If you follow Aaron Rupar on Bluesky, you may already have seen the current occupant nodding in and out of consciousness this afternoon.
What really caught my eye though was his facial expression as he prepared to answer a question (at the eight-second mark). It may be normal to fall asleep as Howard Lutnick goes on and on. But that kind of facial expression? Not normal. It was there a few days ago as well. I think that’s the face of dementia.
Is it irresponsible to speculate? I don’t think so. What’s really irresponsible is journalists’ refusal to ask obvious questions. “Mr. President, you sometimes appear to be asleep while members of your cabinet are speaking. Could you comment on what Secretary Lutnick said earlier?”
Monday, August 31, 2026
Faces
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If this were somebody other than the president of the United States, he would be attended to, and moved aside, for his completely irrelevant and inappropriate actions, respondences.
ReplyDeleteAnd how insane it is that being in a position of authority gives him a pass.
ReplyDeleteInteresting idea, Michael. I’m surprised that a newspaper, even a small one, hasn’t asked an expert to run some footage of the president through some of the programs designed to detect dementia. The science is emerging but seems straightforward to me. You can get the gist of it from “Detecting Dementia from Face-Related Features with Automated Computational Methods,” which is at the NIH’s National Library of Medicine:
ReplyDeletehttps://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10376259/
“More negative emotional expressions and more facial expressiveness than healthy controls”: that sounds a lot like the current occupant, save for when he’s sleeping.
ReplyDeleteI see dementia also in the blank stare he offers when other people are talking — he appears not to be engaged.