Maggie Haberman told MS Now viewers she did not “feel equipped” to answer whether Americans should be concerned about Donald Trump’s mental acuity. She said she and her co-author, Jonathan Swan, “see what you see, which is he is 80, which is that he is clearly - doesn't speak with the same crispness that he did 30 years ago, 20 years ago, ten years ago. as people who turn 80 tend not to.”
Haberman also said Trump’s health “is like a black box inside that administration, much more than almost any other issue.” She added that “if there is an area of failure in the reporting” in her book with Swan it was about Trump’s health, not just his mental health but “why he has gone to Walter Reed several times, and they have released less and less information.”
But Haberman also said that in their hour-long interview with Trump, “there was nothing that felt, ‘Oh, this is unusual. This is different. It was actually quite the same. … this was very much pure Trump.”
As an example of “pure Trump,” Haberman related a jarring anecdote about the interview in which he boasted about being compared to Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan.
Haberman concluded by saying that, “the mental acuity point is not one that I feel equipped to answer and I don't think Jonathan does either. But I think that people can very legitimately question whether 80-year-old people should be president, and there are reasons for that, but that's a different issue.”
That elicited such an adolescent rant from the 80-year-old that, if anything, it should make us question Trump’s mental fitness even more. “Maggot Hagerman has covered me incorrectly for ten years. Her book is a joke!” he whined. “She has made a living off her bad reporting, and will pay the price when our Multi Billion Dollar Lawsuit against The Failing New York Times gets to Court, which should not be that long. … Maggot is a loser! If she ever wrote the true story about me, it would actually be quite boring, but loaded with lots of SUCCESS.”
That’s unpresidential enough. But then Trump said this:
“I just finished a perfect physical at Walter Reed, I do it every six months, and I requested another Cognitive Test, the only President to do so, three times, and I aced them all - Got every question right. Few people in Washington, D.C., could do so, including Maggot and her flunky associate, Jonathan Swan. I would be willing to bet they couldn't get 50% of the questions right.”
Did Trump just have yet another physical at Walter Reed? Or was he claiming that he “just finished” his May checkup? It’s worth pointing out he said nothing about providing the records of that “perfect physical.”
Also, as Conover pointed out to me, who requests a cognitive test unless you have concerns?
