ILLNESS: Is it time to say that the president's ill?

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2025

Morning Joe takes a dive: As we've noted in the past, "illness" can be a challenging term. Not when we speak about physical illness, but when we try to speak about that other way to be "ill.".

What kind of "illness" do we mean? We've posted the relevant passages before. The leading authority declaims:

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...

[...]

The definition and classification of mental disorders are key issues for researchers as well as service providers and those who may be diagnosed. For a mental state to be classified as a disorder, it generally needs to cause dysfunction. Most international clinical documents use the term mental "disorder," while "illness" is also common. It has been noted that using the term "mental" (i.e., of the mind) is not necessarily meant to imply separateness from the brain or body.

So the authority says. The fraught term "mental illness" is apparently giving way to the kinder and gentler term "mental disorder." That doesn't mean that the affliction in question isn't physiological—is  "separate from the brain or body."

Mental "illness" can be physiological too. It isn't necessarily just a bunch of lousy, immoral choices. 

With that, we move to the top of the New York Times web site. To their credit, the editors had placed a certain news report at the top of that page as of 5 o'clock this morning.

Let word go forth to the nations! With respect to yesterday's event in the Cabinet Room, the Times wasn't taking a dive.

Has the time come for journalists to say that the president is mentally ill? In their report for the Times, Kanno-Youngs and McCreesh used the alternate term "bigoted." 

We can't call their choice wrong.

The Times reporters described a "shocking" event. Headline included, their report starts like this:

Trump Calls Somalis ‘Garbage’ He Doesn’t Want in the Country

President Trump unleashed a xenophobic tirade against Somali immigrants on Tuesday, calling them “garbage” he does not want in the United States in an outburst that captured the raw nativism that has animated his approach to immigration.

Even for Mr. Trump—who has a long history of insulting Black people, particularly those from African countries—his outburst was shocking in its unapologetic bigotry. And it comes as he started a new ICE operation targeting Somalis in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region.

“These are people that do nothing but complain,” Mr. Trump said at the tail end of a cabinet meeting at the White House, during which he sometimes appeared to be fighting sleep. But when the subject turned to immigration, Mr. Trump made a point of lashing out.

“When they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it,” Mr. Trump added as Vice President JD Vance banged the table in encouragement.

The reporters spoke of bigotry, xenophobia, nativism. These are terms of morality, not of illness, disease or disorder. 

That said, as their report continued, their accurate description of what occurred only became that much worse. We would describe this behavior as "shocking" too:

(continuing directly from above)
He said Somalia “stinks and we don’t want them in our country.” He described Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, who came to the United States from Somalia as a refugee and became a citizen 25 years ago, as “garbage.”

“We could go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country,” Mr. Trump said. “She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people who work. These aren’t people who say, ‘Let’s go, come on, let’s make this place great.’”

Mr. Trump has used this kind of rhetoric throughout his rise in politics, including in his first term as president, when he demanded to know why the United States would accept immigrants from Haiti and African nations, which he described as “shithole countries,” rather than, say, Norway.

[...] 

Robert Pape, a professor at University of Chicago who has studied political violence for 30 years, said such language from the Trump administration was dangerous.

“They’re not just like nasty metaphors—they’re especially dehumanizing metaphors,” Mr. Pape said. “‘Garbage.’ You’re not thinking of something that is human, you’re thinking of it as something that can be easily thrown away, so that is exactly the kind of metaphor we have just found for really decades is likely to increase support for violence.” 

Is Rep. Omar (D-Minn.) "garbage?" How about her friends, none of whom the resident would likely be able to name?

Is it true that these people are "garbage?" At such times, we're forced to ask whether we're willing to say that any person is. 

("No person is uninteresting," Yevtushenko said.)

Meanwhile, sad! By 7 a.m., someone at the New York Times may have had a change of heart concerning this shocking event. By 7:10 a.m., this report had been removed from the top of the Times' front page. A reader had to scroll quite a distance down the page to find a link to this report.

This morning, also this:

From 6 a.m. until 7:02, we sat and watched, in surprise, as Morning Joe took a dive on this shocking event. The president's outburst was mentioned just once, at 6:52 a.m., and it was mentioned in thoroughly glancing fashion. 

If a viewer didn't already know what the president had said and done, that viewer wouldn't learn from Joe Scarborough, who took a serious dive today about this remarkable conduct.

The president went on and on about the Somali garbage. The C-Span videotape doesn't show Vice President Vance during these remarks, but you can see Secretary Lutnick gesturing to Vance soon thereafter, in a way which would seem to support the account of Vance's conduct the Times  reporters gave.

(To see the president's full remarks, click here for the C-Span videotape, click ahead to the very end.)

What does it mean to be "mentally ill"—in evolving medical parlance, to be afflicted with a (serious) "mental disorder?" Given the imperfection of our human capacities, that remains a difficult question to answer at this point in time.

That said, we think the time has finally come for our journalists, such as they are, to start to make an overt attempt to come to terms with that question. That would involve our front-page reporters, but it would also involve the opinion columnists and cable news stars who continue to duck this fairly obvious question, even at this late date.

It's time for them to stand and speak. As we say that, we remind you of what we've said before:

As a general matter, our high-end journalists won't have the slightest idea how to talk about this topic. 

For starters, they don't know how to talk about the obvious possibility that the president may have inherited a type of mental disorder—that it may have come to him in the genes, that it may have been bred in the bone.

Professor Brabender, the great anthropologist, once described the way we tribal humans work. This is what he was quoted saying about our human behavior here on this earth:

Where I come from, we only talk so long. After that, we start to hit.

After that, we start to hit! We're inclined to unloose the verbal bombs which come from the realm of morality, ethics and insult. Traditionally, that has included the claim that someone with a serious "mental disorder" is crazy or nuts—or is "mentally ill."

The possibility that we might "pity the child"—or discuss the state of the medical science—isn't within the reach of our current journalism. But in such ways. those of us in Blue America make it less likely that we can approach this situation in a way which will let us achieve the goals we claim to seek.

Sorry, Morning Joe! At this site, we weren't about to take a dive on the "shocking" way the president behaved. By way of contrast, the dive was aggressively taken on today's Morning Joe.

Essentially, the president's conduct went unmentioned. In place of any such discussion, the Morning Joe panel continued a jihad aimed at Pete Hegseth—a jihad which is based, it must be said, by a great deal of embellishment and "creative paraphrase" concerning the several things Hegseth has now said.

(More on that in this afternoon's post.)

"Illness" is a challenging term with respect to this kind of affliction. We hope to return to General Washington when do our Saturday morning post. 

We hope to return to that topic this weekend. For today, there was no way we were going to walk away as if nothing happened yesterday in the Cabinet Room.

He doesn't want that garbage, he said. We suggest that you pity the child—and that you consider the various thing his niece said about her uncle, the adult, in her best-selling 2020 book, Too Much and Never Enough. 

Speaking as a doctorate-wielding clinical therapist, she said he was almost surely seriously disordered ("mentally ill") in the clinical sense. She also said it had quite possibly been bred in the blood—passed down biologically from his father, "a high-achieving sociopath."

(What happens in the minds of such people? Why don't you react in the ways they do? Have you ever seen any journalist ask?)

People remember the great forgivers. Nelson Mandela forgave his jailer. President Lincoln stood in public and shockingly said: 

If this war continues until we've lost every cent and until we've shed much more of our blood, who could deny that the judgments of the Lord are just and true forever?

In his first book, the young Dr. King expressed his pity for the southern whites who had been misled about racial decency "even by their pastors." These are the people whose moral greatness is remembered down through the ages. 

Faulty as all humans are, we Blues have been more strongly inclined to rail and call names and accuse. Or perhaps to take a dive on shocking presidential behavior.

It seems to us that that instinct is politically self-defeating. But as that great anthropologist once said, it's the way we humans are inclined to react:

We make a tiny effort at talk. At that point, we start to hit!

Tomorrow: Inheriting money and genes

This afternoon: The several things Hegseth has said