This Saturday, President Donald Trump delivered a commencement address at the West Point military academy, after school administrators called graduates back to the school grounds for the event following school closures amidst the initial stages of the Coronavirus pandemic. During his speech, which he in large part read from a teleprompter, Trump included a racist diatribe against China in connection to the Coronavirus, and he interjected to note that his birthday was the following day, which didn’t exactly earn much of a response from the audience. After the event concluded, Trump was caught on camera seemingly struggling with walking down a ramp that led away from the stage where he’d been speaking.
In the video, Trump can be seen eventually taking very small steps as he makes his way down the incline alongside a military official who clearly had a somewhat easier time with it. Twitter user and political commentator Tom Joseph wrote:
‘Trump had trouble walking down the ramp at the West Point grad ceremony. Balance & gait issues are part of his dementia symptoms. Bad planning here. His forward lean on a down slope w/ a normal sized step would make him fall over. To stay upright he had to take baby shuffle steps’
Trump had trouble walking down the ramp at the West Point grad ceremony. Balance & gait issues are part of his dementia symptoms. Bad planning here. His forward lean on a down slope w/ a normal sized step would make him fall over. To stay upright he had to take baby shuffle steps pic.twitter.com/skxlmFtgb7
— Tom Joseph (@TomJChicago) June 13, 2020
This incident is far from the first occasion on which observers have wondered and worried about the president’s health. Concerns have ranged from some kind of diagnosable narcissistic personality disorder to some kind of dementia, like that which Tom Joseph pointed to. For example, Yale psychiatrist Dr. Bandy X Lee, who also leads an organization called the World Mental Health Coalition, commented recently to Salon that Trump’s “psychopathology makes him avoid all the right decisions, while driving him to make all the wrong decisions” and added that Trump “has been visibly deteriorating.”
Trump, infamously, has responded to those who’ve wondered about his fitness by proclaiming himself to be a “very stable genius.” Is his “genius stability” why he has endlessly melted down on Twitter and in other public meltdowns with reality-disconnected freakouts targeting his opponents?
