Cognitive Decline? Listen to Trump Try to Describe Missile Defense

Donald Trump took the road less traveled on Monday, opting to use sounds and shapes rather than words to explain what he had in mind for America’s military.

During a campaign stop in Laconia, New Hampshire—the last rally before the state’s Republican primary—Trump announced that under his leadership, the country would copy and paste Israel’s Iron Dome defense system over our own national borders. That idea, by the way, has previously earned him ridicule even by the likes of Fox News.

“I will build an Iron Dome over our country, a state-of-the-art missile defense shield made in the USA,” Trump said. “We do it for other countries. We help other countries, we build, we don’t do it for ourselves.”

But then, things got weird as Trump tried once again to assert his “extremely stable genius” status.

“These are not muscle guys here, they’re muscle guys up here, right,” Trump said, gesturing to his arms and then his head.

“And they calmly walk to us, and ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.… They’ve only got 17 seconds to figure this whole thing out. Boom. OK. Missile launch. Woosh. Boom,” he added.

The stunning performance comes after the 77-year-old bragged that he “aced” a cognitive test that required him to correctly identify a giraffe, tiger, and whale. According to Trump, that means his “mind is stronger now than it was 25 years ago.” In reality, that test is meant to measure dementia or cognitive decline, and it has never included the combination of animals Trump keeps mentioning.

Trump’s cognitive decline has been in question recently after the GOP front-runner was spotted with mysterious red sores on his hands. Trump has also been making increasingly nonsense remarks during his campaign tangents—last week, the former president said he would stop banks from “debanking” Americans—and confusing major players in American politics. During another campaign speech, Trump switched up former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and his only rival in the GOP race, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, several times, blaming Haley for the events of January 6 while claiming she turned down extra security. (The House committee assigned to probe the attack found no evidence to support Trump’s claim, which he has previously leveled at Pelosi.)

“Don’t be surprised if you have someone that is 80 in office, their mental stability is going to continue to decline. That’s just human nature,” Haley said Sunday on Face the Nation. “I don’t know if he was confused, I don’t know what happened, but it’s enough to send us a warning sign.”

House Republicans are getting increasingly frustrated at their caucus’s inability to draft laws and enact change, with some very publicly complaining about their party’s lack of accomplishments.

“We have nothing. In my opinion, we have nothing to go out there and campaign on,” Arizona Representative Andy Biggs told Newsmax’s Chris Salcedo at the beginning of the year. “It’s embarrassing.”

“The Republican Party in the Congress majority has zero accomplishments,” Salcedo agreed.

That’s in part thanks to the party’s incredibly slim majority in the House, which can currently only afford two defections on any given vote, as well as a growing rift in the Republican Party that has split lawmakers between long-standing conservative ideals and Trumpian loyalism.

The 118th Congress has passed fewer than 30 bills thus far, a paltry showing compared to previous congresses, which have generally passed more than 300.

With just 10 months until Election Day, the lacking report card is beginning to hang heavy over many Republicans, who fear it may be a death knell for their political ambitions.

“If we keep extending the pain and creating more suffering, we will pay the price at the ballot box. But if we can get on with governance and get the best policy wins we can, then you can open-field this thing,” former Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry told reporters on Thursday. “But at this point, we are sucking wind because we can’t get past the main object in the road. Once we get past that main object, then it’s the president’s performance on the economy, it’s the president’s performance on national security.”

McHenry also said Johnson needs to get a grip on the fact that Republicans “control one-third of the negotiations” so “we’re going to not get 100 percent of the wins.”

Against all odds, several openings for Republican wins lie on the horizon. The spending deal between House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer could secure big wins for spending cuts, while a Senate immigration deal could help Republicans tighten border security. Yet none of those are guaranteed for the divided caucus, which so far has effectively objected to any negotiations with Democrats.

The party has shown little interest in actually working on those openings, threatening to boot Johnson for negotiating with Democrats and opting instead to spend time nitpicking and ousting its House leadership and dragging on a meritless impeachment of President Joe Biden, which some party members have admitted has “no evidence.”

And other Republicans, instead of turning their attention to material policy change, are privately predicting Johnson’s end should the party lose its majority in the House this fall.

“I don’t think he’s safe right now,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene told Politico. “The only reason he’s speaker is because our conference is so desperate.”

Some conservatives saw the writing on the wall months ago. In November, Freedom Caucus member Representative Chip Roy blew a gasket, criticizing his party for continually failing to follow through on campaign promises, even when it had the majority in the House, Senate, and White House during Trump’s presidency.

“One thing. I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing. One. That I can go campaign on and say we did,” Roy said. “One!”

“Talked a big game about building a wall and having Mexico pay for it. Ain’t no wall, and Mexico didn’t pay for it, and we didn’t pass any border security,” he added.

The nation’s highest court ruled on Monday that federal agents could snip or move razor wire Texas agents placed along the Rio Grande section of the U.S.-Mexico border, siding with the federal government and President Joe Biden that Texas had overstepped its authority in national border enforcement.

The 5–4 decision, which was issued without an opinion as is the norm in cases of emergency applications, is the latest update in a monthslong spar between Texas Governor Greg Abbott and the federal government over elements of its anti-immigration effort dubbed “Operation Lone Star.” In October, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced the initial lawsuit against the Biden administration, claiming that federal agents were unlawfully destroying elements of the state’s border deterrence efforts and “damaging Texas’s ability to effectively deter illegal entry into Texas.”

“Texas has the sovereign right to construct border barriers to prevent the entry of illegal aliens,” said Paxton at the time.

The case was granted an emergency request filed by the Biden administration, which argued that the wire was preventing federal agents from accessing the border and from reaching migrants who had already crossed the border.

A federal judge initially ruled for the Biden administration, but a decision by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals—based in New Orleans—reversed that decision last month, preventing federal agents from moving the wire except in the event of a medical emergency.

The slim decision saw Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett join the court’s three liberal justices to side with Biden over Texas.

House Republicans started the week with a new, even smaller majority that could set the chamber up for a remarkably unproductive session.

As of Monday, Democrats have 213 seats in the House. Republicans have just 219 seats, after Ohio Representative Bill Johnson served his last day in the chamber this weekend. There are also two other vacancies, with the expulsion of George Santos and the resignation of Kevin McCarthy late last year.

This will likely make it even harder for Congress to get anything done in its new session. If just three Republican lawmakers dissent, Republicans won’t be able to pass legislation. If Democrats win over four Republicans, they could flip the tables and push through their own agenda.

During the first half of its first two-year session, when Republicans had a larger majority in the House, the 118th Congress passed less than 30 bills through both chambers. Typically, Congress passes between 300 and 450 laws per session.

Even when Republicans controlled at least one chamber during Bill Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s presidencies, Congress managed to pass at least 70 bills during those sessions.

This Congress’s low productivity can be blamed in large part on Republican in-fighting, particularly over government spending bills and their own House speaker. The party’s farthest-right wing has repeatedly demanded to slash government spending, taking the U.S. to the brink of a disastrous shutdown multiple times as representatives fought to get their way.

This led to McCarthy’s ousting as House speaker, after he made a deal with Democrats to keep the government funded. The multiple agonizing rounds of votes for speaker, first for McCarthy and then for his successor, Mike Johnson, have paralyzed the House. And Johnson may soon be on the chopping block, as well.

More than ever, Republicans can’t afford defectors if they want to pass anything. But they have yet to achieve total unity for a single vote. It’s starting to look less and less likely that Congress will achieve anything this year, either.

Republican Representative Nancy Mace, an outspoken sexual assault survivor, has endorsed rapist Donald Trump for president, yet another example of her constant stunning hypocrisy.

Mace announced her endorsement on Monday. “I don’t see eye to eye perfectly with any candidate. And until now I’ve stayed out of it,” the South Carolina representative told the AP. “But the time has come to unite behind our nominee.”

“To be honest, it’s been a complete shit show since he left the White House. Donald Trump’s record in his first term should tell every American how vital it is he be returned to office,” she added.

It may not seem like a huge surprise that yet another Republican lawmaker has endorsed Trump for president. But when it comes to Mace, the announcement is particularly embarrassing.

Mace has made her story of surviving sexual assault a major part of her identity. She said it took her 25 years to share the story, after she was raped at just 16 years old, and it was one of the hardest things she’s ever done. Since sharing her story, Mace has at least somewhat advocated for rape survivors during her time in Congress, and repeatedly urged Republicans to adopt more moderate stances on issues such as abortion.

It’s also a little premature to call Trump the GOP’s nominee. There’s still another Republican in the 2024 presidential primary: former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who staunchly supported Mace in her 2022 congressional bid. Meanwhile, Trump endorsed her primary opponent, and called Mace an “absolutely terrible candidate,” “crazy,” and a “terrible person.”

That wasn’t enough to sway Mace’s views on Trump, as she apparently no longer even cares about her own previous warnings on the Republican front-runner. Mace had blasted Trump in the wake of the January 6 insurrection, saying his actions that day “wiped out” everything Republicans had accomplished during his term.

Trump, as a reminder, has been found liable for sexually assaulting the writer E. Jean Carroll. The judge in the case went out of his way to clarify that as we understand the common definition of the word “rape,” Trump can be considered a rapist.

Trump is currently on trial for defaming Carroll when denying her accusations. Despite the fact that Trump is now a proven rapist, Mace is backing him.

That shouldn’t come as a surprise, though: For all her talk about not passing what she calls “asshole” measures on abortion, Mace falls in line with her party every single time. Mace betrayed her purported ideals for the sake of her party’s ideology a long time ago.