude and has a widely followed blog called Resource Insights. He can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.