The Age of Incoherence, Part I

🥄 The Rambler-in-Chief: A Spoonful of Slurry

In which we examine the oratorical by-products of one man’s mind — now more creamed corn than cogitation.

If President Biden was inspected nightly for signs of slippage — a stumble, a cough, a name misplaced — then President Trump should, by all rights, be declared an open-air sinkhole of cognitive collapse, into which sense, syntax, and solemn duty vanish without trace.

📜 "I Don't Know" — But President Anyway

Asked about his second appointed Surgeon General, Trump offered this clinical diagnosis of his own staffing decisions:

“I don’t know who that is.”

One marvels at the candor. One trembles at the implications. This, from the man who once declared himself a “very stable genius,” now dodging accountability for the man charged with America’s lungs and livers. But who needs public health when you have hydroxychloroquine and herd instinct?

He similarly hedged when reminded of the Constitution, unsure whether his oath included the words “preserve,” “protect,” or “pronounce correctly.” One suspects the parchment lies crumpled in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom, under a Diet Coke coaster and beside a torn-up subpoena.

🧠 Phonemic Paraphrasias & Other Goblinisms

What are we to make of a man whose tongue meets English like a trawler meeting a coral reef?
Trump’s speeches have long been linguistic demolition derbies, where syllables are mangled like pretzels in a toddler’s fist.
Highlights include:

Referring to “Yo-Semite” National Park
Describing “Nambia” as a thriving nation (perhaps between Wakanda and Brigadoon)
Butchering “Abu Ghraib” so thoroughly that it sounded like a Fast & Furious villain

Let us also recall the stirring declaration:

“Well it means exactly what it says, it's a declaration, it's a declaration of unity and love and respect and it means a lot and its something very special to our country. People don’t know this, but a lot of people signed it… Thomas Jefferson, who a lot of people say was a Republican, actually.”

Truly, nothing inspires civic pride like watching a former president confuse America’s founding with a BuzzFeed trivia list.

🎖 The West Point Wandering

At a recent address to cadets at West Point, the Commander-in-Chief offered life advice that one might expect from a concussed uncle at a wedding:

Avoid “trophy wives” (a topic on which he is presumably a tenured professor)
Ramblings about Al Capone, army drag shows, and “strong generals” who cry when they see him
Neglecting, naturally, to shake the hands of the very cadets he came to honor

Instead, he stared blankly, waved at no one in particular, and wandered off as though the podium had personally offended him.

📃 Orders Not Signed, Domes Not Named

Among other recent oddities:

A fiery speech about executive orders, delivered with gusto — only for him to forget to sign them at all
Taking full credit for naming Israel’s Iron Dome, a system developed and deployed in 2011, well before he’d descended his escalator to proclaim the end of days

These claims, like much of his utterances, belong to the genre known as delusional patriotic fan fiction.

📱 Truth Social, or the Ticker-Tape Parade of Unwellness

If Trump’s Truth Social account is any indication, the Commander-in-Chief spent the weekend in an unbroken scroll of caps lock senility:

Accusing windmills of giving him “cancer of the sunset”
Ranting that “the Constitution is too long”
Demanding someone “call Bill Barr and ask if he’s still fat”

Each post bears the haunted energy of a raccoon loose in a megachurch PA system.

☠️ Conclusion: Not All Who Ramble Are Lost — But This One Is (And They're All Pretending Otherwise)

Let it not be said that we at The Panican Ledger are ageist. We are, however, anti-gibberish. And gibberish is precisely what is issuing daily from the Resolute Desk — if indeed he still knows where it is.

But unlike with President Biden, whose every pause and ankle shuffle becomes a chyroned emergency, the decline of Donald J. Trump is treated as either:

A charming eccentricity,
A calculated ruse,
Or — most commonly — a taboo not to be named.

Behind closed doors, aides whisper concerns. On the Hill, Republican lawmakers privately compare notes on his confusion, his paranoia, his inability to process briefing material thicker than a placemat. But in public? They fall in line like footmen at Versailles, dutifully applauding his tales of Iron Domes and executive orders never signed, as if this is all fine.

The White House itself has become a Potemkin operation — part assisted-living facility, part theater of denial — where staff work double shifts to make sure he doesn’t wander into the Rose Garden naked, live on Newsmax.

They hold back transcripts. They cut camera feeds. They rewrite speeches after he’s delivered them — a sandbag brigade of sycophancy, attempting to dam a river of senile deluge.

And the press? Too often, they follow suit — hedging with euphemisms like “unorthodox delivery,” “colorful phrasing,” or the ever-popular “Trump being Trump.”

But make no mistake: this is not politics-as-usual. It is government by gibbering puppet, cloaked in complicity and powered by a party too cowardly to say aloud what every aide, every lawmaker, and every sentient creature with a Wi-Fi connection already knows:

The man is not well. And they are all pretending he is.

To be continued in

The Age of Incoherence, Part II:

Of Apophenia, Sane Washing, and Media Complicity