Are we just going to sit around and pretend that the president isn’t having a lot of… questionable moments these days?
President Donald Trump speaks to members of the military aboard the USS George Washington, an aircraft carrier docked at an American naval base, in Yokosuka, Tuesday, October 28, 2025.
(Mark Schiefelbein / AP)
Something is rotten in the state of Donald Trump’s mind.
“No kidding,” you say. “Tell us something we don’t know.” But I’m not talking about the bigotry and gleeful cruelty that have animated the president’s second sweep through the halls of federal power. I’m saying that something is rotten in the fizzling neurons and squelching gray matter sluicing around Trump’s skull—you know, the stuff that is supposed to interpret the world around him, differentiating reality from whatever phantoms must haunt septuagenarian billionaires with lifelong daddy issues.
Last year’s brief electoral debate over “sanewashing” Trump notwithstanding, questions about the president’s mental state have been largely absent from the public discourse during his second term. But those questions have become all the more urgent as his regime consolidates fascistic power in the hands of an imperial executive branch. With Trump retreating to his emotional safe space of gaudy construction projects to distract from something he saw on TV (or is it the other way around?), the public has a legitimate right to know if the most powerful man on the planet fully grasps the material world around him.
Consider that while discussing his administration’s policy of extrajudicial murder in South American waters, Trump bragged that “we’re just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. We’re going to kill them. They’re going to be, like, dead.” Consider as well Trump’s seemingly inadvertent slip that he’d been given an MRI during his last doctor’s checkup, which he described to reporters aboard Air Force One as “perfect” without explaining why he’d been ordered to take the test to begin with. And consider that shortly after this admission, Trump was filmed meandering aimlessly beside an uncomfortable-looking Sanae Takaichi, Japan’s new prime minister, as if in search of an aide to place a “Caution: Wet Floor” sign under the soupy brain dripping from his ears.
Finally, consider that all this happened in the past week.
Of course, Trump has long spoken his own brand of incoherent gibberish, and his first term featured its share of questionable moments. What’s changed, however, is both the frequency with which those moments occur and the relative lack of cumulative accounting for their larger implications. Yes, Trump has “always been like this” to some degree, but the recent increase in frequency and severity of these episodes comes as he begins exerting his fascistic power like never before. The danger may have always been there, but that doesn’t mean things aren’t noticeably becoming worse.
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All of this makes Trump’s moment of (possibly) fleeting insight last month during a phone call with Oregon Governor Tina Kotek, over his push to send the military to what he’s frequently described as “war-ravaged” Portland, especially interesting. Describing the conversation to the press later, Trump admitted he’d asked Kotek, “Am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening?”
“My people,” the president added, “tell me different.”
The episode—which didn’t go wholly unnoticed at the time—seemed to many like an unexpected acknowledgement of decidedly un-MAGA vulnerability: that, on some level, Trump is aware his relationship with reality may be more malleable than a “very good brain” would have us believe. If someone as constitutionally allergic to introspection as Trump is can not only reach but voice that conclusion, then what excuse do the rest of us have? To quote a political truism from his first term, Trump appeared to have leapfrogged disparate speculation and just “tweeted it out” himself, thereby normalizing and neutering what would otherwise be a pretty notable admission.
While armchair diagnoses of Trump’s mental state have long been something of a fool’s game (an ethically dubious one at that), we’ve nevertheless reached a point where even the most casually tuned-in observer can see a president in obvious decline. There’s the rambling logorrhea Trump has spent years desperately upselling as a rhetorically brilliant “weave” and now arguably presents a threat to national security; the frequency with which the president appears to nod off or disassociate during public events; the firehose of hard-to-parse jeremiads and masturbatory self-congratulations on Trump’s Truth Social account; and the aggressive AI fantasies, as obscene as they are racist—in some cases so hyperrealistically rendered that Trump’s recent musing on seeing things “different from what’s happening” takes on an even more ominous implication in hindsight.
Is it so out of the realm of possibility to imagine Stephen Miller flashing Trump a Sora2-rendered fantasy on his phone to convince the president that fishing boats are full of drugs and the streets of Chicago are soaked with the blood of law-abiding white folks? More importantly, is it so out of the realm of possibility to imagine Trump actually buying it? The dangers of an executive with degraded executive functions are not simply a question of what he might do but also of what others will try to get him to do on their behalf—particularly given the long-standing claims that Trump merely parrots the worldview of whomever he’d last spoken with. The more erratic the president himself seems, the more the rancorous palace intrigue that’s long animated this White House assumes a new layer of urgency.
And yet, with limited exceptions, there’s been no real effort to address even the prospect of a mad American king beyond a general sense in the zeitgeist that Trump is just sort of nuts. A decade’s worth of scandals has turned most of us into frogs boiling in the waters of our national melting pot. We’ve become helplessly inured to the sort of odd and outrageous behavior from Trump that not too long ago may have prompted serious (albeit oftentimes ineffectual) questions about his cognition—and would have justifiably caused a national meltdown if another president were in charge. (Here is where I reluctantly bring the name “Joe Biden” into the chat.)
As proof mounts that Trump’s ability to relate to reality is fundamentally changing, it becomes all the more tempting to hold each instance of evidence as just another concern to be briefly considered as it crosses our social media timeline before it’s filed away as simply more of the same. After all, the implications of a president-turned-strongman with an inconsistent grasp on fact and fiction are frightening to consider. The inclination to compartmentalize and avoid is understandable. The need to address it is inescapable.
Any collective push to elevate the topic of Trump’s mental fitness will struggle to gain traction thanks in large part to one immutable fact: There are only so many hours in the day. As I write this, the federal government remains shut down, SNAP benefits, which millions depend on for food, are set to expire, masked deportation squads are terrorizing communities nationwide, and the president is openly flouting the rule of law by demolishing a third of the White House to make way for an oligarch-funded ballroom in his honor.
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One of fascism’s greatest strengths is overwhelming mass movements by forcing separate communities to focus on just getting themselves and their neighbors through the day. It shouldn’t matter in the moment to a person getting tear-gassed in Wrigleyville whether Trump can genuinely discern what is or isn’t real in Chicago. But as the regime grows more brazen in its vulgar displays of power—and in its assertions of moral, theological, and mental superiority—so too grows the need to truly address what it means to be living in a country led by a mashup of King George III, Caligula, and Hans Christian Andersen’s infamously naked emperor.
When Biden delivered a frail, halting debate performance against Trump last summer, the (again, very valid) tsunami of public hand-wringing over the president’s age and mental fitness was enough to crater his decades-long career in less than a month. So far, as with so many things, Trump has managed to evade that level of actionable scrutiny. But, given the president’s increasingly scattershot behavior and legitimate concerns over his ability to exercise the power he continues to illegally consolidate, the time may soon come when thinking about it becomes unavoidable. And when that day comes, the question on everyone’s lips will be: What took us so long?
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