The Daily Blast: Trump Mental Decline Exposed as Damning Video Evidence Flummoxes Rubio

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Secretary of State Marco Rubio testified before the House Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday. An extraordinary extended exchange took place between Rubio and Democrat Ted Lou, and it was all about Trump's tendency to fall asleep at public events. Ted Lou cornered Rubio on this and forced him to lie to Congress about what all of us can see with our own eyes.

“That might seem trivial, but the way representative Lou handled this moment captures something essential about how our politics works today.”

And it shows why Democrats need to relentlessly center Trump's ongoing physical and mental decline. We're talking about this moment with Brian Boitler, because he writes regularly on his excellent sub-stack off message about the need for Dems to fight the information wars aggressively. And this Rubio moment raises some important issues related to that.

Brian, always good to have you on.

"Great to be back." Okay, so this moment started when Representative Ted Lou got to question Rubio. First, Lou played video of Rubio talking at a recent cabinet meeting with Trump slumbering away right beside him. Then, Ted Lou asked Rubio about that. Listen.

“Secretary Rubio, have you been at more than one meeting?”

Brian, just to start off, Rubio is actually undercutting himself here because he's admitting that Trump is up in all hours with the night. And that's part of the problem since it's another symptom of his ongoing decline. But otherwise, what do you make of this move by Lou here? Part of the reason he's following Stephen Cabinet meetings is that he's this erratic person who is outraged all night stays up all night tweeting and then is too exhausted for the work that he actually finds boring. The work of the president that happens during mostly normal business hours.

But I think that the point here is to put Rubio or whoever happens to be testifying before Congress in a bind and make them say ridiculous things under oath that are contradicted right there by video evidence so that, you know, they make the rounds on social media and you and I talk about them on this podcast. What Lou is saying is I know that you know the truth and you're here misrepresenting it to the public and and just like putting a lot of pressure on Rubio. You know, because somewhere deep down in Marco Rubio here assumes is a conscience is is is somebody who is like is in a character and the character will break down under enough pressure.

Right. Well, let's listen to more of the exchange. It continues this way. After Rubio had denied the Trump falls asleep at the meetings Trump played more video that showed Trump sleeping away right next to Rubio and then Lou said this. You are literally talking about issues of war and peace and Donald Trump is sleeping right next to you.

“No, if Donald Trump cannot stay awake at these important meetings where the cameras are rolling imagine what he's like when the cameras are not there. So I'm going to ask you have you been a classified meetings with Donald Trump has fallen asleep.”

I've never been in any meeting where and the things are showing me now. He was not falling asleep.

In ability, the presence in ability stay awake on the job has caused other countries to perceive him differently. They mock him. They see he is weak and he is feeble. Brian, what interests me about this is Rubio is trying to plead that this is too trivial a matter to be discussed before the foreign relations committee. But Lou just doesn't let himself get knocked off course by that. Everything here is all about Trump's fundamental on fitness for the job about how he shouldn't be making these decisions and he shouldn't have this power and that this is a disaster for America and the world your thoughts on that.

But that there's there's a almost like an obvious contradiction here where Rubio is on the one hand saying he wasn't asleep, but also if he was asleep, it's no big deal right and and in you know in a more normal context, a president slipping you know right. There are an office for four years as cameras everywhere they might trip and fall they might not off in one meeting right they might they might you know accidentally hit post on a tweet before they finish typing it right and that would be ridiculous to to home in on in a four relations committee meeting because it is trivial.

There's a pattern here with Trump right this is this is like elemental to his presidency it's gotten us into a war that Trump can't get himself out of right like the the it has. You know inspired mockery around the world it it makes foreign leaders and even like domestic counterparts kind of know how to manipulate Trump his his not just you know not hit the fact that he's old and tired but the fact that he's well erratic. It's acceptable to flattery these are all part of one thing and it is a crisis it is relevant to the work of the foreign affairs committee and multiple other committees Congress.

“And I think part of the story here that gets at the unfitness you're talking about is that.”

We're trying to bait Rubio into revealing himself to be kind of an unprincipled psychophantic dirt bag or basically right he has a lot of experience at sheep shifting at this point.

Yeah he certainly does well let's listen to a little bit more of Ted Lou and Rubio here. We hear Lou broadens the indictment out to Trump's mental state in the bigger sense that all Trump's inability to stay awake on the job shows that there's something very wrong with his health of cognitive abilities. In the fact that a number of occasions Donald Trump will contradict himself and literally the same meeting or interview. Then plays more video of Trump and then says this. Listen. So, Secretary Rubio instead of holding North Korean style cabinet meetings where everyone goes around the room kissing Donald Trump's ass.

I'm going to ask you to come clean with American people in the White House as well.

There's something wrong with Donald Trump's health or cognitive abilities. There's a reason he keeps going to the hospital and they keep giving him cognitive tests. We have not seen the president in eight days. American people deserve the truth. I yield back. I don't even have to respond to that other than to tell you that it's absurd and ridiculous and I can't believe we're in a foreign affairs committee meeting for the House and important time in American foreign policy. Just keep lying, Secretary Rubio. Just keep on supposedly someone who thinks he's a medical expert.

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[Music] So Rubio goes on to spend a bunch of bullshit about how youthful and vigorous and superior to everyone around him Trump is. But the thing is Brian, what strikes me about this is Rubio's force to deny what we can all see is true. And it seems to me Democrats don't do this kind of hand-to-hand combat enough.

They spend, meaning Democrats spend their time denying Republican lies about them.

What do you make of that? Yeah, we in the writers community have this phrase or this cliché show don't tell, which can be effective for writing an univocative way or making people think.

“But in politics, especially today, I think it's more important to tell not show or tell and show.”

And I think Democrats have had a hard time shaking the habit of assuming that what is true will be made clear to people when they watch television or when they read the newspaper,

that the mediating institutions will do this work for them.

They don't need to say, "Hey, why is Donald Trump been to the hospital so many times to take so many cognitive tests? Why is Donald Trump following a sleep in all of his meetings? Does it have something to do with him being up until 3am tweeting all like libel all the time?" And what Lou recognizes is that if you want to make that something that the public thinks of as a big discrete problem,

“you have to tell them that it's a big discrete problem and then connect the dots for them.”

And it would be better if more members of the Democratic caucuses on Capitol Hill had picked this up the way Lou has. Agreed, and just to broaden out what we're really talking about here. Some people might watch these exchanges and listen to what you and I are saying and conclude, "Oh, this is just TDS, Trump derangements syndrome." They're just obsessing over Trump.

It's not focused on what people really care about. Brian, you spend a lot of time focused on this idea of what people really care about. So I'm going to set you up here. This just seems to misunderstand how politics works these days. Now, I'm not going to say that talking about Trump's unfitness is all you need to do.

Of course, not you do have to explain to people how you're going to make their lives better and so forth. But it's just factual that Trump is the center of our political universe. And it's precisely when voters forget how unfit he is that he does well, that Republicans do well. Right? It's one voters understand and see glaringly how unfit he is that he and Republicans lose. What's your big theory on all of us?

Well, I do want to say that I think that the public is more willing to overlook this stuff when things are going better. So when Trump is in some sense insulated from this substantive consequences of his unfitness for office, which was essentially the case for the first three years of his first term.

He was never popular then, but his economic approval ratings were high, and it was very easy for people who either supported him fully or were willing to tolerate him to say,

"Look, I don't like all the insane tweeting or whatever, but things are basically going okay, so that's not a big deal."

“And I think that does suggest that there is some balance that you need to strike between trying to make issues and trying to appeal to people on the basis of regular terms.”

Regular concerns, right? I never want to overstate the case and say, "Forget about kitchen table issues, don't have health care plans." That stuff is important, but people can be made to care about all kinds of things through, through persuasion of a different kind, where people of influence behave in a way that suggests, "This is important, people need to care about this." And make consumers voters in essence think, "Huh, whatever I want the government to be doing for me, I really can't have my president be like this."

Trump would absolutely agree with our understanding of how politics works. And here's why he runs everything through a strong versus weak frame. Everything is about his dominance, his virility, his masculine strength, his big crowds, his big ratings, and everything is always also about how weak his enemies are, how they're failing, how they get low ratings, how they have low energy, and he lashes out with particular vitriol, those who question those narratives about his dominance and strength. He knows that if he's seen as flailing or floundering or not in control that it's deadly for him.

What are your thoughts on that? What can we conclude from that about how our politics works these days, D.F. Yeah, I mean, so even before Donald Trump kind of took it to this insane level where everything he says is about his opponent, you can count on to be a lie and abusive and maybe libeless.

Republicans would do this, right? They did this to John Kerry in 2004, he was a war hero, and so they said, nah, you fake to your injuries and you didn't deserve your purple heart, right?

And the idea wasn't just to convince people of the lie, it was to put Kerry in a bind to make it to make Kerry reveal that he didn't know how to fight back to defend himself and thus appear weak. And I think in the end of that, this swift boat, it's a better thing than I'm alluding to from 22 years ago, Kerry found his footing, but it was a perilous moment because Kerry, Kerry's like initial inability to stand up for himself was dangerous because people cared less about the attack than they did about the likelihood, the possibility that Kerry would become president and bring this on willingness to stand up for himself to the office.

And if he wouldn't stand up for himself, how could he stand up for regular people or the country, right? And, and that aspect of politics while regrettable is sort of irreducible. And, and, and, you know, this is sort of like, it was maybe useful to Barack Obama to see John Kerry have to struggle with that, because by the time he came on to the scene in the next election, I think Democrats had at that point learned that, you know, you can't just shrug these things off or say that was so rude, you've got to apologize to me only to be smacked in the face again.

“You really have to set the terms of the debate yourself, and somewhere after Donald Trump won his first election, I think, Democrat's lost faith in us or they lost sight of that insight and they lost their confidence.”

And things like what Ted alluded in the clips you played, are the kind of thing that can help bring it back. I think it would be helpful to bring another contemporary example into this here, James Talleriko and the Texas Senate race.

Republicans are attacking Talleriko as transgender as someone with low testosterone as a vegan, you know, basically as a whim, right?

Now, Republicans don't expect voters to actually say it themselves, oh, he's transgender on a vegan, so I'm not voting for him, right? Ted, what Republicans won is for Talleriko to lie down and take these attacks, that's the main event they want. They want again to go back to the swift vote example for one side to be seen as strong and dominant and the other as we can submissive and unable to fight back.

“And these attacks are almost designed to trigger bad instincts in Democrats, I think, in a way.”

Can you talk about this Texas Senate race example in this context a little bit, you wrote a great piece about this?

It's applicable, isn't it? I think it's directly applicable and I do want to say it's both things. There are definitely voters in Texas who absent everything might think canpacks in such a sleaze bag. But even though I'm conservative, I'm Republican, I like Donald Trump, accenticts it too far, so this time I'm going to vote for Talleriko, or I'm going to stay home. And Republicans certainly want some of those voters to think, well, you know, if you vote for Talleriko, that means you're not a real man.

And they want those people's friends to be saying, you're not going to vote for that Talleriko guy, are you, right?

“To create like a kind of peer pressure, such as a social environment, where supporting Talleriko is something that you have to be ashamed of.”

But the flip side about of that is that there are people who are less committed to really more genuine, genuinely independent. They vote in both parties or they vote for Republicans mostly out of habit, but they're not. Like super, like Republicanism is a part of their identity, but they do values strength, they do respect people who stand up for themselves, and they do think the people who don't stand up for themselves are are weak and pathetic in some sense. And so irrespective of the attack, this is the Talleriko is trans.

I don't think that they particularly care about the truth or falsity of the accusation. They're looking to Talleriko to see if he'll take a front to his identity lying down, not that there's something wrong with being trans, but that when someone lies about you in a way that's designed to make half of the state hate you. Do you say, well, that's just a distraction from kitchen table issues and refuse to stand up for yourself, or do you challenge kin packs then to like a real debate about what it means to be a man.

Questions of trans rights would be to take it head on in that way, like you're going to lie about me, let's have it out, right?

“And, you know, we shall see so far, I think the Talleriko campaign has done a very good job of reminding people just how scummy kin packs and is, but have not done a particularly good job of.”

Telling as opposed to showing the Talleriko is the is the real man in this race is the strong man in this race.

And, and that there are ways that they can do this without undercutting, you know, the more positive vision that they want to run on.

“Absolutely, so just to close this out, just to go back to this Ted Lou slash review exchange, what's your general feeling about what democrats can actually learn from an exchange like this and what do you want to see them doing.”

This is something you write about all the time, very well, folks, check out Brian's sub stack off message, it's really good on these topics. What do you want to see democrats take from an exchange like that and what do you want to see them do from here through election day and I guess through 2028. I guess the through line here is that there's a lot of political value in putting your opposition in a bind that at least at a glance feels impossible.

“You know, I do want to say that I think Rubio because Republicans are well versed in this, I think Rubio actually handled this exchange about as well as is possible if you work in Trump's administration, right.”

And it's because he understands don't get yourself in a bind, right, like have like think through what your opposition is likely to throw at you and how you're going to respond. And so, you know, this is why like this is why I write a lot about how democrats can prepare to counter Republicans or set their own traps to Republicans. And what was what was so sharp about what what Lou did is it in a sort of more above board an honest way. Required Rubio to to to to make a choice, right. I either have to lie and debase myself or tell the truth and lose my job.

And if if if democrats on Capitol Hill grilling Republicans before committees can try to keep that that binary in mind, then their questions are going to be a lot sharper a lot better. And there will be people who aren't quite as adept as Rubio and they will start to flounder.

Brian Boitler always awesome the talk team and folks check out Brian Substack off message Brian thanks for coming on let's do it again soon.