MRI Says Trump Is A Bad Person

Trump's evil has cooked his brain

Over the weekend Our President of the Gilded Toilet dragged himself away from eternal contemplation of his orange anus to chat with the hated press on the greatest of all airplanes, Trump Force 1.

Said press corps asked him about his physical last month. Trump, of course bloviated that his physical had been awesome. Then he added that he had had an MRI.

Routine physicals usually do not involve an MRI, which is an expensive procedure used for close study of possible soft tissue damage, including brain damage from strokes. So the evil reporters asked Trump follow up questions, such as, “Why did you have an MRI?” Also, in the quiet of their hearts, “What the fuck are you talking about?” “What is your problem you fucking orange fuckhead?” and possibly, “Why has God forsaken us?”

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Trump responded to these interrogatories, voiced and unvoiced, with further bloviation.

Here’s what the story is. I had an MRI. The doctor said it was the best result he has ever seen as a doctor. That’s it. But, I had an MRI as part of my standard, yearly—or, I think they do it every two years. But I have the physical every year. But the result was outstanding.

Not especially forthcoming! So a journalist tried to do more jouranlisting to get further clarity. “Was it your brain, or…?”

At which point, Trump, high on his greatest of all time MRI results, responded, “I have no idea what they analyzed, but whatever they analyzed, they analyzed it well.”

In short, Trump does not know why he had an MRI and does not even know what part of his body was scanned. Perhaps it was his brain, but he does not know, because he takes his brain out of his head in order to apply his stupid orange makeup. Maybe they did an MRI of his ass to determine if his brain is actually down there. All Trump knows, is that if he gets an enema, it is the best enema; if he has a brain worm, it is the biggest brainworm. If the doctor analyzes his MRI, that doctor is making analysis great again. Thank you for your inattention to this matter.

Has Trump’s forebrain rotted like decaying meat?

If Joe Biden had told reporters he got an MRI but he couldn’t remember what for, the nation’s media would seize the emergency broadcasting system, hire planes with giant banners reading “BIDEN’S BRAIN IS TOAST” to criss-cross every county, and stage an orgy hosted by skyclad and erect Jake Tapper. The Atlantic would start a new vertical; Ross Douthat, Ezra Klein, and Bret Stephens would write 5 columns apiece, each one more brow-furrowed than the last.

Since it’s Trump, of course, most venues have just shrugged and (on the brighter side) we do not get skyclad Jake Tapper. A certain number of progressives have, though, pointed out that it does not seem like a great sign when the President can’t remember if he left his brain in the MRI or not. Journalist Mehdi Hassan asked, “How is this not 25^th Amendment territory?” Alex Underwood at The New Republic pointed out that Trump is “the oldest person ever elected president”. On social media and elsewhere the mystery MRI has also been linked to Trump’s frequent habit of falling asleep in meetings and on camera.

Trump is aging and has visible symptoms of disability. He also is getting MRIs, speaks incoherent gibberish, and has an irrational hatred of windmills. He doesn’t know how tariffs work; he appears to think that “hoax” means “thing Trump does not want to talk about”. He thinks Portland is burning down; he has suggested that people cure COVID by injecting bleach. Some have concluded (like the subhead says) that his forebrain is rotting like decaying meat, and that he is therefore unfit for office.

Maybe we need an MRI to find Trump’s soul

As those of us who have been forced to watch Trump for years know, his plan to inject bleach is from his first term, when he was in his early and mid-70s rather than his late 70s, and when he was therefore supposedly more mentally adept. Back then he was young and fruity and did not need an MRI, just a good brain cleanse with ammonia and a line of ivermectin to snort.

The point being: Trump has always been shockingly ignorant and often wildly untethered from reality. His major entry point into politics was some 15 years ago as a proponent of the utterly false, racist birther theory that President Barack Obama was not born in the US. He lies pathologically all the time—even, famously, about the weather at his first inauguration. It’s entirely in character for him to lie about the results of an MRI; for that matter it’s entirely in character for him to lie about undergoing an MRI. He may vaguely think an MRI is special and cool and have decided it would be impressive to claim he had undergone one. Or he may really just not pay much attention during his physical because he prefers to think about how awesome he is; someone told him at some point he’d gotten an MRI and that stuck in his head even though he wasn’t sure which test that meant. This is someone who thinks Americans need to show ID to buy groceries; he does not in general even minimally know what’s going on.

I can’t say one way or the other whether Trump is in mental decline. I can say, though, that his belligerent ignorance long precedes the current moment. Trump knows nothing about tariffs and windmills and groceries and COVID and MRIs, not (just?) because he is in mental decline, but because he on principle will not learn anything from anyone. He famously refuses to listen to intelligence briefings because he finds them boring. He is monumentally, callously incurious. The only thing Trump cares about is the greatness of one Donald Trump, and he simply will not take in any information that is not directly relevant to that topic. Racism and sexism are appealing to him because he’s a white guy and so racism and sexism confirm to him that as a white man he is awesome. An MRI is interesting to him if it confirms that he is healthy and that he got the best MRI, whatever that is. Beyond that, who cares?

The moral is we need morals, not (just) intelligence

Mainstream media, and I think Democrats and progressives, are often more comfortable with using medicalized language when talking about morality than they are in using…well, moral language. We say that fighting to starve children is deranged rather than saying that it’s evil; we say murdering people on Latin American fishing boats for giggles is sick, rather than saying that it’s wicked.

Language of mental illness feels simultaneously more objective and more stigmatizing. If you can say that Trump is in decline, you can say that his removal is beyond partisanship while also smearing him with the disgust and shame that has been attached to disabled people through centuries of marginalization and contempt.

Unfortunately, amplifying mental health stigma is going to harm mentally ill people a lot more than it harms Trump. More, the rush to blame Trump’s moral failures on his cognitive failures gets the causality backwards. Trump is not a vile hateful racist narcissist because his cognition is limited or broken. His cognition is borked because he’s a megalomaniac racist. As I’ve discussed before, it’s fascism that makes you a fool, not low intelligence which makes you a fascist.

It’s fun and good to mock Trump for refusing to know anything, even unto his own MRI tests. But I think it’s important to realize that the problem is the refusal to know, rather than some form of organic not knowing. Being open to knowledge and listening to others is a teachable skill to some degree, but it’s also very much a moral choice—one that some very educated people, like, say, Heidegger, Pound, or J.D. Vance—not infrequently abandon in the name of power, ethnonationalism, and/or hate.

Trump is old, ignorant, and may be in mental decline. But lots of old people, lots of mentally ill people, and lots of poorly educated people aren’t monstrous fascists who live to terrorize immigrants, trans people, or anyone who criticizes them.

Whatever Trump’s MRI does or does not say, his unfitness is not because his brain is decaying. It’s because he long ago chose to use his brain to harm others and aggrandize himself and has continued to choose over and over to use his brian for that purpose and no other until he has made himself into one of the absolute worst human beings the world has ever known. An MRI can’t say that. But the rest of us can and should.