For cognitive decline, Trump train lacks emergency brake

When I was young, my grandfather on my mother’s side descended into what was then called premature senility — dementia — and became a very different person.

So much so that we didn’t visit him, and my mother’s mouth would take a distinct downward turn at the corners when his name came up. He was not the father she knew any more. There was, I think, a lot of hurt in there I wasn’t ever told about.

It was also a spectre that haunted her — because she feared the same fate was coming to her.

She was concerned enough about what she called “losing my mind” that she built fail-safes — if she or Dad started spending money oddly, for example, my brothers and I were supposed to be contacted, and the closest sibling geographically would be able to use a sort of floating power of attorney to take control, if necessary.

It wasn’t revocable. Mom knew what might be coming, and she wasn’t leaving anything to chance. Lawyers knew. Accountants knew. Neighbours knew.

In the end, though, it was a member of her book club who put it all in motion, when my mother urgently called for help and the book club member found her distraught, with every coffeemaker in the house — the glass percolator, my father’s steel espresso maker, the electric coffee maker — taken apart into their constituent pieces and spread on dish towels on the kitchen counter.

My mother needed someone to help her figure out how to make coffee. She had forgotten how, and none of the pieces of coffee-making equipment made any sense.

More disorder and confusion followed, until eventually she was sure she was still living on the East Coast instead of on the edge of Victoria, B.C.

I say all this because of a single sentence in a social media posting by U.S. President Donald Trump this past week.

“The first thing China will do is terminate ALL Ice Hockey being played in Canada, and permanently eliminate The Stanley Cup.”

That line, that oddly phrased and out of context, was immediately familiar to me.

Trump’s post was really about a new border-crossing bridge between Windsor, Ont., and Detroit, and Trump’s sudden decision that the project was unfair to the U.S. — but the post descended, as late-night Trump posts often do, into a morass of other grievances, real and imagined.

That one line, though. I’m not a doctor, and I could well be wrong about this, but for me, it was the penny-dropping moment.

It was the tell of all tells.

It was so familiar to me because it had all the trappings of someone who’s lost trying very hard to pull out and express a clear thought through what had become an impossible forest of mental wrong turns and dead ends.

You can imagine the squiggly little line of his thought process: “What do Canadians care about? Hockey. What’s important about hockey? Trophies.”

I heard sentences exactly like that from my mother — you could translate them so they made sense, but only if you took their abstraction into account: that she couldn’t find the right words for parts of what she was trying to say, and that other parts depended on linkages to her past that still remained active.

You had to reverse engineer them through her own past experiences and beliefs, and try to winkle out the point she was trying to make.

But to do that, you also had to have a working knowledge of what that past was — the key that could unlock the code — and you couldn’t always have that.

The hardest? When my mother woke me up at three in the morning, frightened and in pain, and urgently said to me, “Call the people. Just call the people. And put me in a bag out by the curb.”

The logic was tortured, but the meaning was clear. She said it again and again. She had good, clear times — but fewer and further between.

My mother, after my father’s death, was in command of the retirement savings she and my father had built, a modest bungalow with a kitchen-window view of Mount Douglas and a vegetable garden, a sensible four-door sedan used almost exclusively for picking up groceries, and a small off-white dog named Coach.

But Donald Trump is the commander-in-chief of the American armed forces.

Many things Trump has done have made me remarkably angry — I’ve been frustrated by his bullying decisions and his bonehead economics, his destruction of a great democracy and his obsequious pandering to despots. The deaths that have resulted from things like the cutbacks to USAID, the failure to support Ukraine, the undermining of medicine and science, and a whole lot more — I think he is plain and simply a global danger.

That hasn’t changed.

This, on a truly individual level, only makes me sad. Because it looks a lot like Trump’s inner circle is going to keep propping him up as if their careers depend on it, no matter where his mind goes.

My mom carefully prepared for what she feared was coming. The framers of the U.S. Constitution did, too. But it really looks like the Trump train has no similar brakes.

I know what comes next.

And if you’ve dealt with a family member with dementia, you know what comes next as well.

It’s horrible.

But unlike the president, our family members don’t have the ability to start a war in the midst of their inevitable decline.

Russell Wangersky is the Comment Editor at the Free Press. He can be reached at russell.wangersky@freepress.mb.ca.