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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
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COPPER MOUNTAIN, Colo. — A White House spokeswoman said Thursday that “no official decision has been made” about whether the United States would be sending athletes to compete in the Winter Olympics in South Korea, echoing uncertainty expressed one day earlier by U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the goal is still to send American athletes to compete the PyeongChang Games, but a decision won’t come until a later date. She said that decision would involve multiple government agencies, “but I think ultimately the president would certainly weigh in. That’s something he would take into account probably a number of the stakeholders that would be involved.”
Within minutes, though, Sanders tweeted a clarification of sorts, saying “The U.S. looks forward to participating in the Winter Olympics in South Korea. The protection of Americans is our top priority and we are engaged with the South Koreans and other partner nations to secure the venues.”
The International Olympic Committee has taken aim at the very heart of the Putin regime, probably without meaning to. The Olympic governing body has banned Russia from participating in the 2018 Winter Games, in Pyeongchang, South Korea, after its investigations found rampant doping among Russian athletes as well as an elaborate cover-up scheme that involved tampering with athletes’ urine samples. The I.O.C. has, however, extended to certain athletes from Russia the option of competing under a neutral flag—the Olympic flag itself. This solution may have seemed like a smart compromise between the need to punish a corrupt state sports bureaucracy and the desire to allow clean athletes to pursue their Olympic dreams. From Russia’s point of view, though, it’s war.
Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a decorated veteran of the Iraq War, is scared — scared that the Trump administration may be getting the US into a devastating war with North Korea without much of the public noticing or seeming to care.
“Most Americans,” she says, “don’t realize how close we are to this war.”
Duckworth, who lost both of her legs after her helicopter was shot down by insurgents, has closely followed both aggressive rhetoric from the White House and the way the US military has been approaching the Korean Peninsula. She believes the events of the past six months indicate that President Trump might be willing to actually launch a preventive strike on North Korea, despite the real chance that it could trigger a nuclear exchange.
This line of reasoning would be worrying if it were coming from an outside analyst or expert. But coming from a US senator and veteran, someone who knows war and has top-level security clearances, it’s truly disturbing — an indication that we need to be having a much bigger debate over Trump’s North Korea policy than we are.
What follows is a transcript of my conversation with Duckworth, edited for length and clarity.
When President Trump slurred his words during a news conference this week, some Trump watchers speculated that he was having a stroke. I watched the clip and, as a physician who specializes in brain function and disability, I don’t think a stroke was behind the slurred words. But having evaluated the chief executive’s remarkable behavior through my clinical lens for almost a year, I do believe he is displaying signs that could indicate a degenerative brain disorder.
As the president’s demeanor and unusual decisions raise the potential for military conflict in two regions of the world, the questions surrounding his mental competence have become urgent and demand investigation.
Until now, most of the focus has been on the president’s psychology. It’s now time to think of the president’s neurology — and the possibility of an organic brain disorder.
Every day of my working life, I evaluate people with brain injuries. It falls to me to make decisions about what is normal and what is not, what can improve and what will not, whether or not my patients can work, what kind of work they can do, and pretty much everything else.
In turning my attention to the president, I see worrisome symptoms that fall into three main categories: problems with language and executive function; problems with social cognition and behavior; and problems with memory, attention, and concentration. None of these are symptoms of being a bad or mean person. Nor do they require spelunking into the depths of his psyche to understand. Instead, they raise concern for a neurocognitive disease process in the same sense that wheezing raises the alarm for asthma.
Here’s the evidence on which I base my conclusion that it would be prudent for the president to be tested for a brain disorder.
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The president is sick. That’s the impression shared by a growing number of Americans — including me, as both a citizen and as a physician.
“It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch 22
― Joseph Heller, Catch 22
