GOP ex-governor: Trump today is 'not the same' as when he was lucid

Speaking with MS NOW host Katy Tur on Tuesday, a former Republican governor who used to frequently interact with President Donald Trump expressed surprise at how far Trump has deteriorated after seeing footage of a more vibrant Trump a decade ago.

“The video you showed of Trump in 2015 worked,” former Gov. Pat McCrory of North Carolina told Tur. He was referring to a campaign speech in which Trump denounced Washington for being full of insiders and corruption. “It worked with me. I was governor at the time of the ninth largest state in the United States. That is not the same President Trump — where, at that time, he became President-elect Trump. His voice has changed dramatically, and I think he has lost some touch with the American people.”

McCrory is not the only one to notice a change in Trump’s voice. Speaking to AlterNet in May about a letter signed by three dozen health experts to Congress, psychiatrist Dr. Henry Abraham (formerly of Tufts University) said that “there has been a frightening progression of symptoms. These include grandiosity without moral safeguards, paranoia, impulsivity, vindictiveness, easy misperception of being harmed, moments of omnipotence, uncontrolled rage, and sole control over the use of nuclear weapons in a time of war.”

He added, “As a psychiatrist reviewing these, I can only say Yikes!”

The North Carolina politician also criticized his fellow Republican for allowing big money to influence his policies. Prior to doing so, Tur had discussed how American taxpayers were always expected to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on his planned White House ballroom, even though he previously claimed it would be entirely funded privately. Most Americans oppose the ballroom, Tur added, and Trump has not helped his image of being in the pocket of the wealthy by holding a Great Gatsby-themed party after repealing health care subsidies and recently visiting the opulent palace at Versailles, where the French Revolution occurred.

McCrory said that in 2022 he ‘realized both parties were bought and paid for by the crypto industry. They were taking money from anyone to pay for super PACs to get on TV, to get the majority of the Senate. That's all they cared about — power, both parties. And it's escalated even more since then. We're not Versailles. I don't think the American people wanted to be Versailles. Neither did Ben Franklin. Neither did John Adams.”

When it comes to Trump’s ballroom, the story of its dishonest origins was broken on Tuesday by Washington Post reporters Sarah Blaskey and Jonathan O'Connell. They found that the estimated "total construction cost" of the ballroom is "$600 million — with more than half coming from taxpayers."

"By the time Trump made his comments in March, the federal government had already approved more than a dozen payments to the contractor overseeing the work, Clark Construction, totaling tens of millions of dollars in public funds, according to a log of the contractor's invoices obtained by The Post,” Blaskey and O’Connell wrote. “Since first announcing the East Wing project last July, Trump has repeatedly said that the price tag would not exceed $400 million and that private donations routed through a nonprofit would cover its entire cost."

They added, "At other times, he has said that the Secret Service and the military would contribute security enhancements, without elaborating on the price of those upgrades. Multiple project summaries provided to the White House by Clark Construction show that internal cost estimates have been significantly higher than administration officials have acknowledged in public comments or court filings. They also show that the work was projected to rely heavily on taxpayer dollars from the moment it was announced."

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