It’s obvious to almost everybody that Donald Trump’s brain is throwing sparks. Especially lately. He keeps slurring his words, drawing a blank on the names of foreign leaders, forgetting what he was saying in mid-speech, and playing mix-and-match with his friends and enemies. Despite this, there are the desperate few who cling to the false belief that the former is as sharp as ever. This includes Newsmax host Greg Kelly, who suggested recently that Trump doesn’t have serious dementia, he just wants everyone to think he does, BoingBoing reports.

I don’t know why anyone would want others to think they have dementia but we’re talking about Donald Trump, so who knows? But then again, we’re also talking about Kelly, who is known to have cockamamie ideas.

Kelly claims Donald Trump’s recent incident where he confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi wasn’t a senior booboo, but instead a stroke of genius. He believes Trump’s tongue-tangles and name-dropping mishaps are instead methods to hoodwink the fake news. I mean, why wouldn’t a “very stable genius” decide to put his cognitive decline on blast to trick his opponents?

BoingBoing provides a clip from Kelly’s show, where he claims Trump is intentionally using the wrong words in the hopes of transforming the media narrative “akin to a magician waving a shiny object,” writes Mark Frauenfelder. “He argues that the correction of Trump’s ‘mistake’ by the media inadvertently amplified his true message about Pelosi’s role in the security failings of January 6.”

I’m going to break down some of Kelly’s spurious comments. And yes. They are spurious.

“The fake news … all had to say later in their reports that it was [then-House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi who was offered the 10,000 troops. It was Nancy Pelosi who was actually charged with security. So that, in a way, affected the message that he wanted out there. Because when he says Nancy Pelosi was in charge of security, nobody pays any attention.”

And nobody should pay attention because as this fact-check from CNN notes:

“The Speaker of the House is not in charge of Capitol security. That’s the responsibility of the Capitol Police Board, which oversees the US Capitol Police and approves requests for National Guard assistance.

Jane L. Campbell, president and CEO of the US Capitol Historical Society, told CNN that “the Speaker of the House does not oversee security of the US Capitol, nor does this official oversee the Capitol Police Board.”

I’ve heard many people blame Pelosi for this and I don’t know why. There’s plenty of information out there that reports she wasn’t involved in this.

But as my dad would say, “Don’t confuse them with the facts.” And this fits here because Kelly continues full steam ahead, while still discussing Trump’s Nikki Haley/Nancy Pelosi mix-up, suggesting that by mentioning Haley numerous times, Trump was doing something “a lot more sophisticated.”

As in:

“But when he says Nikki Haley is, and he said Nikki Haley three times, I don’t know, what do you think? It’s kinda like when he said “We’re gonna build a wall and Mexico is gonna pay for it.” So he repeated that, as you know, all throughout the country. And when he said Mexico is going to pay for it, suddenly that became the debatable part. Is Mexico, how could that ever work? People weren’t debating the wall part. He’s actually advancing his argument. And guess what, he got a lot of the wall done*. And if they didn’t try to sabotage his administration, I think he could have finished it and he’ll finish it next time. Look, he could have been just confusing the names, but I have a feeling it was up to something else, something a lot more sophisticated.”

It would appear that Kelly has some space for rent in his brain. Trump certainly has him bamboozled anyway. Trump’s wall barely got off the ground during his time in office and it was largely a huge, ineffective, blunder. It was never part of any attempt to spread “fake news.”

*Kelly’s definition of “‘a lot'” is questionable. According to the BBC: “Various types of fencing totaling 654 miles (just over 1,000 km) were already in place before Mr Trump became president in 2017,” and during the Trump administration, “80 miles of new barriers have been built where there were none before – that includes 47 miles of primary wall, and 33 miles of secondary wall built to reinforce the initial barrier.”

If you ask me, I think Trump and Kelly are both demented.

Newsmax's Greg Kelly claims Trump is just pretending to be demented:

"He said it on purpose, and the fake news fell for it."pic.twitter.com/gKvibzp60r

— The Intellectualist (@highbrow_nobrow) March 5, 2024