Portside

During President Donald Trump’s announcement that he’s sending the National Guard to Washington, DC, to fight a crime wave that isn’t real, it became clear he has caught Sleepy Joe Biden’s much-ballyhooed cognitive decline.

I’m not sure how it happened. I imagine the liberals figured out a way to make a concerning lack of mental acuity contagious.

But whatever the cause, hearing the president ramble incoherently during a nationally televised news conference on Monday, Aug. 11, left no doubt: The man’s brain has turned to oatmeal.

For starters, on two occasions Trump told reporters he will be meeting in days with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Russia. The meeting will be held in Alaska, which, unless Trump has given away one of America’s states to Putin, is very much not in Russia.

A mistake like that from President Biden would have prompted Republicans to launch a congressional investigation into his competency and CNN’s Jake Tapper to pen a book on the presidential competency scandal of a generation. Two mistakes like that from Biden would have effectively spun the U.S. news media into a months-long cyclone of speculation and hysteria.

Remember how important mental decline was when Biden was president

So I’m sure all Americans who have displayed deep concern about the importance of world-leader lucidity will meet the moment with an appropriate number of gasps, pearl clutches and calls for an immediate mental-fitness exam.

Because the “I’m going to Russia!” confusion was just a part of Trump’s troubling Aug. 11 performance.

Trump's word salad answers are getting more concerning

Asked a specific question about whether other cities like Chicago and Los Angeles might expect similar action involving the use of the National Guard to combat crime, Trump said, in part, this:

“But when I look at Chicago and I look at LA, if we didn’t go to LA three months ago, LA would be burning like the part that didn’t burn. If you would’ve allowed the water to come down, which I told them about in my first term, I said, 'You’re going to have problems, let it come down'. We actually sent in our military to have the water come down into LA. They still didn’t want it to come down after the fires. But that was it, we have it coming down. But hopefully LA is watching. That mayor also, the city is burning, they lost like 25,000 homes. I went there the day after the fire, you were there, and I saw people standing in front of a burned-down home. Their homes were incinerated, they weren’t like, even the steel, literally it was all warped, literally disintegrated because of the winds and the flames like a blow torch. They were standing on this beautiful day, maybe a couple of days after, we gave it a little time because of what they had suffered. Almost 25,000 homes. And you see what’s happening now, they didn’t give their permits. I went to a town hall meeting I said we’re going to get you the federal permit, which are much harder.”

That’s the sort of thing you hear before having to make a difficult decision about grandpa’s future. That it came from a sitting president waging domestic war against a crime emergency in a city that currently does not have a crime emergency seems, at best, troubling.

Time for the 'Biden is incompetent' folks to perk up

I wish a reporter had asked Trump what “LA would be burning like the part that didn’t burn” means. I wish a reporter had asked the president if the DC crime wave he kept referring to was in the room with them as they spoke.