The Wrap
Trump Is ‘Surrounded Entirely by Enablers’ Eager to Diminish Apparent Cognitive Decline, Jonathan Lemire Says
Benjamin Lindsay – March 4, 2024
Analyzing a series of public Donald Trump gaffes while he campaigned in North Carolina and Virginia over the weekend, Politico’s White House bureau chief Jonathan Lemire said Monday that the former president is “surrounded entirely by enablers” who are just “forging forward” through apparent cognitive decline.
“He’s surrounded entirely by enablers during this campaign and would be again if he were to be in the White House for a second time,” Lemire said on Monday’s “Morning Joe.” “There would be no guardrails, there would be no adults in the room, there would just be people doing what he wants.”
The conversation began with cohosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough relentlessly replaying clips of Trump mixing up Barack Obama and Joe Biden, of him stumbling through the pronunciation of “Venezuela,” of him referring to the South American country Argentina as if it were a person and more.
“There is nobody around Donald Trump that can protect him from himself,” Scarborough said, indicating that even if the gaffes were signs of ailing health, the former president would likely hear nothing of it.
“He’s just not the same guy he was five, 10, even 15 years ago. Nobody’s saying he was a saint then, but we knew him, he’s radically different. You look at him talking radically different,” Scarborough continued. “You look at Jan. 6 — he had every single person in the White House begging him to stop the riot … Didn’t listen to anybody. He’s alone. So as we go through this sad scene, there is nobody that can take him off the stage and say, ‘You’re not well. You need to get checked and taken care of.’”
“To your point, he’s not the same guy,” Lemire added. “You can watch video footage of the 2016 campaign, some of his time in the White House. We played last week a clip from the debate between Trump and Biden back in 2020, and it was striking even then how much Trump has changed, how he’s aged. I mean, he is in his late 70s.”
Lemire then became confounded by the differences in public perception between President Biden’s aged state and Trump’s.
“He’s only a couple years younger than President Biden, and we’re seeing with more and more frequency, even as the media [is] full of polls and obsessions about President Biden’s age, it’s this — it’s Trump who day after day is showing the signs of age, but also pressure,” Lemire said. “Indeed, pressure because he is not getting as much of the share of the Republican vote as he would like — Nikki Haley even posting a win over the weekend. Pressure because of the money he now owes, nearly half a billion dollars in a couple cases in New York City. And pressure that his first criminal case, a case that could theoretically put him in prison, starts in just three weeks.
“We’re seeing it night after night on the rally stage where he seems to even just lose control of the English language … This is something that his team knows, but they’re just forging forward.”