There’s no other way to say it: Donald Trump just isn’t all that bright

Donald Trump, oddly, really does think the people coming to the southern border to seek asylum are mental patients who come here to get a prime spot in one of our insane asylums.

“Why is it,” the ex-president said today, in a rambling press conference held at his private golf club in Florida, “that millions of people are allowed to come into our country from prisons, from jails, from mental institutions, insane asylums, even insane asylums, that’s a, uh, a mental institution on steroids.

Donald Trump

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“That’s what it is,” Trump went on, “when you see the people that are coming into our, these are institutions that are being emptied out, not in South America, all over the world, including South America, all over the world.”

I’d already addressed in another column that Trump’s repeated references to the fictional character Hannibal Lecter make sense when you come to the realization that he thinks it’s funny to bring up a fictional crazy person as what he thinks is a callback to immigrants seeking asylum.

This would seem to be newsworthy, but the same news media that, for months, parroted the Trump campaign’s insistence that President Biden is a doddering old man who shouldn’t be anywhere near the nuclear briefcase, doesn’t press the ex-president on this issue, which isn’t even a sign of declining mental acuity, but is actually a sign that he’s just not all that bright.

For all the rancor that we see over Trump’s repeated lies, his petty insults of political rivals on both sides of the aisle, the most vicious of those usually reserved for elected Republicans who still nonetheless continue to carry his water for him, the bigger issue is that, yes, OK, he’s 78 years old, and not a good 78 years old, acuity-wise, but also, and I don’t know how to say this without just saying it – the guy is dumb as a bag of broken glass.