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.
The only one of your assertions I was able to verify was the 22 minute speech after winning the Iowa Caucus:
https://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/politics/elections/2024/01/16/former-president-donald-trump-speaks-at-iowa-caucus-watch-party/72239132007/
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/KBjmI
SECOND 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.
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.