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Quick preview: I’m working on a banger for tomorrow. My operating thesis is that 2025 was the period of maximum danger for democracy and I can’t believe I’m saying this but . . . maybe we’ve made it through the crucible?
Lots can still go wrong. Trump can do more damage. And if he decides to go full-dictator, there will be at least one more constitutional crisis (and possibly three more).
I know. It feels strange typing these words. But I wanted to give myself a couple days to think through this idea. It should be ready tomorrow.
In the meantime . . .
The president of the United States gave a speech yesterday before a group of McDonald’s corporate workers and franchise owners. I’m going to quote a few sections of his remarks at great length, because if you have not listened to Trump speaking recently, the decline in his cognitive abilities is a bit shocking.
The point of this exercise is not to clown on Trump, but to give everyone a baseline understanding of where he is, with the mentals, as we try to understand how he will respond to increasing pressures in the coming months.
The video of his remarks is here and I’ll include timestamps for each section, in case you want to see what he looks and sounds like.
Bottom line: This is a man in noticeable mental decline.
Here is Trump at the very beginning (1:40) doing the litany of greetings and salutations that begin presidential speeches:
But I want to thank, uh, as you know the famous Sundar and Sergey, Sergey Brin. These are two guys that own and run a place called Google. They called me the following day after I did that McDonald’s little um, skit, because it was it wasn’t a commercial. You got it for nothing. It was a skit and they told me that it and I didn’t know them. I just I said, “Who are they?” They own Google. I said, “That’s pretty good. That’s not bad.”
And uh that it received more hits than anything else in the history of Google and that records, it still stands.
Did Sundar Pichai and Sergey Brin call Donald Trump on October 21, 2024? Did they tell him that in just twenty-four hours he’d gotten more “hits” than anything else in the history of Google? More than COVID? More than January 6th? More than Taylor Swift? What is a “hit” on Google?
But most importantly: It’s unclear whether Trump understands that Pichai and Brin were not in attendance at the McDonald’s speech. (At least I cannot find any evidence that either of them was there.) Trump sounds like he’s thanking people who aren’t there as if they were sitting in the front row.
At the 10:30 mark Trump is clearly on-script doing an encomium to the virtues of McDonald’s before weaving off-script:
