President Trump is due for his first physical as president today. He’ll be seen at Walter Reed Medical Center, and I assume there will be a lot of ground covered, given his age.

The White House said earlier this week that a mental evaluation would not be part of the exam.

That’s a biggie, given that there have been many expressing concerns that Trump’s behavior and language show a rambling incoherency that should probably have people worried.

Some are.

More than 70 mental health professionals have reached out to the doctor performing the physical to ask that he also include a mental evaluation.

In a letter to Rear Adm. Ronny Jackson, the physician to the president, the group casted a mental health examination as necessary, citing Trump’s “declining faculties for complex thought, rambling speech” and
“difficulty completing a thought.”

“Your duty to this patient and the country that employs you as an officer of the United States Navy is to refer your patient to specialist care if any elements of your neurological and psychiatric examination yield pertinent results,” reads the letter, a copy of which was obtained by Politico.

“Your threshold for such referral should be low given this patient’s position,” it adds.

The president is 71 years old. A neurological exam is often recommended at this age, and to be honest, there’s no good reason for Trump not to have one.

There is a political reason. He’s the “Weekend at Bernie’s” president. If a neurological exam shows some deficiencies, would his doctor be required to make that information public? What would it mean for Trump’s presidency?

The GOP seems determined to prop him up, no matter what. The house is burning down around them and they’re saying, “This is fine.”

They’re giving him more “Executive time,” which means Gramps doesn’t officially start his day until 11am. They’re cutting days short. They’re obviously trying to control his Twitter message, by having aides post coherent messages about policy, only to have him get control of his account back immediately after and tweet out something so amazingly garbled that it’s obvious he’s not the one posting about policy.

And at this point, we know what his 2020 campaign slogan is. We’ve gone from “Make America Great Again” to “What He Meant to Say Was…”

This isn’t a winning strategy for the party.

This is where all the Trumpidian howlers point out that the 70 mental health professionals asking the doctor to do a mental eval are liberals… it’s not professional to diagnose without an examination…

Well, they might all be raging liberals. That doesn’t mean they’re wrong.

Saying, “Something is wrong. Examine him” isn’t a diagnosis. It’s a suggestion, based on observations. That’s also not wrong. It’s prudent.

And I don’t expect Trump’s loyalists to agree that their 71 year old idol may have the common human frailties that the rest of us are subject to, but reality dictates for the rest of us that he should at least go through the tests.

This is as much for the well-being of Trump, himself, as it is a national security issue.