What could unite swing-state voters against Trump? The d-word

I could be wrong, but JB Pritzker may be the first Democrat to apply the d-word to Donald Trump. More importantly, the Illinois governor may be the first to link his criminality to his dementia. And! He may be the first to explain America’s existential crisis in context of a remedy.

A threefer! He said:

"It appears that Donald Trump not only has dementia set in, but he's copying tactics of Vladimir Putin. Sending troops into cities, thinking that that's some sort of proving ground for war, or that indeed there's some sort of internal war going on in the United States is just, frankly, inane, and I'm concerned for his health. There is something genuinely wrong with this man, and the 25th Amendment ought to be invoked."

Like I said, I could be wrong. California Governor Gavin Newsom came close to saying it. Last month, his social media account mocked one of Trump’s Truth Social posts, parsing all the lives, with a zinger on top: “Take your dementia meds, Grandpa. You are making things up again.” (Newsom has also said there’s something wrong with Trump. He suggested his cognition has decayed dramatically since his first term.)

But that’s as close as Newsom got, and as far as I can tell, no Democrat as high as Pritzker has said outright that Donald Trump is demented.

This is not to say no one has been talking about it directly. I have. USA Today’s Rex Huppke has. The New Republic’s Greg Sargent has. The Hill’s Chris Truax has. There are dozens more examples. (There’s also a repertoire of wink-wink-nudge-nudge that the Democrats have used since Joe Biden dropped out of the campaign. Kamala Harris talked a lot about Trump’s “stamina” and “weakness.” Others followed her lead.)

But that’s pretty much the extent of it. Despite wall-to-wall coverage of Joe Biden’s mental state, now to the point where some respectable journalists are claiming there was a vast conspiracy to cover it up, the Washington press corps seemed to have priced into their coverage of Trump his obvious deterioration. There’s barely a hint of anything about it. Absolutely no one has used the d-word in their reporting. It’s enough to make you wonder if there’s a vast conspiracy to cover it up.

I will say that something changed this week, at least in terms of coverage by the New York Times, which tends to be a bellwether for newspeople. A piece on his gathering of top military brass resulted in this reaction from a seasoned Times-watcher: “I assert that The New York Times has changed its approach to writing about Trump.”

The article, headlined “Trump Gave the Military’s Brass a Rehashed Speech. Until Minute 44,” was about how difficult it is to pick out the newsworthy bits from Trump’s speeches, as they tend to be retreads of the same things he’s always going on about. Despite addressing elites of the American military, Trump twaddled on about Biden and the “infamous autopen”; about the unfair media; about tariffs; about the border; about “the time he went to a restaurant in Washington to eat dinner”; and even the “Nobel Peace Prize he felt he had earned.”

As Times reporter Shawn McCreesh said: “These were pretty much the same things he talked about a day earlier while standing next to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in the State Dining Room at the White House, which were the same things he talked about at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service in Arizona, which were the same things he talked about at Windsor Castle and at Chequers in England.”

But then, out of that miasma of mangled words, broken thoughts and disconnections arose “something new. Something different,” McCreesh wrote. The president of the United States said that “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”

To make sure you don’t miss it, McCreesh repeats those words in italics. “‘We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military,’ the president of the United States said.”

McCreesh is reporting, not commenting. He’s not saying directly that Trump looks like an old man whose brain is so broken he can’t stop perseverating on the same five topics or that out of that word salad, he sometimes spews the pristine proclamations of a dictator. Instead, he takes a reportorial approach toward arriving at a similar conclusion. He’s showing, in other words, not telling, and the showing is clear.

“It has become harder to perceive the occasionally revealing things the president says … because of the way he sometimes says them,” McCreesh wrote. “For a 79-year-old, he’s often shown a great deal of energy, but he seemed a bit sapped Tuesday. As his remarks went on and on, his voice took on a more monotonous quality. A day earlier, when he spoke … Mr. Trump sounded out of breath at times.”

McCreesh could have taken a different reportorial approach.

He could have backgrounded the word salad and focused on how the “training ground” remark is in keeping with all the other dictatorial things Trump has said, which altogether are in keeping with Project 2025, published prior to the election. McCreesh could have focused on how, with each of these statements, the president seems to be coming around to publicly embracing that manifesto, after having renounced it. Indeed, such an approach would have gone viral. Just today, Trump said, in essence, he lied when he said he had nothing to do with it.

In short, McCreesh could have set aside the word salad to establish continuity between, say, the president who led an attempted insurrection and the president who said, years later, “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”

Instead, McCreesh foregrounds Trump’s word salad to suggest that something has changed, and that such change could itself suggest that his dictatorial statements are the exception to the rule. “Thousands of words pour forth from the president’s mouth,” he wrote. “Sometimes, he tucks in a wild insight about the direction he is taking the country.”

Which brings me back to JB Pritzker. He’s why I’m dwelling on this piece and the way Shawn McCreesh wrote it. In being the first leading Democrat to use the word “dementia,” he’s doing something similar – foregrounding Trump’s deteriorated mental state such that all the crazy things that he’s doing in defiance of reason, morality, the Constitution and the law are downstream from there. (McCreesh’s foregrounding is, of course, implicit while Pritzker’s is explicit).

While other Democrats are making what seem to be ideological or policy-based arguments against the president – he’s a threat to your freedoms or he’s failing to protect your health care – Pritzker can take what you might call a position of big-hearted centrism. He can stand against Trump’s tyranny while at the same time genuinely lament that his disease has turned him into a despot. Now the dementia has set in, Pritzker said, Trump is copying Putin. “I'm concerned for his health.”

This won’t be fully convincing to a lot of people, myself included, but its effectiveness with independent voters might bring us around in time. Pritzker, or another ambitious Democrat, could easily pivot this framing to include all those things that swing voters thought he was going to do but didn’t. Why is food still so expensive? Why did my electric bill go up? Why didn’t Trump do what he said he was going to do? You could, as liberals often do, say that he lied, or that he actually wants to immiserate the middle class. But that would require changing swing voters’ minds. It would require them to admit they were wrong. Probably more effective to say, well, he’s gone mad with the dementia.

It’s the difference between the patient and his sickness. He isn’t saying “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds,” because he’s a fascist. He’s saying it because he’s sick. While the symptoms are the same, the diagnosis is politically what matters.

Consider comments made by Jack Cocchiarella. A CNN host asked the young YouTube influencer for his thoughts on the government shutdown. “Trump to me is kind of this dementia-addled nursing home patient in the White House right now,” he said. “He’s leaning on [budget director Russell] Vought, he’s leaning on [Deputy Chief of Staff] Stephen Miller, because he doesn’t want to get the job done.

“He just doesn’t seem interested in negotiating. He’s taking pleasure in what Russ Vought said, which would be the traumatizing of federal workers. That was their goal coming into this administration. So it seems like that’s all they wanna do. And I don’t know how that gets any Democrat, who actually cares about people who are gonna see their premium double, triple, to come to the table, and why would you?

“This Administration doesn’t want to engage.”

Nothing here about Trump being fascist. Cocchiarella merely thinks he doesn’t want to negotiate with Democrats because he’s old and mean.

Since last year’s election, the Democrats have been in debate with themselves. Some say they need to keep sounding the alarm about Trump’s threat to democracy. Others say that didn’t work last time and they should focus on “kitchen-table issues,” which is to say, economics.

Dementia, in the way that Pritzker used it, could be the link between them. Why is Trump acting like a dictator? Why didn’t he do more to bring down my grocery bill? Same answer. It’s as elegant as it is simple.