The Real Reason Donald Trump Is Mixing Up Joe Biden and Barack Obama Isn’t His Dementia—It’s Something Much Worse
Trump critics—even some journalists—have called into question his mental state, as is warranted given his recent behavior. But his odd conduct regarding Obama has a very different origin.
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Introduction
Donald Trump has exhibited confusion about who the current President of the United States is a number of times over the last few months—at least nine times, according to Forbes—which is a cause for concern, given the increasing number of medical professionals who say that Trump is now showing clear signs of dementia.
And perhaps some of what’s happening with Trump indeed involves dementia, as just released viral clips like this one would seem to suggest.
But with respect to Trump repeatedly referring to Barack Obama and not Joe Biden as the current President of the United States, there’s a possibility—a very good one, in fact—that in this instance the reason for the former president’s bizarre verbiage is one Trump himself has belatedly offered: that he’s making reference to a now-ubiquitous conspiracy theory on the far right that holds that Obama, not Biden, is in fact running the United States.
Specifically, Trump just told a crowd in Richmond, Virginia, that “Every time I….say ‘our president, Barack Hussein Obama’—now, I do that because, you know, that makes a point. We understand that, right? Because a lot of people say he’s running the country. I don’t personally think so.”
Of course, even in offering up this new defense for a bizarre, and bizarrely consistent, transposition of Obama and Biden, Trump is dissembling—as he at once claims to be referencing a conspiracy theory but also saying that he doesn’t believe it (which would undercut any reason he could possibly have for repeatedly citing it, as doing so not only lends credence to it, which Trump would be fine with, but also suggests that he credits it, which per his Richmond speech is not an impression that he wants to leave).
Instead, the available evidence points to Mr. Trump indeed believing in this particular conspiracy theory—which from any standpoint, considering how conspicuously unfounded it is, is worse than him exhibiting signs of early- to mid-stage dementia.
This essay explains how, why, and when Trump came to hold beliefs about the 44th President of the United States—including the implicitly racist one mentioned above—that are so extraordinary that they should be seen as terrifying and even disqualifying.
Trump and Obama: A Brief History
I’ll first very briefly summarize some key historical events that are discussed in much more detail in my 2018 New York Times bestseller Proof of Collusion (Simon & Schuster).
As bizarre and memorable as these are, they still remain unknown to most Americans.