THE QUESTIONS: Is something wrong with President Trump?

FRIDAY, MAY 30, 2025 

Our favorites aren't going to ask: As we noted not long ago, the leading authority on the topic doesn't like the term "mental illness."

It prefers a slightly less hurtful term. Its lengthy discussion of the complex topic starts exactly like this:

Mental disorder

A mental disorder, also referred to as a mental illness, a mental health condition, or a psychiatric disability, is a behavioral or mental pattern that causes significant distress or impairment of personal functioning. A mental disorder is also characterized by a clinically significant disturbance in an individual's cognition, emotional regulation, or behavior, often in a social context. Such disturbances may occur as single episodes, may be persistent, or may be relapsing–remitting. There are many different types of mental disorders, with signs and symptoms that vary widely between specific disorders. A mental disorder is one aspect of mental health.

The causes of mental disorders are often unclear. Theories incorporate findings from a range of fields. Disorders may be associated with particular regions or functions of the brain. Disorders are usually diagnosed or assessed by a mental health professional...

And so on, at length, from there.

The authority prefers the term "mental disorder." Whatever you want to call it, the authority says that the phenomenon in question can "cause" (or simply be associated with?) "significant distress or impairment of personal functioning." 

As such, the syndrome in question is routinely involved in a tragic loss of productive human functioning. You can use the name you prefer, but the consequences are routinely tragic.

As far as we know, "mental illness" isn't the same thing as "cognitive decline." Here, for example, is the way the leading authority starts its treatment of the latter condition:

Cognitive impairment

Cognitive impairment is an inclusive term to describe any characteristic that acts as a barrier to the cognition process or different areas of cognition. Cognition, also known as cognitive function, refers to the mental processes of how a person gains knowledge, uses existing knowledge, and understands things that are happening around them using their thoughts and senses. Cognitive impairment can be in different domains or aspects of a person's cognitive function including memory, attention span, planning, reasoning, decision-making, language (comprehension, writing, speech), executive functioning, and visuospatial functioning. The term cognitive impairment covers many different diseases and conditions and may also be symptom or manifestation of a different underlying condition. Examples include impairments in overall intelligence (as with intellectual disabilities), specific and restricted impairments in cognitive abilities (such as in learning disorders like dyslexia), neuropsychological impairments (such as in attention, working memory or executive function), or it may describe drug-induced impairment in cognition and memory.

[...]

Cognitive impairments may be caused by many different factors including environmental factors or injuries to the brain (e.g., traumatic brain injury), neurological illnesses, or mental disorders. While more common in elderly people, not all people who are elderly have cognitive impairments....Stroke, dementia, depression, schizophrenia, substance abuse, brain tumors, malnutrition, brain injuries, hormonal disorders, and other chronic disorders may result in cognitive impairment with aging. Cognitive impairment may also be caused by a pathology in the brain. Examples include Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, HIV/AIDS-induced dementia, dementia with Lewy bodies, and Huntington’s disease.

And so on from there. Any such loss of cognitive function is, of course, a human tragedy. That said, though cognitive impairment may be "caused by mental disorders" in some cases, cognitive decline, in and of itself, is not the same thing as "mental illness," at least as best we can tell.

We mention this as a way of noting what President Trump did last night. All in all, we'd be inclined to put it this way:

For whatever reason, there he went again!

The story starts with Wednesday's (unanimous) ruling by a three-judge panel of the little-known U.S. Court of International Trade. As it turns out, the three judges are charter members of the deep state, even though one was named to the court by President Trump himself.

(One of the other judges was named to the court by President Reagan. The third was named by Barack Hussein Obama himself, with the emphasis frequently placed on the gentleman's middle name.)

Uh-oh! The three-judge panel ruled that President Trump's sweeping imposition of tariffs has been, in a word, illegal.  

(For the record, the greatness of tariffs sems to be an idée fixe—a "fixed idea"—with the current president. According to the leading authority, the term " idée fixe" doesn't appear in the current DSM, but it has long been a part of psychological reasoning and analysis.)

Three out of three judges agreed—large parts of the president's scattershot behavior have also been illegal. This ruling had been expected for some time, but in response to this unanimous ruling, there he went again!

Last evening, the president offered a lengthy post on his Truth Social site. For whatever reason, the president often waits for the midnight hour to offer his most furious posts. This one came early, at 8:10 p.m.:

You can read the whole thing here. 

You can read the whole thing there! In an attempt to "simplify, simplify," we'll offer only the excerpt posted by Mediaite in this samizdat.

Here's the way that excerpt starts, with that site's headline included:

Trump Turns on Conservative Group’s ‘Sleazebag’ Leader Who Recommended Judges: ‘Probably Hates America’

[...]

PRESIDENT TRUMP (5/29/25): ...Where do these initial three Judges come from? How is it possible for them to have potentially done such damage to the United States of America? Is it purely a hatred of “TRUMP?” What other reason could it be? 

That's the way the furious excerpt starts. It has to be a hatred of TRUMP! What else could it possibly be?

That's the way the excerpt starts. Here's the full excerpt from Mediaite, though this is only part of a much longer, furious attempt at discussion:

PRESIDENT TRUMP (5/29/25): ...Where do these initial three Judges come from? How is it possible for them to have potentially done such damage to the United States of America? Is it purely a hatred of “TRUMP?” What other reason could it be? I was new to Washington, and it was suggested that I use The Federalist Society as a recommending source on Judges. I did so, openly and freely, but then realized that they were under the thumb of a real “sleazebag” named Leonard Leo, a bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America, and obviously has his own separate ambitions. He openly brags how he controls Judges, and even Justices of the United States Supreme Court—I hope that is not so, and don’t believe it is! In any event, Leo left The Federalist Society to do his own “thing.” I am so disappointed in The Federalist Society because of the bad advice they gave me on numerous Judicial Nominations. This is something that cannot be forgotten!

New to Washington, he'd been mugged by areal sleazebag! Presumably, that explains how this very stable genius could have named a judge who took part in Wednesday's diabolical ruling.

The lengthy, nutty imitation of "discussion" continues on from there. At his point, we turn again to one of the two basic questions we've offered this week:

Is it possible that something is wrong the current sitting president?

Is something wrong with President Trump? If so, that would of course represent a tragic loss of human potential. 

Really though, riddle us this—is something wrong with this sitting president? That's the second of the two basic questions we've been floating this week:

The two basic questions:
Was something wrong with President Biden when he sat in the Oval Office?

Is something wrong with President Trump today?

At present, many people have agreed on the answer to that first question. It appears that something really was wrong with President Biden, even as he sat in the Oval Office. Most people have agreed that this situation became obvious at a fateful presidential debate on June 27, 2024.

Many people have settled on that idea. They have agreed that some type of cognitive impairment became apparent for all to see at that fateful debate.

Journalists now largely agree on the answer to that first question. They also agree on this:

To this day, they agree that the second question must never be asked or discussed.

The New York Times? The Washington Post? Rachel Maddow? Possibly even Jake Tapper?

Everywhere he looked in 1937, FDR said he saw "one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished." Everywhere we look today, we see a collection of high-end journalists who have agree that a certain blindingly obvious question simply mustn't be asked.

They refuse to answer that question. In fact, they refuse to ask:

Something was wrong with President Biden. Is something wrong with President Trump? 

If so, that represents a tragic loss of human potential. But is something actually wrong?

In her bestselling 2020 book, the president's niece—Mary L. Trump, PhD—gave her assessment of what is wrong with her uncle. She didn't speak of cognitive decline. As we've noted again and again, she offered this instead:

Prologue

[...]

None of the Trump siblings emerged unscathed from my grandfather’s sociopathy and my grandmother’s illnesses, both physical and psychological, but my uncle Donald and my father, Freddy, suffered more than the rest. In order to get a complete picture of Donald, his psychopathologies, and the meaning of his dysfunctional behavior, we need a thorough family history.

In the last three years, I’ve watched as countless pundits, armchair psychologists, and journalists have kept missing the mark, using phrases such as “malignant narcissism” and “narcissistic personality disorder” in an attempt to make sense of Donald’s often bizarre and self-defeating behavior. I have no problem calling Donald a narcissist—he meets all nine criteria as outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)—but the label gets us only so far.

[...]

Does Donald have other symptoms we aren’t aware of? Are there other disorders that might have as much or more explanatory power? Maybe. A case could be made that he also meets the criteria for antisocial personality disorder, which in its most severe form is generally considered sociopathy but can also refer to chronic criminality, arrogance, and disregard for the rights of others...

The fact is, Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neuropsychological tests that he’ll never sit for.

Mary L. Trump, PhD, is a trained clinical psychologist. That said, the fact that she offered that assessment that doesn't mean that her assessment is accurate.

We can't tell you if her assessment was correct. We can tell you this:

Everyone from the New York Times on down—and yes, that includes Rachel Maddow—has agreed to ignore, to disappear, what the president's niece said in her best-selling book.  They've agreed to disappear that assessment.

Their bosses have told them not to discuss it, and the various cable stars have done what their bosses ordered. The result of this is obvious:

To this very day, that second question has barely been asked. 

Is something wrong with President Trump? If so, it's a tragic loss of human potential, and it should be treated as such.

(We've praised Mary Trump for teaching us to pity the badly treated child even as she tried to warn us about the dangers of the disordered adult.)

That said, if something is wrong with President Trump, it almost surely isn't the same thing that was wrong with President Biden. Almost surely, a different problem obtains—one that people like TV's Chris Hayes aren't willing to talk about.

Sad! "Mental illness" is off limits for these prominent boys and girls. "Cognitive decline" is not. 

For that reason, they keep suggesting that "cognitive decline" is also the current president's basic problem. We'll guess that that's a dodge.

As of June 2024, President Biden had long since begun presenting with a problem which is quite familiar to many Americans. He'd been presenting with something that looked like "cognitive decline."

By way of contrast, the problem which President Trump may be presenting may, in fact, involve issues of "mental illness" / mental disorder." For better or worse, the men and women of our upper-end press corps have agreed, for the past sixty years, that such possibilities mustn't be discussed with respect to the behaviors or states of mind of the nation's most powerful people.

Many of our journalists are speaking now about President Biden's apparent cognitive decline. It's completely appropriate for them to do so.

On MSNBC, most of the TV stars are still avoiding this topic. That brings us to the pseudo-discussion staged by Chris Hayes Tuesday evening's edition of All In.

Hayes was joined by a pair of stooges as he staged his short pseudo-discussion. As we noted yesterday, he started off like this:

HAYES (5/27/25): If we're going to have a conversation about the mental acuity of a recent president, it does seem a little weird to be focusing exclusively on the last one, and not to also include the one who blasted out this typically, truly insane, all-caps social media screed yesterday...

Sad! In the beginning was the end. Already, any serious hope for clarity had already been lost.

We're sorry, but no! The problem which seems to have afflicted President Biden does, in fact, seem to involve a matter of "mental acuity." In line, for example, with Mary Trump's book, the problem which seems to afflict President Trump doesn't seem to be that:

It isn't a question of mental acuity. In this case, it's a tragic question of "mental disorder"—a question of possible "mental illness."

Chris Hayes seems to be too smart not to know that. Many other high-end journalists may not be that smart.

We're not going to walk you through the imitation of a (short) discussion staged by Hayes this Tuesday night.  It turned into an enormously empty pseudo-discussion—an imitation of life.

Our nation has been played this way ever since President Trump's unusual behavior first appeared on the scene. Discussions of possible "mental illness" have long been verboten. In the face of President Trump's apparent disorder, children have (almost) all agreed to play that unhelpful game.

As a result, we have a sitting president who goes before Congress and says that upwards of twenty million long-dead people are receiving Social Security checks. We have a president who still crazily rants, late at night, about the Clintons' many murders.

Our president says that Barack Hussein Obama should face a military tribunal. He's still insisting that the 2020 election was rigged—that the 2020 election was rigged in a way he won't describe.

When Candidate Harris attracted a large crowd at an event, he offered a Truth Social post which claimed that no one was actually there! And now, we're handed this latest lengthy rant, about the way his own appointee has ruled that his recent conduct has. in fact, been illegal.)

We have a president who offered the crazy post we've excerpted above. This goes on ad on, then on and on, and the stooges continue to agree that they mustn't ask the obvious question about why he persistently does this.

Last night's crazy tweet will likely be ignored by the New York Times. They could report and discuss this recurrent strange behavior, but it simply isn't done.

The Times took a dive on "Knucklegate"—on the crazy claim he broadcast about Kilmar Abrego Garcia. More recently, the Times took a dive on the president's inexcusably crazy post about the Clintons' many murders.

The New York Times isn't going to go there! But neither are wealthy TV stars like Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow. 

Is something wrong with President Trump? Also, is something wrong with Elon Musk, or was that just the ketamine talking?

Is something wrong with Robert Kennedy? Was Tucker Carlson really attacked by demons as he slept? The endlessly timorous New York Times took a dive on that one too!

Long ago, back before Trump, we started telling you this:

It's all anthropology now.

By that, we meant that our flailing nation almost surely wouldn't be finding its way out of this mess. All that was left was the need to describe the way our vastly limited species works when experiments in rational conduct reach their inevitable end.

Is something wrong with President Trump? Last night, there he went again, with his latest nutty post.

Is something wrong with President Trump? If so, that's a human tragedy—but of one thing you can be certain:

Rachel Maddow, Blue America's favorite, isn't going to ask!