Are we just going to sit back and pretend that the President doesn't have a lot of… questionable moments these days?
President Donald Trump speaks with military personnel aboard the USS George WashingtonThe aircraft carrier docked at the US naval base in Yokosuka on Tuesday, October 28, 2025.
(Mark Schiefelbein/AP)
Something is wrong in the mind of Donald Trump.
“No joke,” you say. “Tell us something we don't know.” But I'm not talking about the bigotry and gleeful cruelty that inspired the president to walk the corridors of federal power a second time. I'm saying there's something rotten in the sizzling neurons and squelching gray matter that surrounds Trump's skull—you know, the stuff that's supposed to interpret the world around him, distinguishing reality from whatever phantoms haunt septuagenarian billionaires with lifelong daddy issues.
Last year's short pre-election debate over “Sanitary flushing“Despite Trump, questions about the president's mental state have been largely absent from public discourse during his second term. But these questions have become even more pressing as his regime consolidates fascist power in the hands of an imperial executive. Trump retreats to his emotionally safe space – bright construction projects to take your mind off something he saw on TV (or vice versa?), the public has a legitimate right to know whether the most powerful man on the planet fully comprehends the material world around him.
Please note that when discussing his administration's policy regarding extrajudicial killings in South American waters, Trump boasted that “we're just going to kill the people who bring drugs into our country. We're going to kill them. They'll be, like, dead.” Consider also Trump's seemingly unintentional slip that during his last check-up with a doctor, he had an MRI, which he described to reporters aboard Air Force One as “perfect” without explaining why he was ordered to undergo the test to begin with. And consider that shortly after this admission, Trump was filmed wandering aimlessly next to an awkward-looking Sanae Takaichi, Japan's new prime minister, as if looking for an assistant who could place a “Caution: Wet Floor” sign under the liquid brain dripping from his ears.
Finally, consider it all to have happened last week.
Of course, Trump has been speaking his incoherent gibberish for a long time, and his first term has had its fair share of questionable moments. What has changed, however, is both the frequency with which these moments occur and the relative lack of cumulative explanation for their larger consequences. Yes, Trump has “always been like this” to some extent, but the recent increase in the frequency and severity of these episodes comes as he begins to exert his fascist power like never before. The danger may have always existed, but that doesn't mean the situation isn't getting noticeably worse.
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All of this makes especially interesting Trump's (perhaps) fleeting epiphany last month during a phone call with Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek about his push to send the military to what he often calls “war-ravaged” Portland. Describing the conversation to the press later, Trump admitted that he asked Kotek, “Am I watching things on television that are different from what is happening?”
“My people,” the president added, “tell me differently.”
Episode-which did not go unnoticed at the time—it seemed to many to be a surprising admission of a distinctly non-MAGA vulnerability: On some level, Trump recognizes that his relationship with reality may be more malleable than a “very good brain” might have us believe. If someone as constitutionally allergic to introspection as Trump can not only come to such a conclusion, but also voice it, then what excuse does the rest of us have? To cite a political truism of his first term, Trump appeared to bypass the scattered speculation and simply “tweeted it” himself, thereby normalizing and neutralizing what would otherwise have been a rather remarkable admission.
Although armchair diagnoses of Trump's mental state have long become something of a stupid game (an ethically questionable option that being said), we have nevertheless reached a point where even the most inattentive observer can see that the President is in obvious decline. This is the incoherent logorrhea that Trump has desperately touted as brilliant rhetoric for years.weaveand now may pose a threat to national security; frequency with which the president appears nod or separate during public events; a stream of incomprehensible jeremiads and masturbatory self-congratulations directed at Trump's social network Pravda; and aggressive fantasies of AI, like obscene as they are racist– in some cases, it's portrayed so hyper-realistically that Trump's recent musings about seeing things “different from what's going on” take on an even more sinister meaning in retrospect.
Is it really impossible to imagine Stephen Miller showing Trump on his phone a fantasy reproduced by Sora2 to convince the President that fishing boats are full of drugs and the streets of Chicago are soaked in the blood of law-abiding white people? More importantly, is it so impossible to imagine that Trump would actually buy this? The dangers of a leader with degraded executive function are not just a matter of what he can do, but what others will try to get him to do on their behalf—especially given longstanding claims that Trump is simply repeating the worldview of the last person he spoke to. The more unstable the president himself appears, the more the malevolent palace intrigue that has long animated the White House takes on a new level of urgency.
And yet, with rare exceptions, no real effort has been made to solve even perspective a mad American king that goes beyond the general feeling that, in the zeitgeist, Trump is simply crazy. A decade of scandal has turned most of us into frogs boiling in the waters of our national melting pot. We've become helplessly accustomed to Trump's bizarre and outrageous behavior, which not long ago might have raised serious (if often inconclusive) questions about his thinking—and would justifiably have caused a national crisis if a different president had been in power. (This is where I reluctantly mention the name “Joe Biden” in the chat.)
As evidence mounts that Trump's ability to deal with reality is fundamentally changing, it becomes increasingly tempting to stick every example from proof as another issue that should be briefly addressed as it crosses our social media timeline before it is dismissed as just more of the same. After all, it's scary to think about the consequences of a president becoming a strongman with an inconsistent understanding of fact and fiction. The tendency to compartmentalize and avoid is understandable. The need to solve this problem is inevitable.
Any collective effort to raise the issue of Trump's mental health will have a difficult time succeeding, thanks in large part to one constant fact: there are only so many hours in the day. As I write this, the federal government remains closed, the SNAP benefits that millions of people depend on for food are expiring, masked deportation squads are terrorizing communities across the country, and the president is openly flouting the rule of law by demolishing a third of the White House to make way for a ballroom in his honor funded by oligarchs.
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One of the greatest strengths of fascism is the suppression of mass movements, forcing individual communities to focus on simply providing for themselves and their neighbors in everyday life. At this point it shouldn't matter to the person receiving tear gas in Wrigleyville whether Trump can truly understand what is real and what is not in Chicago. But as the regime grows more brazen in its vulgar displays of power – and in its assertions of moral, theological and intellectual superiority – so does the need to truly understand what it means to live in a country led by a mixture of King George III, Caligula and the infamous naked emperor Hans Christian Andersen.
When Biden delivered a feeble, stuttering debate against Trump last summer, the tsunami of (again, very serious) public hand-wringing over the president's age and mental health was enough to destroy his decades-long career in less than a month. So far, as in many other cases, Trump has managed to evade this level of practical control. But given the president's increasingly fragmented behavior and legitimate concerns about his ability to exercise the power he continues to illegally consolidate, there may soon come a time when thinking about it becomes inevitable. And when that day comes, the question on everyone's lips will be: Why have we taken so long?
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