Morning Joe namesake Joe Scarborough is back to claiming President Donald Trump has dementia.
That was his explanation on Thursday morning for Trump’s slurred speech at the end of a major address yesterday on Israel that has generated immense speculation and a dentist has blamed on a problem with the president’s dentures.
Saying he wants ‘to be very careful’ with the charge, Scarborough said he has personal experience with people ‘who are struggling with certain issues because their personality changes,’ namely his mother.
‘Unfortunately in the case of my mother, I can move that to the side and I am totally fine with that,’ he said. ‘In this case, Donald Trump has control of nuclear weapons.’
Morning Joe namesake Joe Scarborough is back to claiming President Donald Trump has dementia
The Morning Joe panel circled the topic on Thursday as they discussed Trump’s bizarre speech patterns yesterday. ‘He seemed like he was almost hanging on to the prompter and hanging on to the words,’ co-host Mika Brzezinski said. ‘Something, I don’t know…There was a struggle happening’
Scarborough went on to say, ‘If we can’t talk about this now, I’m trying to be as careful as we can, I don’t know when we can talk about it.’
He also said during the segment ‘this is not the person that we knew even three years ago.’
‘There’s a remarkable change,’ the MSNBC host said.
Scarborough and his on-air co-host, off-air girlfriend, Mika Brzezinski have been questioning Trump’s mental stability ever since the president assailed them in June on Twitter.
Trump claimed the couple begged to party with him on New Year’s eve at Mar-a-Lago. His version of the story has the television hosts, who he referred as ‘low I.Q. Crazy Mika’ and ‘Psycho Joe’ coming to his Florida property, three times around the holiday. He says Brzezinski was ‘bleeding badly from a face-lift’ at the time.
They fired back on air and in an op-ed that cast Trump as unfit for office.
‘We are both certain that the man is not mentally equipped to continue watching our show,’ they wrote in the Washington Post.
The cat fight with Trump ebbed over the summer only to flow once again after the president tweeted out of the blue about a woman who died in Scarborough’s former congressional office.
Scarborough has also ramped up his assessments that Trump is unwell in the last several weeks.
He said on a show earlier this week that many Republicans have told him when the cameras are off that Trump is mentally ‘unstable.’
‘So many people on Capitol Hill say that,’ he asserted, according to The Wrap.
Scarborough made a direct charge on the program last month that Trump is in the ‘early stages of dementia’ based on the accounts of people close to him.
‘People close to him say [he’s] mentally unfit. People close to him during the campaign told me [he] had early stages of dementia,’ he said, as reported in The Washington Examiner.
Scarborough said: ‘Everybody around Donald Trump knows he’s not stable. Everybody around Donald Trump knows he’s not stable now. Everybody.’
The Morning Joe panel circled the topic again on Thursday as they discussed Trump’s bizarre speech patterns yesterday.
‘He seemed like he was almost hanging on to the prompter and hanging on to the words,’ Brzezinski said. ‘Something, I don’t know…There was a struggle happening.’
Poligrip emergency? President Donald Trump slurred his speech at times during a speech on Wednesday, which a dentist tells DailyMail.com could be related to a loose denture plate
Regular guest Mike Barnicle, a columnist at The Daily Beast, said the 71-year-old president’s age and physical condition may be factors.
‘He does not look in great physical shape and hasn’t for some time,’ Barnicle said. ‘The anxiety, the worry, the burden of knowing that Bob Mueller and the special prosecutor is out there investigating nearly every aspect of his life and his family’s financial life and the fact that you know, he doesn’t really know the mechanics, the nuts and bolts of what he’s talking about a lot of times.’
Steve Schmidt, another show regular, pointed out that Trump has not been to Bethesda Naval Hospital since taking office for his annual check up.
‘This president, to my knowledge is departing that tradition,’ Steve Schmidt said. ‘We don’t have updates on his health, we don’t know what’s going on, but this is a legitimate issue worthy of consideration.’
Trump’s speaking cadence became irregular and his speech slurred through part of his speech Wednesday announcing changes to America’s Israel policy.
Speculation about the oratory oddity became national water-cooler talk after Trump finished his remarks by saying ‘God bless the United Shhtates. Thank you very much-sh.’
A White House spokesman says the president merely had a case of ‘dry mouth.’
But conspiracy theorists on Twitter launched into high gear, including Democratic partisans who speculated about every possible cause from a mini-stroke to cocaine use.
A Virginia dentist consulted by DailyMail.com watched a video of the speech Wednesday afternoon and concluded that the quirk ‘sounds like a loose denture plate.’
‘Saliva can get trapped between an upper plate and the palate – or between the lower plate and the lower jaw – and that’s what makes the noise,’ he said.
Washington, we have a problem: Trump, announcing changes in the U.S. policy toward Israel, ended his speech by saying: ‘God bless the United Shhtates’
He also speculated that it’s also ‘a bit like what you get when you try to talk after you lose a filling.’
But he ultimately said the denture hypothesis is more likely.
The president took in air through his nose during the last third of his remarks, the dentist noted, developing a pointed lisp only when he breathed through his mouth instead.
‘You don’t want a lot of air rushing through your mouth when you have a loose plate,’ he said.
The dentist is board-certified but declined to be identified publicly, saying he’s ‘not about to wade into politics.’
‘The last thing I need is for half my patients to get the wrong idea,’ he said.
The real thing? Trump’s pearly whites at times look too perfect to be natural
It’s unknown whether the president has dentures. The White House initially didn’t respond to requests for comment about what caused the slurring.
But Trump did seem to adjust the lower half of his mouth, moving his jaw from side to side at times, in between lines of his speech.
White House spokesman Raj Shah dismissed the speculation in the afternoon, telling the Los Angeles Times that ‘his throat was dry. There’s nothing to it.’
Asked if Trump had any related health concerns, Shah said: ‘I know what you’re getting at. I’m saying there’s nothing to it.’
An Obama-era White House ethics expert said the lack of attention given to Trump’s speaking quirk, compared with the crush of news stories about Hillary Clinton’s health problems las tyear, was proof of ‘sexism in politics’
‘My mouth used to get dry like this when I was using drugs,’ suggested an organizer of a national anti-Trump march
A Salon.com writer tweeted: ‘Looks stroke-ish’
Walter Shaub, an Obama-era former director of the Office of Government Ethics, compared Trump’s pronunciation slip with last years’s national fascination over Democrat Hillary Clinton’s bout with influenza.
‘It’s amazing that the media ignores the spectacle of POTUS slurring words in a speech, given the frenzy over the health of a rival who proved her stamina doing shuttle diplomacy around the world,’ Shaub tweeted.
‘I don’t know how to make sense of it except as evidence of the sexism in politics.’
‘He couldn’t quite control his mouth. Looks stroke-ish, but could be, I dunno, dental?’ speculated Salon.com writer Bob Cesca.
The president appeared Wednesday in front of a portrait of George Washington, who famously had his own set of false teeth – made of wood
Holly O’Reilly, an organizer of the anti-Trump ‘March for Truth,’ had her own theory.
‘Is Trump using again?’ she asked in a tweet. ‘My mouth used to get dry like this when I was on drugs. Is he having a stroke?’
Trump is famously anti-drug and doesn’t consume alcohol. His older brother died in his 40s as a consequence of heavy drinking.
He was speaking Wednesday to announce that the U.S. is recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and beginning the process of relocating its embassy there from Tel Aviv.