Trump’s Tattoo Fantasy Raises the Question: If He Were Senile, How Would We Know?
The Trump administration concedes that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran who had lived in the United States since 2012, was illegally deported to his native country on March 15 due to an “administrative error.” But it says there was good reason to expel him because he is a member of MS-13, an international criminal gang. That much is clear, President Donald Trump insisted in an interview with ABC News correspondent Terry Moran this week, because Abrego Garcia “had MS-13 tattooed” on “his knuckles.”
Abrego Garcia did not have MS-13 tattooed on his knuckles. Rather, he had four tattoos on the fingers of his left hand—a marijuana leaf, a smiley face with X eyes, a cross, and a skull—that the government has controversially interpreted as evidence of his alleged MS-13 affiliation. In a picture that Trump posted on X last month, the president is holding a photo of those tattoos, captioned “Kilmar Abrego Garcia MS-13 Tattoo” and superimposed with labels that include the characters M, S, 1, and 3 across the fingers. “They said he is not a member of MS-13,” Trump wrote, “even though he’s got MS-13 tattooed onto his knuckles.”
Although Trump clearly mistook those labels for ink that had been injected into Abrego Garcia’s skin, he adamantly refused to acknowledge his embarrassing error when Moran pointed it out. That episode poses a puzzle that is apt to come up repeatedly during the next three and a half years: When Trump says something that is clearly not true, does it reflect his longstanding character traits, or does it reflect the sort of cognitive decline that forced Joe Biden to withdraw from last year’s presidential race?
At 78, Trump is four years younger than Biden. But by the end of his term, Trump will be older than Biden was when his disastrous debate performance made it plain that his mental faculties were slipping. And you can be sure that if Biden had displayed the sort of stubborn obliviousness that was evident in Trump’s conversation with Moran, Republicans would have cited it as clear evidence of his encroaching senility.
If you think I am exaggerating, watch the interview or read the transcript. The relevant exchange begins when Moran asks Trump about Abrego Garcia, whom he describes as “the Salvadoran man who crossed into this country illegally but who is under a protective order that he not be sent back to El Salvador.” Moran notes that “your government sent him back to El Salvador and acknowledged in court that was a mistake.” He
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