Christian extremist lie-clown House Speaker Mike Johnson made a confession on CNN last night, namely that literally nobody actually thinks President Joe Biden is going to be on cocaine during Thursday night’s debate. (You will watch it with us, at Wonkette!) The part he didn’t admit is that they’re only saying this because they’re terrified that all the fanciful stories they’ve made up about Biden being sleepy and senile are going to come back to bite them in the ass when Biden appears normal and Trump starts babbling about sharks.
“Look, there’s a lot of things that are said in jest,” Johnson answered. “Of course no one expects that Joe Biden will be on cocaine.” He nevertheless said he believes people are asking legitimate questions about whether the president will “be on some sort of energy drinks or something.”
It was just a joke, said Johnson, a funny guy. But maybe he’s going to just be on Red Bull or Mountain Dew or something. No, seriously, those are things other Republican pig sharts have been suggesting on TV this week. Mountain Dew, said Rep. Eric Burlison. They’re “experimenting with just the right dose of Red Bull, caffeine pills, or whatever,” said Sean Hannity. (We’ll get to Drunky Dr. Pill Pusher Rep. Ronny Jackson’s part in all this in a minute.)
Johnson, enthusiastically flicking his forked tongue along the Trumpian taint, added that he has legit questions whether Joe Biden can really go 90 minutes against Trump, “who, as you know, goes to rallies and talks for two hours on end without any break and any notes.”
Does one need notes to shit one’s pants about sharks, say a bunch of Nazi shit about migrant fight club, and make the same stupid joke about Hannibal Lecter that doesn’t land no matter how many times he tells it?
Trump himself whined this weekend that the man who will beat him Thursday night had gone “to a log cabin to ‘study’” — AKA debate prep at Camp David — and that he’d get “a shot in the ass” just before the debate. He said at a rally that Biden would “come out all jacked up, right?” and then insinuated Biden might do “all that cocaine that was missing a month ago from the White House.” (Bless his heart, Trump thinks July 2023 was “a month ago.” Brain damage. Also, that cocaine wasn’t missing, it was found. Does he know somebody who was missing some cocaine?)
Trump, who still frequently brags about a dementia test he says he aced in 2018 — he had to pick out which one was “camel” — also this weekend has been ALL-CAPS-ing out half-literate demands for Biden to take a drug test.
This came after similar demands from batshit former White House pill-pusher and current Republican Rep. Ronny Jackson, who likes to go on TV and show-and-tell what your brain looks like on drugs, and if he isn’t fucked up on camera, then he sure does a mighty fine impression of it. (By the way, last time Trump bragged about his dementia test, he mentioned how “Doc Ronny — Doc Ronny Johnson” had given it to him.)
Jackson appeared on Fox Business this weekend with slurring rage muppet Maria Bartiromo, claiming that there are drugs Biden could take that “treat the cognition part of it, they try to make it where he can think straighter, and he’s not lost and confused as much.” Jackson, prissily listing off all his Dr. Feelgood knowledge of performance enhancers, added, that there are other drugs that “increase alertness, like Adderall and other types of amphetamine-type drugs, maybe Provigil, things like that, and then there’s a host of drugs that try to take the agitated edge off of most of these cognitive disorders.” He said he thinks they’re probably giving Biden all these things.
Acyn from MeidasTouch commented, “The stuff in here is oddly specific and lines up with accusations about the previous White House essentially being a pill mill.”
This, of course, is the same Ronny Jackson who has kept trying to call himself an “admiral,” even though the Navy quietly stripped him of his rank after that Pentagon Inspector General report came out in 2021 — the one that said Jackson was a drunken shitshow as White House doctor, sexually harassed subordinates, dosed on Ambien even while he was on call traveling with the president, and so much more. Of course, there was also allllll the pill-pushing and the stories — you know, just your average inspector general reports — about the Trump White House being “awash in speed,” while under the caring medical eye of Dr. Ronny.
You might not be surprised to learn that, during the Trump years, one of the pills that was just fucking flying around the White House was Provigil. (Along with ketamine and morphine and tramadol and …) Just look at this:
Every Republican accusation — literally every one — is a confession. If they’re talking about things, they’re talking about the things they do, and that’s why they know about them.
Shockingly, more qualified doctors than the sobriety test blooper reel up there spoke to Philip Bump at the Washington Post and explained that actually, that’s not how such performance-enhancing drugs work at all. There are not drugs that would just temporarily reverse the wandering dementia Joe Biden doesn’t have.
“There are no medications or stimulants that can reverse a dementing process transiently,” said Thomas Wisniewski, director of the NYU Langone Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. Actually, he said, what happens is that some kind of alertness drug would confuse a dementia patient more. He said the things Trump people are saying right now are “spurious” and “nonsensical.”
Then there was this guy:
Adam Brickman, associate professor of neuropsychology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, concurred with that assessment.
“I’m not aware of any medications that would reverse or mask cognitive decline,” Brickman said. What’s more, he noted that “the association between energy and cognition is a very weak one. In other words, someone could have low energy but totally intact cognition and vice versa.”
Brickman and Wisniewski agreed that if they came out with drugs that do what these Republicans claim, that would be really fucking neat!
As Jeff Tiedrich notes, all this messaging about Biden on drugs is happening on top of all the other Republican screaming and caterwauling about how the debate will be rigged somehow, by CNN. Trump spox Karoline Leavitt was so obnoxiously thirsty and desperate with those accusations when she went on the network the other day that host Kasie Hunt just told her to fuck off and ended the interview:
As we mentioned, Joe Biden has been doing debate prep, like presidential candidates do, before debates.
Trump is doing, um, whatever the fuck he’s doing.
We’re sure it’ll be great.
[Daily Beast / Washington Post / video via Acyn]
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I have officially won all debates now. Alert the New York Times.
Morphine, fentanyl, ketamine, AND hydrocodone? As I said yesterday, America's opioid crisis is apparently coming from inside the house.