One of the most concerning accusations to come out of Michael Wolff’s new book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, is the insinuation that Donald Trump may not be mentally firing on all cylinders — which is nothing new, as there have been rumblings at to the state of his mental health since before he took office. However Wolff’s assertions that the president did not recognize old friends and repeats himself several times over the course of 10 minutes suggests that he may be suffering from early onset dementia, and the fact that his father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s is definitely concerning.
Wolff’s book was once again the leading topic of conversation on The View, although the ladies differed in opinion on whether or not it was fair to armchair diagnose the President of the United States. When co-host Sunny Hostin brought up the excerpt about Trump repeating himself, Joy Behar interjected, “We’re gonna talk about that because he’s reportedly unraveling over this, he’s yelling at staffers, he can’t stop watching all the bad press about him, he repeats these terrible things people say about him over and over again.”
Meghan McCain agreed that Trump probably is unraveling, because this book does look really bad for him, but still questions the validity of some of the accounts in it. Bringing it back around however, Behar stated that she thinks Trump has short term memory loss. “So do any of us have a medical degree though? I mean, we’re not doctors,” McCain shot back. “I don’t need a medical degree for what I just said,” countered Behar.
“This is an ambiguous area, self-diagnosing, we’re not doctors,” McCain repeated. “And again, there’s a lot of bigger problems that are going on and diagnosing our president’s mental health– we’re not doctors, we’re talk show hosts!”
Stepping in as the voice of reason, Hostin interrupted. “If this is true, I don’t think it’s a stretch when you know the facts that his father had Alzheimer’s for six years that died,” she pointed out, to McCain’s protests. “And that’s one of the problems that we have in terms of the review of our presidents. The president is not mandated to have a medical exam.”
Valid points were made on both sides of the argument, however if the president is indeed afflicted with dementia, then that’s a problem for everyone.