TRUMP’S INSULTS DEMEAN FAMILIES COPING WITH DEMENTIA
President Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 campaign aired its “daisy” TV ad against Barry Goldwater that showed a little girl plucking daisy petals as an ominous voiceover delivered a dramatic countdown to a nuclear attack. But the ad generated so much outrage that it ran just that once. Now, after this week’s GOP convention, the 2020 presidential campaign is shaping up to be perhaps the most contentious one in modern history.
It is already intensely personal.
For weeks, the Trump campaign and its allies have been targeting the Democratic nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden, as cognitively impaired. He’s “losing it,” “not all there,” “can’t put two sentences together,” etc.
Biden’s impressive delivery of his acceptance speech Thursday evening refuted that last charge. But it doesn’t guarantee that presenting Biden in a mental fog — or even afflicted with dementia, the GOP’s implicit slur — will diminish.
Still, you have to wonder why a presidential campaign would embrace a campaign tactic that would transform innocent people into collateral damage.
Those would be friends and relatives of older Americans who have contracted Alzheimer’s, the most common form of dementia, as the UsAgainstAlzheimer’s (UAA) organization reports. Early onset dementia afflicts thousands more every year.
The Alzheimer’s Association (alz.org) says the disease is the sixth leading cause of death in America, killing more people than breast and prostate cancers combined. There is no cure. And funds needed for research are woefully inadequate.
Biden is pushing back against the cognitive slur. Asked recently whether he’d been “tested for cognitive decline,” he responded, “I can hardly wait to compare my cognitive capability to the capability of the man I’m running against.”
There is no mystery why the president is pushing Biden-is-mentally-incompetent narrative even as he lies about mail-in voting and the threat of voter fraud. Given Biden’s current polling advantage, there’s no doubt Trump is planning a scorchedearth campaign unlike anything we’ve seen before.
As one example of that, look no further than his eagerness to deploy variations of the Alzheimer’s slur against Biden — certainly with no concern of the tactic’s impact on families dealing with relatives stricken with the disease.
When older men or women contract Alzheimer’s, or early on-set dementia, relatives or friends typically offer help however they can on behalf of family members as the disease progresses.
That often results in a role-reversal, as when a or son or daughter effectively becomes the parent.
After my father contracted Alzheimer’s, he did allow me to give him a bath twice, even as he argued the bath was unnecessary. But as the disease progressed, it became necessary in June 2000 for me to commit him to a facility in tiny Red Springs, North Carolina. I learned later that after I’d signed the paperwork and left, Dad had frantically searched for me.
The commitment decision, I later told my brother and sisters, was roughly equivalent to abandoning one’s child at a mall. Dad died two weeks later.
It is impossible to know how many Americans are tending to an Alzheimer’s-afflicted parent, and may soon have to make the same decision.
I’d like to think that most of them have been revulsed by President Trump’s cynical hijacking of their tragedy for his re-election campaign.
The reality is that Trump seems willing to do whatever it takes to win in November. Given his fragile ego, why should we be surprised by his resort to any repugnant claim against Biden — even when it ignores the tragedies of Americans who’ve lost a family member to an incurable disease?
So: Does he care?
Please. If we’ve learned anything about him since 2017, it is that he cares only about himself.
Michael Loftin is a former opinion page editor for The Chattanooga Times.