This all happened almost a year ago. While we the public did not have knowledge of exactly what was happening to the same level of detail as we now have with this report, it was all pretty much known then in all its important features.
How could anyone then have looked at Trump’s behavior in this episode, and been left with the impression that he was able to discharge the powers and duties of his office?
Oh, sure, no doubt about it, having our side gin up hearings in the House about his cognitive impairment, in order to fulfill the general duty of the Congress to see to the general welfare, and its specific duty to appoint some other body should the cabinet fail to vote to remove an impaired president, might not have seemed a remedy appropriate to such a trivial, non-threatening, display of impaired cognitive ability.
Mostly the presidency runs on rails, because the federal govt runs mostly on rails, and so the president mostly just has to project purely symbolic mastery of the most powerful job on the planet. Demented Reagan held the office for eight years, but he took direction well, so raised little concern he wouldn’t get out of the way and let non-demented people handle anything important that might crop up. No harm, no foul if we see the president show the effects of dementia over weather forecasting. Except this, that occasionally a crisis crops up, and we actually need the president to react in a way that requires an ability to reality test with some competence.
There was no need to suspend Trump because his dementia made him do the Sharpie thing, because that was harmless. COVID is not harmless. Trump’s dementia is keeping him from getting out of the way and allowing competent people to handle it, in ways that we know are perfectly achievable, because every single nation on the face of the planet that has the resources to track COVID even approximately, is doing way better than the US, in ways that are saving lives in the tens of thousands.
We had this warning a year ago, and ignored it because the failure of reality testing was over something trivial in itself. But the failure of reality testing itself, in someone who held this office, was not at all trivial, and something that should have been fobbed off to the electorate at the next election to get rid of the demented guy. Of course our system is still failing, is still shrugging and fobbing the task of removal off on the electorate, even though now it is obvious that waiting until Inauguration Day 2021 to get a president who can reality test is way too long to wait.
We have a president who suffers from literal dementia, but that’s alright, he’s actually perfect for our political system, because that system suffers from a metaphorical dementia, so it’s all good.