Mike Luckovich Atlanta Journal-Constitution cartoon: Not now Jake
50 thoughts on “Batty is in the Eye of the Beholder”
many thanks to Trail friend Renee for spotting that spot-on Luckovich cartoon. he captured my very thoughts as Jake and CNN for a week did their best to keep Godzilla from their door by tossing him daily tasty tidbits about Joe.
lest we forget though the fun there was when the shoe was on the other claw:
Not only can President Trump remember things, he can remember them in order. Find out how he does it in the new film, “The Good Brain.”
To ensure that the United States will always be led by a coherent, functioning President, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment provides for the prompt, orderly, and democratic transfer of executive power in the event the president is incapacitated, physically or mentally. Trump’s tariff debacle, where he thrust out his chest, flung economic incoherence at the world, then flip flopped only two days later, was the strongest evidence yet- in a roiling sea of evidence- that he is mentally incapacitated.
Despite inheriting the strongest post-covid economy in the world, Trump keeps insisting that the US economy is broken and in need of saving.He insists global trading partners who sell us more than they buy from us- even countries that are a fraction of our size- are “taking advantage.”
Trump’s tariff drama was so asinine, he’s either self-dealing or insane. Frankly, although they are not mutually exclusive, I’d prefer the former. I only wish that rumors swirling in the media today, suggesting Trump’s tariffs were a hustle, an insider scheme meant to enrich his backers, were true. Trump being a self-dealing crook poses less danger to the world than him making than no sense at all.
Dementia and the Duty to Warn
Leaders of the EU are too intelligent to sneer out loud at Trump’s flip flop on tariffs. Aware of his deranged lust for revenge, they are reluctant to utter the truth about his economic ignorance. But the world is aware, even if Americans aren’t, that our president is deranged.
Because Trump’s administration hasrefused to release his medical records, other mental health professionals have come forward with their own assessments. The emerging consensus is that Trump, showing cognitive decline, is presenting signs of advanced dementia.
Psychotherapist Dr. John Gartner, former Johns Hopkins University Medical School faculty, is so alarmed about Trump’s cognitive impairment that he circulated a petition addressing it among thousands of psychiatrists, psychologists and other credentialed mental health professionals. Gartner wrote last year that Trump shows “progressive deterioration in memory, thinking, ability to use language, behavior, and both gross and fine motor skills,” adding that he felt an ethical “obligation to warn the public, and urge the media to cover this national emergency.”
Trump struggles to “even finish a sentence,” Gartner explained in an interview with MindSite News, elaborating that, “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. 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.”
Dr. Gartner notes how Trump is “losing his capacity for coherent speech,” identifying “dozens and dozens of Trump’s phonemic paraphasias, in which you use sounds in place of an actual word (a hallmark of brain damage and dementia).” 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 paraphasias, in which he uses a word incorrectly, as in ‘the oranges of the situation’ because it rhymes with ‘the origins of the situation.’”
Mental health professionals, mainstream media, sound the alarm
Main stream media, including the New York Times, have also questioned Trump’s mental state. In October 2024, the NYT reported that Trump now uses more “negative words than positive words compared with 2016, which can be another indicator of cognitive change.” And he curses far more often than he did when he first ran, “a trend that could reflect what experts call disinhibition,” another sign of dementia. They cited a study by health care news outlet, Stat, that reports similar findings.
Newsweek’s article, “Donald Trump Dementia Evidence ‘Overwhelming,” cites New York psychologist Suzanne Lachmann. Lackmann describes how Trump “seemingly forgets how sentence began and invents something in the middle” resulting in “an incomprehensible word salad”—a behavior she argues is observed “frequently in patients who have dementia.”
The Dementia Society notes that “forgetting names and dates is normal for people who are aging. But “confusing people and generations” is a sign of advanced dementia. During the campaign, Trump confused Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi on eight separate occasions, and said he was running against Obama. He said his father was born in Germany, when it was his grandfather who was born in Germany.
The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump
With the assistance of other psychiatrists and credentialled mental health professionals, Dr. Bandy Lee wrote, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President near the conclusion of Trump’s first presidency. In the book, psychiatric experts came forward due to what they saw as their professional moral and civic “duty to warn” America about Trump’s dementia.This duty, they argued, supersedes their competing professional duty of neutrality.
Since then, more than 3000 credentialed mental health professionals have added their signatures to a petition concluding that the president has probable dementia.
They write, “Donald Trump is showing unmistakable signs strongly suggesting dementia, based on his public behavior and informant reports that show progressive deterioration in memory, thinking, ability to use language, behavior, and both gross and fine motor skills…. his vocabulary is impoverished, he often has difficulty finishing a thought, sentence or even a word. Typical of dementia patients he perseverates and overuses superlatives and filler words…”
Congress needs to act before Trump gets red-button happy
Trump, who caused global destruction with his mindless tariff wars, now has the sole authority to launch nuclear weapons as the Commander in Chief.
Evidence of his cognitive decline is everywhere. Mental health professionals have sounded the alarm, and met their professional duty to warn the world about Trump’s dementia.
Congress now has a duty to listen to the professionals. Republicans, on the whole, have a duty to act.
Section 4 of the 25th Amendment allows the Vice President and either the Cabinet, or a body approved “by law” formed by Congress, to jointly agree that “the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Democrats need to proceed under this clause, and frightened republicans need to join in before Trump commits another, potentially world annihilating, blunder.
*Sabrina Haake is a 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense.Her columns are published in Alternet, Chicago Tribune, MSN, Out South Florida, Raw Story,Salon,Smart News and Windy City Times. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
this could be the makings of a sequel to Jake’s book
– Trump’s staff is increasingly treating him as if he had dementia, much the way Fred Trump was dealt with years ago
that was 3 months ago. since then, David Pakman has followed up with several other videos on same subject.
(sung to the tune of “Delta Dawn”)
dementia don, what’s that plane you’re flying on
could it be a grifted gift from days gone by?
and did I hear you say you’re a dictator today
who wants to rule the whole world by and by?
This caught my eye, probably explains a lot: “the $100 million check he vowed to the president’s political-action committee hasn’t arrived”
Out of his gourd
Craig, do you have a deadline for pictures for the anniversary? I’m out of town in Austin until the 2nd. What kinds of photos are you looking for? Thanks, and thanks for all you’re doing.
President Donald Trump’s directives for mass firings at multiple agencies will remain on hold, a federal appeals court ruled Friday evening.
he Trump administration had asked the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to freeze a lower court’s order that halted the terminations at more than a dozen agencies.
The new order is a major setback for Trump in his efforts to drastically shrink the federal government. His plans for the sweeping layoffs – known as reductions in force, or RIFs – have been on hold since May 9, after US District Judge Susan Illston ruled that Trump could not do such a dramatic overhaul of federal agencies without congressional authorization.
In its 2-1 opinion, the 9th Circuit panel said the Trump executive order at issue in the case “far exceeds the President’s supervisory powers under the Constitution.”
The majority concluded that the challengers were likely to succeed on the merits of their arguments that the mass layoffs were unlawful and said the administration failed to meet the other factors that would have justified the emergency appellate intervention.
Trump already once asked the Supreme Court to get involved in the case – a request that initially went nowhere – and it is likely the dispute will eventually reach the high court again.
[…]
On Friday, the 9th Circuit said that while Congress gave agencies the authority to undertake major layoffs, it did not give the president that power.
Writing for the majority, Senior Circuit Judge William Fletcher said, “The kind of reorganization contemplated by the Order has long been subject to Congressional approval.”
Fletcher, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, was joined in the majority by Circuit Judge Lucy Koh, who was put on the appeals court by President Joe Biden. Circuit Judge Consuelo María Callahan, an appointee of President George W. Bush, dissented from the ruling, writing that “the President has the right to direct agencies, and OMB and OPM to guide them, to exercise their statutory authority to lawfully conduct RIFs.”
The coalition of organizations challenging Trump’s directives said in a statement, “We are gratified by the court’s decision today to allow the pause of these harmful actions to endure while our case proceeds.”
For our 20th birthday on Thursday: Here is the first “Trailmix” post I’ve found (Sept. 2005). We were Crawfordslist in those days. Unfortunately the comments page wasn’t archived.
I am rummaging through our past in the Wayback Machine at https://web.archive.org. Our archive here starts in 2016, so that’s where our ancient history can be found. If you’d like to stroll through the past on archive .org our address in those early days was http://crawfordslist.blogspot.com/
Congress* now has a duty to listen to the professionals
*They listen only to their own voters and in certain states their voters still like what they hear (he talks like they talk and walks like they walk.)
Elon isn’t really gone, unless you mean looping on K. Those eyes were rolling like they did during the inauguration.
He’s accessed government contracts, data to aggregate, surveil, and who knows what. There is, most likely, spyware on our taxpayer-funded servers. And, just because he’s not physically present doesn’t mean DOGE has vanished.
#RejectedSongTitles
Chuck the Magic Dragon
A free and independent press would be nice to have at this time, but with the majors owned by the oligarchs we are lacking. What we are getting is a national exercise in making a demented, delusional, diseased and senile old who is nuts sound like a reasonable person without mental issues. When he spoke of ruling the U.S. and the world he was not joking, in his mind he does. Every day his internal world is told to us and the media works hard to make it seem real and reasonable even though it is scrambled and demented. At some point the charade will end and a lot of angst will be over the believers. A large group of us will be saying We Told You So (WTSO).
Been exposed to Fox News Alerts all week. Even in Austin, that’s all there is. I see our problem. As Fox goes, so goes the nation. Until it changes, we won’t change.
Framing his departure as the end of his “scheduled time” as a special government employee, Musk’s departure from the federal government will likely do little to change DOGE’s work carrying out Trump’s vision of shrinking the federal bureaucracy and purging it of people and programs that the president disagrees with.
But many of Musk’s allies are embedded across federal agencies as full-time employees, like a group of young staffers based in the General Services Administration who have been attempting to push DOGE’s reach beyond the executive branch — in some cases trying to embed in non-governmental and non-executive branch entities.
Other lawsuits have focused on one area DOGE has seen great success in: amassing sensitive government data and combining it into massive databases.
The New York Times reports that President Trump has enlisted the firm, founded by far-right billionaire Peter Thiel, to carry out his March executive order instructing government agencies to share data with each other. The order has increased fears that the government is putting together a database to wield surveillance powers over the American public.
Since then, the administration has been very quiet about these efforts, increasing suspicion. Meanwhile, Palantir has taken more than $113 million in government spending since Trump took office, from both existing contracts and new ones with the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security. That number is expected to grow, especially considering that the firm just won a new $795 million contract with the DoD last week.
Palantir is speaking with various other agencies across the federal government, including the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service, about buying its technology, according to the Times. Palantir’s Foundry tool, which analyzes and organizes data, is already being used at DHS, the Department of Health and Human Services, and at least two other agencies, allowing the White House to compile data from different places.
Isn’t there a globe in the classroom that the kids get to spin?
Smoke from Canadian wildfires worsens air quality in Dakotas, Midwestern states
*Took a road trip to Missouri to watch a charity softball game yesterday, and the sun definitely looked weird on the way home.
Craig, If you don’t have it.
The link to Colorado bob’s Bluecorn Experiment. One of those side roads we took. It was Kinda fun scrolling through the posts and remembering. It won’t be long until all Bob’s online stuff disappears. As I remember Google removes any stuff that hasn’t been active in 2 years.
Jack
Jack,
thanks so much for the link to Colorado Bob’s Bluecorn.
I see a couple of long lost Trailmixers in the comments…. rezdog and Blonde wino.
I also see in the avatars pictures of followers in the last row…. a dragon fly… Carol Thornton (who BTW, passed away just before Xmas last year) and the woman with the glasses is Patsi… I really miss her!
Maybe some comments on CBob’s blog spot website
would keep it alive
Thanks Jack. He actually send me seeds, and I grew them on back deck with full southern sky sun, they got enormous but produced no corn
came across a Col Sanders interview that just got half million views on TikTok, so here’s what I remember..
As I recall, you posted the secret recipe in the trail, Craig.
Craig – Will you post the secret recipe again? I thought I copied it, but as with many things I can’t remember where or what I filed it.
“they got enormous but produced no corn”
corn is wind-pollinated so “must” be planted in grid (i got away with a row once but that’s me)
call it whatcha wanna
Loretta Swit, Emmy-winning ‘Hot Lips’ Houlihan on ‘M.A.S.H.,’ dies at 87
She received two Emmys for playing the hard-driving head nurse from 1972 to 1983. The series finale drew one of the largest TV audiences of all time: 125 million people.
RIP Loretta.
Here are the 11 ingredients (found on the back of Col. Sanders’ wife’s will):
2/3 tablespoon salt
1/2 tablespoon thyme
1/2 tablespoon basil
1/3 tablespoon oregano
1 tablespoon celery salt
1 tablespoon black pepper
1 tablespoon dried mustard
4 tablespoons paprika
2 tablespoons garlic salt
1 tablespoon ground ginger
3 tablespoons white pepper
And a pinch of Accent/MSG (not in the original recipe, KFC added this in later years)
For fried chicken mix the above with 2 cups of flour. Soak the raw chicken in a buttermilk-egg bath for an hour or so before frying. Roll pieces in the spice mix for a light coating. Fry in oil until golden brown at no more than 350 degrees (pan or deep fry OK but Sanders used pressure cookers).
Donald Trump shared a post to his Truth Social account Saturday night that made some wild claims about former President Joe Biden.
“There is no #JoeBiden — executed in 2020. #Biden clones doubles & robotic engineered soulless mindless entities are what you see. #Democrats don’t know the difference.”
*SFB? Dementia? An outlandish comment as a distraction?
NEW THREAD by our Trail friend Jack
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many thanks to Trail friend Renee for spotting that spot-on Luckovich cartoon. he captured my very thoughts as Jake and CNN for a week did their best to keep Godzilla from their door by tossing him daily tasty tidbits about Joe.
lest we forget though the fun there was when the shoe was on the other claw:
Not only can President Trump remember things, he can remember them in order. Find out how he does it in the new film, “The Good Brain.”
shrinks are having their say according to *Sabrina Haake
https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/struggles-to-even-finish-a-sentence-behind-the-obvious-signs-of-trump-s-growing-dementia-opinion/ar-AA1Futw5
*Sabrina Haake is a 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense.Her columns are published in Alternet, Chicago Tribune, MSN, Out South Florida, Raw Story,Salon,Smart News and Windy City Times. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
this could be the makings of a sequel to Jake’s book
– Trump’s staff is increasingly treating him as if he had dementia, much the way Fred Trump was dealt with years ago
that was 3 months ago. since then, David Pakman has followed up with several other videos on same subject.
(sung to the tune of “Delta Dawn”)
dementia don, what’s that plane you’re flying on
could it be a grifted gift from days gone by?
and did I hear you say you’re a dictator today
who wants to rule the whole world by and by?
At least one of the monsters is gone. Here is gift link to Wall Street Journal’s deep dive into the sicko relationship between Trump and Elon Musk: https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-elon-musk-relationship-64773ad1?st=2tUToc&reflink=mobilewebshare_permalink
This caught my eye, probably explains a lot: “the $100 million check he vowed to the president’s political-action committee hasn’t arrived”
Out of his gourd
Craig, do you have a deadline for pictures for the anniversary? I’m out of town in Austin until the 2nd. What kinds of photos are you looking for? Thanks, and thanks for all you’re doing.
Dangerous walking
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-s-mass-firings-at-several-agencies-will-remain-on-hold-appeals-court-rules/ar-AA1FOBam?
For our 20th birthday on Thursday: Here is the first “Trailmix” post I’ve found (Sept. 2005). We were Crawfordslist in those days. Unfortunately the comments page wasn’t archived.
I am rummaging through our past in the Wayback Machine at https://web.archive.org. Our archive here starts in 2016, so that’s where our ancient history can be found. If you’d like to stroll through the past on archive .org our address in those early days was http://crawfordslist.blogspot.com/
*They listen only to their own voters and in certain states their voters still like what they hear (he talks like they talk and walks like they walk.)
Elon isn’t really gone, unless you mean looping on K. Those eyes were rolling like they did during the inauguration.
He’s accessed government contracts, data to aggregate, surveil, and who knows what. There is, most likely, spyware on our taxpayer-funded servers. And, just because he’s not physically present doesn’t mean DOGE has vanished.
#RejectedSongTitles
Chuck the Magic Dragon
A free and independent press would be nice to have at this time, but with the majors owned by the oligarchs we are lacking. What we are getting is a national exercise in making a demented, delusional, diseased and senile old who is nuts sound like a reasonable person without mental issues. When he spoke of ruling the U.S. and the world he was not joking, in his mind he does. Every day his internal world is told to us and the media works hard to make it seem real and reasonable even though it is scrambled and demented. At some point the charade will end and a lot of angst will be over the believers. A large group of us will be saying We Told You So (WTSO).
Been exposed to Fox News Alerts all week. Even in Austin, that’s all there is. I see our problem. As Fox goes, so goes the nation. Until it changes, we won’t change.
They report bullshit as if it’s real.
The real stuff they turn into bullshit.
today’s meme…. just because…
meme #2…
https://www.npr.org/2025/05/30/nx-s1-5415641/musk-leaves-doge-what-comes-next
Framing his departure as the end of his “scheduled time” as a special government employee, Musk’s departure from the federal government will likely do little to change DOGE’s work carrying out Trump’s vision of shrinking the federal bureaucracy and purging it of people and programs that the president disagrees with.
But many of Musk’s allies are embedded across federal agencies as full-time employees, like a group of young staffers based in the General Services Administration who have been attempting to push DOGE’s reach beyond the executive branch — in some cases trying to embed in non-governmental and non-executive branch entities.
Other lawsuits have focused on one area DOGE has seen great success in: amassing sensitive government data and combining it into massive databases.
https://newrepublic.com/post/195904/trump-palantir-data-americans
The New York Times reports that President Trump has enlisted the firm, founded by far-right billionaire Peter Thiel, to carry out his March executive order instructing government agencies to share data with each other. The order has increased fears that the government is putting together a database to wield surveillance powers over the American public.
Since then, the administration has been very quiet about these efforts, increasing suspicion. Meanwhile, Palantir has taken more than $113 million in government spending since Trump took office, from both existing contracts and new ones with the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security. That number is expected to grow, especially considering that the firm just won a new $795 million contract with the DoD last week.
Palantir is speaking with various other agencies across the federal government, including the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service, about buying its technology, according to the Times. Palantir’s Foundry tool, which analyzes and organizes data, is already being used at DHS, the Department of Health and Human Services, and at least two other agencies, allowing the White House to compile data from different places.
Isn’t there a globe in the classroom that the kids get to spin?
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/weather/2025/05/31/canada-wildfires-smoke-air-quality-midwest/83962981007/
Smoke from Canadian wildfires worsens air quality in Dakotas, Midwestern states
*Took a road trip to Missouri to watch a charity softball game yesterday, and the sun definitely looked weird on the way home.
Craig, If you don’t have it.
The link to Colorado bob’s Bluecorn Experiment. One of those side roads we took. It was Kinda fun scrolling through the posts and remembering. It won’t be long until all Bob’s online stuff disappears. As I remember Google removes any stuff that hasn’t been active in 2 years.
Jack
Jack,
thanks so much for the link to Colorado Bob’s Bluecorn.
I see a couple of long lost Trailmixers in the comments…. rezdog and Blonde wino.
I also see in the avatars pictures of followers in the last row…. a dragon fly… Carol Thornton (who BTW, passed away just before Xmas last year) and the woman with the glasses is Patsi… I really miss her!
Maybe some comments on CBob’s blog spot website
would keep it alive
Thanks Jack. He actually send me seeds, and I grew them on back deck with full southern sky sun, they got enormous but produced no corn
came across a Col Sanders interview that just got half million views on TikTok, so here’s what I remember..
As I recall, you posted the secret recipe in the trail, Craig.
Craig – Will you post the secret recipe again? I thought I copied it, but as with many things I can’t remember where or what I filed it.
“they got enormous but produced no corn”
corn is wind-pollinated so “must” be planted in grid (i got away with a row once but that’s me)
call it whatcha wanna
Loretta Swit, Emmy-winning ‘Hot Lips’ Houlihan on ‘M.A.S.H.,’ dies at 87
She received two Emmys for playing the hard-driving head nurse from 1972 to 1983. The series finale drew one of the largest TV audiences of all time: 125 million people.
RIP Loretta.
Here are the 11 ingredients (found on the back of Col. Sanders’ wife’s will):
2/3 tablespoon salt
1/2 tablespoon thyme
1/2 tablespoon basil
1/3 tablespoon oregano
1 tablespoon celery salt
1 tablespoon black pepper
1 tablespoon dried mustard
4 tablespoons paprika
2 tablespoons garlic salt
1 tablespoon ground ginger
3 tablespoons white pepper
And a pinch of Accent/MSG (not in the original recipe, KFC added this in later years)
For fried chicken mix the above with 2 cups of flour. Soak the raw chicken in a buttermilk-egg bath for an hour or so before frying. Roll pieces in the spice mix for a light coating. Fry in oil until golden brown at no more than 350 degrees (pan or deep fry OK but Sanders used pressure cookers).
.
And then….at the same time….
lol
🫰 🫰
(snapping fingers emojis)
Oh, why not…..
Ha. I’ve been on stage with Percy.
One of Bob’s websites.
https://the-shin-bone-star.blogspot.com/2012/03/cactus-water-harvester.html?m=1
Another Bob’s site.
https://peggychapmansgarden.blogspot.com/?m=1
Uno mas poor fever….
https://www.pennlive.com/news/2025/06/donald-trump-shares-post-claiming-joe-biden-was-executed-replaced-by-clones.html
Donald Trump shared a post to his Truth Social account Saturday night that made some wild claims about former President Joe Biden.
“There is no #JoeBiden — executed in 2020. #Biden clones doubles & robotic engineered soulless mindless entities are what you see. #Democrats don’t know the difference.”
*SFB? Dementia? An outlandish comment as a distraction?
NEW THREAD by our Trail friend Jack