How the Projectionist Game is Played. Part Three—Invoke the 25th Amendment! Victor Davis Hanson
https://victorhanson.com/how-the-projectionist-game-is-played-part-three-invoke-the-25th-amendment/
How many times since 2017 did we heard the cry, “25 Amendment!” to remove Donald Trump from office on grounds he was non compos mentis?
Immediately upon taking office Foreign Policy ran an essay by Obamaite Rosa Brooks outlining a way to remove him through a) impeachment, b) the 25th Amendment, or c) a military coup.
What were these reasons for thinking Trump was nuts? That he stood down Kim Jong-un and called him “little rocket man” (Was that a worse quip than Biden claiming we were on the edge of Armageddon, as he lowered the bar of nuke porn talk?)?
Then came the strange case of Dr. Bandy X. Lee, the Yale psychiatrist. In 2017, she organized a Yale medical school forum to call out the mental problems, supposedly, of President Trump (Lee had never met him. Much less had she first-hand diagnosed him of anything. Thus, she was essentially violating her own professional organization’s ethical guidelines of a medical professional diagnosing someone as impaired without a thorough examination.).
No matter. In psychodramatic rhetoric, Lee warned that our entire species was in danger due to Trump’s nuttiness (she is now quiet about the back-and-forth nuke talk between Putin and Biden over Ukraine). After editing a book on Trump’s supposed mental illness (again, she had never examined him), a dozen congressmen called upon her to offer yet a new diagnosis that Trump was dangerously on the brink. She became a media celebrity and the 25th Amendment became her calling card.
Lee, remember, was eventually fired by an embarrassed Yale for violating professional ethical guidelines—but apparently not from unprofessionally diagnosing Trump. More likely, the cause was that she had smeared Alan Dershowitz on the crackpot charge that his use of the adjective “perfect” was analogous to Trump’s employment of it, and thus Dershowitz was likely guilty of something or other.
At one point admitted liar Andrew McCabe and later acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein traded charges about which of the two was willing to wear a wire to tap (likely illegally) Donald Trump to record his private conversations. The plan then was to take the transcripts to a sufficient number of cabinet members to ensure a 25th Amendment consensus and thus to start proceedings to remove a president.
“Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!”
Indirectly, Trump fired back at Lee and others by acing the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a not so easy test of mental acuity, and one that should be given immediately to Joe Biden, John Fetterman, Nancy Pelosi, and Diane Feinstein.
I could adduce more examples of leftwing 25th Amendment mania, but you can see that such projectionist rhetoric was useful politically.
By 2019 during the primary campaigns and debates, it was clear that something was wrong with Joe Biden. Indeed, his rival liberal candidates on stage often chided him on his apparent incoherence.
He word-searched, went mute on occasion, shuffled about, and seemed dazed. And even in moments on the campaign trail, when he seemed more alert, he blurted out nonsense like “lying dog-faced pony soldier,” and “You’re a damn, liar, man” and “Look, fat”—as well as the bizarre “corn pop” corpus of Biden heroics. He would go on to call black hosts “junkie” and “you ain’t black” and boast about taking Trump behind the gym for a sound beating.
Biden’s 2020 campaign was a sham, in which he retired to his basement, outsourced the actual campaigning to his wife, Kamala Harris, and surrogates—and let the media foam and vent at Trump. Meanwhile, DNC lawyers and affiliates systemically changed voting laws as Big Tech money assumed registrars’ roles in key precincts.
Once elected, Biden confirmed his mental health challenges by stumbling on stairs, shaking invisible hands, becoming lost on the stage, and reverting to his squeezing/breathing/sicko comments when nearing underaged girls.
Of course, the Left abruptly went mute on 25th Amendment talk, at least until the November 2022 midterms (When the red tsunami arrives, the Left will be leaking about the scapegoated Biden’s mental frailties).
Was the increasing crescendo of 25th-Amendmanet slanders about Trump simply a dead-give-away that the Left knew 1) Biden was impaired, and 2) he would offer the only viable veneer to package an otherwise odious socialist agenda and see it across the 2020 finish line?
I close with the strange case of Pennsylvania’s Senate candidate John Fetterman. His October 25th debate against Mehmet Oz was one of the saddest spectacles in campaign debate history. Fetterman demanded a closed-captioned screen and then post facto complained it was the source of his bewilderment.
And bewilderment is a euphemism for his near total cognitive impairment. It was a cruel thing to put such a candidate on the stage, and even crueler for the mainstream media to lie that Fetterman had done well and even outpointed Oz. That the media lied before the debate in doing a Biden-like coverup of Fetterman’s decline was somehow trumped post-debate by the surreal acclamations that Fetterman had done well, when he was either mute, dazed, or simply rambling when asked simple questions. Never in U.S. history has a more impaired candidate entered a major political debate.
Biden and Fetterman are not alone. The octogenarian Nancy Pelosi also often sounds confused. So does the even older Sen. Diane Feinstein.
Many of the Democratic political hierarchy are either suffering from onset dementia, stroke-related impairment, or simply incoherence (especially Kamala Harris’s innate dysphasia). One way of ensuring these issues were not and will never be raised, was and is, to accuse Donald Trump of being crazy and deserving removal under the 25th Amendment.
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