Former President Donald Trump will no longer be coming to Arizona this week, where he was scheduled to speak during a GOP rally Friday evening in Phoenix. The AZGOP Freedom Fest has also been canceled, an Arizona Republican Party spokesperson confirmed to Arizona’s Family.
Trump was scheduled to be the keynote speaker at the event. Other speakers who were scheduled to appear included Congress members Andy Biggs, Paul Gosar and Eli Crane, as well as U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake, Abe Hamadeh, Charlie Kirk and Tyler Bowyer. Tickets to the event were sold through eventbrite, and a state GOP spokesperson says refunds will be issued.
The announcement that Trump wouldn’t be coming to Arizona was made soon after the former president briefly took the stand in a New York defamation trial that will determine how much he could owe advice columnist E. Jean Carroll. It’s unclear if the trial had any bearing on the decision to cancel the trip.
The news also comes a day after the Chairman of the Arizona Republican Party resigned. Jeff DeWit stepped down amid pressure after a British tabloid released secretly recorded audio clips of him reportedly trying to bribe Lake to keep her from running for U.S. Senate.
Remember when he floated the idea that the DNC was keeping Biden away from in person speaking events because his mental acuity was declining?
Remember?
Lol, that’s exactly it. It’s going downhill so rapidly now that he only appears for minutes at a time.
There’s a point in progressing dementia where nothing slows the progress anymore, and you just go downhill fast. It’s still up and down day by day, but even the best day is no longer obviously competent normalcy.
Speaking solely for myself, as someone who has had to deal with relatives and parents in various stages of declining cognition, I think that point is actually behind us.
I think Trump is now in the Kim Jong Il stage of his public appearances, where he gets walked out regularly from time to time but very briefly, isn’t allowed to speak for more than a couple minutes, and even then most of his public appearances take place for only seconds at a time – for example, between the entrance of Trump Tower and his waiting limo, or on the way in and out of the courthouse without stopping. And almost nothing after sundown: very few, if any, nighttime public appearances. Literally just enough daytime public exposure for the paparazzi to get pics and reporters to yell questions and everyone to see that, yeah, he’s still alive. And thus the people who want to believe in his competency can continue to do so unchallenged, all the way up til the election.
For people living with progressive cognitive impairment, regardless of cause, some things are just common across the board. For example, whether he is allowed to speak at all depends entirely upon what kind of day he is having, and that cannot be predicted with any certainty. Add to that his insistence upon being President wherever he goes, King Trump of Trump Kingdom, having his way in everything: all of this complicates matters immensely for whoever is having to take care of him, because he wasn’t one to be told no to begin with.
So what you end up with is what we’re seeing here now: his personal staff and legal teams desperately trying to keep all options open on all public appearances and working very carefully to make sure he can speak a few lines when he feels up to it but doesn’t have to if he’s not, like Christopher Kise not telling the judge until the last second that Trump wanted to speak, unplanned absences and bow-outs from highly visible functions like this rally, suddenly finding his words at the last possible second like the E. Jean Carroll trial today, etc.
My personal opinion is that he is still having very good days here and there, where he’s almost functional, but that his bad days are now SO bad that anything he does, anywhere he goes, his people have emergency plans for getting him out of sight and into the limo or plane fast.
Trump is a demagogue, and the authoritarians need a demagogue. So he will continue to be wheeled out for regular viewing, if at all possible, no matter what his condition is. But they only need his appearance, not his functioning or even his consent. Kim Jong Il, literally, or the American presidential candidate version of it.
So keep a close eye on the VP seat, because that’s who’s going to be the real president. Trump is just a placeholder at this point, IMO.
I think Trump is now in the Kim Jong Il stage of his public appearances
I’m sorry
You should be
-chef’s kiss-
It really seems like his cognitive function has taken a sharp decline in the last few months
What? He is still going on long rambling speeches almost daily. He made 20ish minute long speeches in both Iowa and New Hampshire this very week, at night. I’d give anything for his handlers to do what you think they are and keep him locked up, but your comment has no bearing on what’s actually happening.
Yeah I double checked, he spoke for almost 2 hours in Iowa…
The only one of your assertions I was able to verify was the 22 minute speech after winning the Iowa Caucus:
Nothing on two hour speeches.(see second edit below)And during those long speeches you claim are still taking place, do they have a beginning, a middle, and an end? Do they have a specific topic to which all his comments relate in some way? Do they maintain a chronological or sequential order, or some other order that makes sense? In forming his spoken thoughts, is he able to follow verbal direction easily, even when not following it carries significant negative consequences for him personally, as in court when a judge offers him clear instruction on how to remain within the law and offer his best presentation?
No, no, no, and NO.
Apparently you are unaware of this, but anyone with mild to moderate cognitive impairment can deliver Trumpian word salad; for many of them, that’s all they have left, when they can still speak. It’s been years since Trump did anything but. And now he’s appearing less and less, speaking less and less, and canceling more.
The Arizona rally he just canceled, which is the subject of this thread and the article it references? Nighttime appearance.
You can cling to straws of hope for as long as you want, but for anyone who has lived with or cared for people with advancing and progressive cognitive impairment, there’s no mistaking this.
But don’t take my word for it. Read the WaPo article I linked above, with his own statements on the subject, side by side with what the creators of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment test have to say about his words on the subject, lol.
EDITED TO ADD: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/01/19/trump-cognitive-test/
Archive link: https://archive.ph/KBjmISECOND EDIT: Here’s another very recent WaPo article where Dana Milbank breaks down Trump’s recent longer speeches (apparently he spoke for 100 minutes in Manchester, NH, so I stand corrected on that), notes how many unnoticed repetitions, logical fallacies, and nonsensicalisms are involved in each, and discusses Trump’s recent failing cognition. WaPo gift link, free to read
Hey now, read what I actually wrote. I don’t want him to win, or like him, or think any of his speeches make a lick of sense. Again I WISH they would get him out of here. I just haven’t seen anyone on his team reining him in at all. It was a judge that made him stop on the witness stand and we don’t know why the entire AZ rally was canceled not just his part. I’m on your side about his cognitive decline but I’m also not going to grasp at straws. We’ve been doing that for too long hoping he would go away and it never happens.
And yes looks like the 2 hour Iowa speech I was thinking of was on January 6th not this week.
I just haven’t seen anyone on his team reining him in at all.
To be honest, I don’t think they can, at least not directly. And that too is common across the board when caring for people with declining mental acuity. You can’t readily “rein someone in” when they are not engaging intellectually anyway.
I think what they do is coach him extremely carefully and use pleas to absent authorities; for example, look at the very few questions Alina Habba put to him in the recent E. Jean Carroll trial. He was on the stand for three minutes, was under judge’s instruction not to stray from the topic, she asked him maybe five questions, and then it was over. Whisked in, whisked out. His own attorneys “reined him in” by using the defense platform itself, asking no open questions, nothing he could get triggered into straying off track with.
And even then it wasn’t enough: that muttering he did at the end, the “This isn’t America” thing? That muttering is also common in progressing cognitive loss. Sometimes the muttering makes sense, a lot of times it makes no sense at all, but a lot of them do mutter, especially the later in the day it gets.
That’s just one example. “This is the schedule, Mr. President,” or even “The doctor said, Mr. President” works much better than offering him a command; it’s a plea to an absent authority, much like you use with children. It gives them nothing in the present space to argue with, and I think his teams use that along with all the other indirect tricks of corralling and directing a combative person with fading intellectual capacity.
But at no point in the last year or so has he seem intellectually engaged with his own defense, or even much interested in it, even though he stands to lose his entire NY business empire. As an ex-president, at every courtroom appearance, he could have had them all eating out of his hand, but instead he served up word salad.
Source for Trump being incompetent? I’m not a trump supporter or anything, I just really don’t keep up with news
Plenty of opinions in both directions.
But keep in mind that for most people, discussions regarding their cognitive ability never happen at all. And Trump himself is apparently proud that he keeps taking cognitive ability tests and passing them (if indeed that is what’s happening):
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/01/19/trump-cognitive-test/
Archive link: https://archive.ph/KBjmISource for you not being a Trump supporter? I just really don’t keep up with your day to day life.
My source is that im a gay mexican? What the fuck is your problem? i was just asking for some news reports to read up on, which i was provided. Idk why you felt the need to comment at all, this whole exchange was over when Chunk gave me the link. But nooo, stop everything because Frezik, this random fuckin guy who has not been in the conversation up until this point, has yet to share his political opinion. God fucking forbid I want to be informed ig.
Vytle, you’re fine. I wasn’t entirely sure you were serious when I responded, but I took a look at your post history and you generally maintain very courteous interactions so I took you at your word. Unfortunately, trolls often begin with a question such as you posed, and that’s why you got jumped. My apologies. Thank you for taking an interest in US politics, I’m sorry we’re such a shitty neighbor.
The years 2016 until the present, almost a daily occurrence.
You sound like someone I’d love to hang out with.
BRUH
Remember?
Speaker list is a veritable who’s who of terrible people.
What are they going to do when he dies? Jump off a really high cliff into a rocky coastline?
It’s hard to imagine the GOP not splitting in some way after he dies. There are going to be a ton of people trying to claim his mantle, and they don’t care at all about destroying each other in the process
Just look at Boebert and MTG both competing to be “the MAGA girl”. They hate each other. There’s no room in MAGA for a team, just moronic personalities and supplication to whoever is currently the head MAGA.
Good. They’ll eat each other and maybe, just maybe, we can get actual shit done.
It’s the only way this country can survive going forwards. If we’re able to vote him out long enough that he croaks.
It will be a bucket of crabs, like Gaetz and McCarthy, Boobert and Marge, etc.
I don’t know but can we find out soon?
It’s his neck looks like it has a butthole in this picture.
It does in most of his pictures.
I was just looking at an article talking about is fucked up makeup and in that photo he has a neck pussy in place of the neck butthole.
His whole head looks like a deflated haemorrhoid.
That’s just his mangina.
I guess the mouth breathers are going to have to go back to rubbin’ 'em out to Guns and Ammo back issues.
“Freedom fest cancelled.”
There’s a LOT of irony in that.
Freedom fest lol
They love that word more than they love actual freedom.
Let me offer you an alternative definition of freedom…
Freedom for the masters!
“Freedom Fest”. These people co-opt terms like freedom, liberty, etc., and now they have their exact opposite meaning when they use them.
The little d party is not about freedom at all. They are for the very opposite of freedom, at least for anyone outside their increasingly smaller definition of what it means to be part of their in-group.
Uh oh, “Cancel Culture” infiltrates the AZGOP I guess!
He was only going to get votes to get the nomination. He has no other use for those plebians
Yeah, now that the RNC is basically just going to declare him the winner.
