MONDAY, APRIL 6, 2026
On the bright side, we have an excuse: In this morning's report, we said we were going to post the text of the president recent unusual statements.
(This afternoon, in his press event, he added to the list.)
We're holding off for a day. Starting Saturday morning, we had an undesirable response to a prescribed pharmaceutical. As we regain full functioning, we'll wait for a brighter day.
MONDAY, APRIL 6, 2026
Stone Age, here we come: Is this what we've been worried about in months and years of reports at this site?
We refer to one part of what the president's niece recently said. We're forced to show you again:
ERIN BURNETT (2/26/26): You've known him your whole life. Do you actually see a [cognitive] decline?
MARY L. TRUMP: I do, but I think it's important to remember that Donald has never been fit in any capacity. Obviously, what we're dealing with now are age-related cognitive declines. We're dealing with physical issues that the White House tries to cover over.
But this is somebody who for decades now has had serious, undiagnosed and untreated psychiatric disorders, which are only going to worsen, especially given the pressure he's under and given the cognitive and physical declines.
What is the phrase to which we refer? Fellow citizens, gaze on our works and despair:
...which are only going to worsen
The current, highly unusual situation is only going to get worse!
The fact that she said it doesn't mean that it's true. But when Bandy X. Lee, the Yale psychiatrist, edited a best-selling book all the way back in 2017, the medical specialists whose work she presented frequently said the same thing.
For better or worse, those medical specialists have been banned from the public discourse. They've been banned in accord with a long-standing rule of the journalistic guild, according to which issues of mental health, but especially of mental illness, must never be included in any discussion of major political figures.
That was always a very good rule, until such time as it possibly wasn't. Along the way, it was sometimes honored in the breech.
But even now, in the case of the sitting president, our sharpest global observers fall back on language like this:
From Fareed Zakaria GPS, CNN
BEDDOES (4/5/26): I mean, the first thing to say is I was shocked hearing you read that [Truth Social] post as I was reading it myself. And it is—I mean, and I use this word advisedly, it sounds unhinged. That that is the President of the United States is just profoundly shocking. And I think we've all become somewhat inured to statements by the president of the United States.
But even by his standards, that was very shocking. And I wasn't surprised when I looked on my phone just a few minutes ago to find several people asking whether this was actually real.
The speaker was Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of The Economist. She's one of the sharpest observers of the war in Iran available to cable news viewers.
But even yesterday, she fell back on the established weasel word for what seems perhaps to be happening right before our eyes. We single her out because she's so well-informed and so mentally sharp.
The weasel word is this:
Unhinged
Unhinged! It's a way to keep your commentary in the safe zone, even as observers ask if this latest Truth Social post could possibly be real.
We don't say this to criticize Beddoes. This is uniform press corps practice and, for better or worse, it isn't going to stop.
(Beddoes was engaged in a conversation about Iran with Zakaria and Richard Haass. Neither of those highly qualified observers took things beyond that one word.)
Beddoes was referring to the now-famous Truth Social post the president offered yesterday morning, as Easter Sunday dawned. It extended a worrisome series of statements over the preceding five days, starting with something he said in his televised address last Wednesday night:
Televised address, Wednesday, April 1, 2026
Thanks to the progress we’ve made, I can say tonight that we are on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly, very shortly.
We’re going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.
FRIDAY, APRIL 3, 2026
Or so Hank Williams said: Is something "wrong" with President Trump? At this site, we would assume that it seems like there is.
Next week, we'll be examining some of the basic concepts involved in this somewhat complex conceptual arena. Early this morning, as we pondered the possible dangers involved in the current state of affairs, we also thought of Hank Williams.
The president's niece believes that her famous uncle is seriously unwell. She regards this as a very dangerous state of affairs—though she also takes us back to what she regards as the start of the story, when her uncle was two years old.
We've suggested that (serious) "mental illness" should be regarded as a deeply unfortunate illness. This morning, we found ourselves thinking of where this sort of thing can start—and of these Hank Williams lyrics:
Tramp on the Street
[...]
He was some mother's darling, he was some mother's son.
Once he was fair and once he was young.
And some mother rocked him, her darling, to sleep
But they left him to die like a tramp on the street.
Some mother rocked him, her darling, to sleep?
Mary Trump suggests that it actually wasn't that way inside her uncle's dysfunctional childhood home. She also says, sympathetically though only up to a point, that it went downhill from there.
That said, Williams was one of the greatest of our American voices, and you can hear him sing those lyrics simply by clicking this.
(As you'll see if you click that link, you'll hear him do that as part of a radio show called "The Health and Happiness Show.")
In fact, "A Tramp on the Street" was a hymn. At this particular time in the Christian calendar, it may have a specific resonance for believing Christians.
In the larger sense, the song encourages us to know how to pity those who may be deeply afflicted in various ways. We strongly recommend that performance by one of this nation's most resonant voices, by a giant star who died at an early age—29!—a bit like his "tramp on the street."
FRIDAY, APRIL 3, 2026
...from a real description of President Trump: Ten minutes into his opening monologue, Lawrence O'Donnell delivered the S-bomb last night.
He was speaking about the sitting president. Suddenly, he rendered this:
O'DONNELL (4/2/26): Donald Trump achieved minor celebrity, working at the bottom of the barrel in so-called reality TV, where his catchphrase was the worst thing you could hear in the workplace: "You're fired."
People's live have actually been destroyed by those words in real life. But a sociopath might think that saying those words is entertaining.
So it went as the cable news press corps continued to flirt with the highly important question at hand:
Is it possible that something is wrong with the sitting president?
On this sprawling campus, we've admired the fact that Lawrence O'Donnell has taken the president's conduct personally. He isn't going through the motions as he reviews the president's conduct—but then, on the other hand, he isn't a medical specialist.
By way of contrast, the president's niece actually is a doctorate wielding clinical therapist. As we've noted in the past, this is the way Mary L. Trump assessed her famous uncle in her 2020 best-seller, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man:
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.
For our fullest presentation of the niece's account, you can just click here.
In her book, Mary Trump repeatedly described the president's father—her own grandfather, who she knew as a child and as an adult—as "a high-functioning sociopath." On a narrow clinical basis, she described the sitting president in the manner shown above.
Elsewhere in her book, she also gave a fuller account of the way her uncle was raised within a family she described as highly dysfunctional, She started with a terrible medical incident afflicting the president's mother when he was only two.
The fact that she said it doesn't mean that it's true, but so the niece assessed.
As we noted yesterday, Mary Trump appeared on CNN in late February. At that time, she offered a briefer assessment of the current state of affairs.
Speaking of her famous uncle, she described an "obvious" cognitive decline—a cognitive decline layered atop decades of "serious, undiagnosed and untreated psychiatric disorders, which are only going to worsen."
Once again, so she assessed. Her assessments might be less than perfectly accurate—but given her medical background, we can say she likely has some basic idea of what she's talking about.
Our journalists—and even our lawyers—quite frequently probably don't! Despite that fact, our cable journalists and their guests continued to offer glancing assessments in the wake of last Thursday's televised "cabinet meeting," in which the sitting president engaged in several rambling discussions which seemed perhaps a bit strange.
Some pundits seemed to suggest the presence of a cognitive decline. Others seemed to suggest the presence of some version of "mental illness," whatever that may be
As we noted yesterday, one of the president's former lawyers has even said that the president is "clearly insane" (whatever that means). With that, we turn to an intriguing assessment which appeared last Thursday.
Only a few hours had passed since the cabinet meeting occurred. At Mediaite, the headline atop a (fascinating) opinion piece by Colby Hall was now saying this:
We’ve Stopped Noticing That Trump’s Cabinet Meetings Are Completely Insane
"Completely insane," the headline said. In fairness, the headline referred to the president's cabinet meetings, not to the president himself.
Now for the rest of the story:
According to The Wrap, Colby Hall co-founded Mediaite (with Dan Abrams) back in 2009.
In recent months, Hall has produced valuable work at that site, where he's now managing editor. That includes yesterday's (researched) essay, in which he describes the way viewers of the Fox News Channel have been kept in the dark about the president's declining approval numbers.
(Headline: Fox News Viewers Have No Clue Trump’s Approval Rating Has Cratered. Can someone explain why the New York Times and The Atlantic aren't producing carefully researched work of this same type?)
Hall has produced some excellent work. (Nobody's work is perfect.) With that, we return to last Thursday's opinion piece, the one which had the words "completely insane" sitting right there in its headline.
Like quite a few others, Hall had been struck by that day's "cabinet meeting"—but what exactly was he saying in this instant reaction?
We'll have to admit that we don't really know! But for starters, let us say this about that:
The word "insane" doesn't appear at any point in the text of Hall's essay. Also, his essay mainly concerns the work of the mainstream press. More specifically, it seems to concern something his colleagues in the press are refusing or failing to do.
According to Hall, what are our journalists failing or refusing to do? Even today, we can't exactly say. Ironically, it seems to us that Hall himself refused or failed to explain what he meant in the course of his essay.
That said, we can tell you this:
When the rubber started to meet the road, Hall offered this account of the way the mainstream press corps covered Joe Biden's decline:
OPINION
We’ve Stopped Noticing That Trump’s Cabinet Meetings Are Completely Insane[...]
Compare Thursday to how the press covered Joe Biden’s decline—and I mean that as an observation, not a complaint, because that coverage was legitimate. Biden’s visible deterioration became a persistent, serious, ultimately determinative story. Reporters documented it carefully. Editors treated it as a genuine question about presidential capacity. The press built a vocabulary for that kind of breakdown and applied it with consistency.
[Continuing directly]That same press watched Trump move from Iranian casualty counts to Sharpie unit economics to Venezuelan oil revenue to King Charles’s cancer to Gavin Newsom’s self-reported learning disability—in a single unbroken monologue, at a wartime cabinet meeting, in front of cameras—and filed it under: here’s what the president said today.We have a vocabulary for one kind of presidential communication failure. We have decided, apparently, not to develop one for this kind [of presidential communication failure]. And that asymmetry is a choice, even when it doesn’t feel like one....The question is whether we are actually describing what we’re watching, or whether we’ve quietly shifted into translation mode—taking what happens in that room and rendering it into something that fits the templates we already have, because that’s easier and faster and the templates are what the traffic wants.I think we’re translating. I think we’ve been translating for a while now. And the thing about translation is that something always gets lost—usually the part that would require us to stop and say, out loud, in a published sentence: this is not what this has ever looked like before, and we should probably name that.
[Continuing directly]Read the transcript. I mean actually read it, the whole thing, not the clips. Read it the way you’d read a document from a foreign government you were trying to understand. Ask yourself what you would write if you didn’t already have a template for it.Then ask yourself why we don’t write that.
THURSDAY, APRIL 2, 2026
It's the absolute truth, Gutfeld said: Is something wrong with President Trump?
Yesterday, he did a drop-in at the Supreme Court. Following that, he placed a familiar crazy claim right there on Truth Social.
Headline included, Mediaite reports:
‘STUPID’: Trump Rages Over Birthright Citizenship After Leaving Supreme Court Early
President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to rage about birthright citizenship just moments after oral arguments concluded in the highly-anticipated Supreme Court case on the issue Wednesday.
“We are the only Country in the World STUPID enough to allow ‘Birthright’ Citizenship! President DONALD J. TRUMP,” the president wrote on Truth Social.
It was Trump’s first public comment on the case since he attended the beginning of oral arguments on Wednesday. He’s the first sitting president to attend oral arguments in a Supreme Court case and was there for roughly 80 minutes before leaving.
We're the only country that STUPID, the sitting president said. Simply put, the president loves this groaning misstatement. It's been corrected again and again and again, but he just continues to say it.
Wisely or otherwise, do other countries have birthright citizenship, the same way we do? As the Christian Science Monitor explains, virtually every country in North and South America has unrestricted birthright citizenship, just the way we do.
That includes our immediate neighbors to the north and to the south. Under the fancy Latin heading Jus soli, the leading authority tattles:
Jus soli
[...]
Canada: Subsection 3(2) of the Citizenship Act states that Canadian citizenship by birth in Canada—including Canadian airspace and territorial waters—is granted to a child born in Canada even if neither parent was a Canadian citizen or permanent resident except if either parent was a diplomat, in service to a diplomat, or employed by an international agency of equal status to a diplomat. However, if neither parent was a diplomat, the nationality or immigration status of the parents does not matter.
Mexico: Article 30 of the Constitution of Mexico states that persons born in Mexican territory are natural-born citizens of Mexico regardless of their parents' nationality. The definition of "territory" includes vessels/aircraft flagged to Mexico travelling in international waters or airspace.
The leading authority provides a similar rundown for such South American countries as Argentina, Brazil and Chile (and on and on from there). Wisely or otherwise, virtually every country in the Americas has this unrestricted citizenship policy.
Having said that, so what? The president seems to prefer the bogus claim.
(Does he possibly believe his false claim? We have no idea.)
At any rate, the president emerged from the hearing, then banged out his bogus claim. As if that wasn't bad enough, after that, along came The Five.
Amazingly, the problem started with Jessica Tarlov, the program's twice-weekly liberal punching bag. During yesterday's second segment, she quoted the president's remark:
TARLOV (4/1/26): ...and you know that today didn't go well because Donald Trump's Truth Social post, once he left, was, “We are the only country in the world stupid enough to allow birthright citizenship."
He didn't say, "The government kicked butt." He didn't say, "We are going to win this thing." He said, basically, "I'm going to throw a temper tantrum." And a couple of—
At that point, the interruption came—in this case, from Greg Gutfeld. By the time the interruption had run its course, Gutfeld had told four million viewers that the president's statement was "the absolute truth"—and there was indication that Tarlov disagreed.
Let the interruption begin! To see the exchange, click here:
[Continuing directly from above]
GUTFELD: That was a fact! Is that not a fact? It doesn't matter?
TARLOV: No, it actually doesn't matter, because you know how he behaves when he's excited about something. You know—
GUTFELD: So you're focusing on emotion and not the fact that's the absolute truth.
Tarlov blustered a bit from there. She never said that the president's familiar claim is in fact crazily false.
In all honesty, Tarlov herself seemed to believe that the president's claim was accurate. Gutfeld proceeded to tell four million souls that the president's crazy claim is "the absolute truth."
So it goes on the most-watched "cable news" show in our un-serious nation. We've never seen a major Blue American journalist comment on the imitation of life produced by the Fox News Channel in the form of this clown-car program.
That happened during yesterday's second segment. During the third segment, the program gave birth to the latest plea by Jesse Watters. We'll touch on that prayer tomorrow.
At any rate, the president made one of his crazy clams. It's the absolute truth, Gutfeld said.
Tarlov never disagreed, and neither did anyone else. As a nation, the Blue with the Red, this is the clown car we've chosen.
THURSDAY, APRIL 2, 2026
But also, the clinical therapist's tale: "Clearly insane," the lawyer said on Tuesday night, speaking to Jim Acosta
The lawyer used some startling language. We take you to Mediaite's report about the lawyer's remarks:
Ex-Trump Lawyer Calls President ‘Clearly Insane’: ‘I Think He’s Gone’
Former Trump White House lawyer Ty Cobb called the president “clearly insane” and argued his last night social media posts only further prove he’s mentally “gone.”
Cobb joined Acosta on his podcast The Jim Acosta Show on Tuesday evening where he blasted his former client, arguing his “screeds” on Iran and more in the dead of night on Truth Social highlight “the level of his insanity and depravity.”
“It’s not a surprise that we’re in this much trouble. It’s not a surprise given the fact that the cabinet will not invoke the 25th Amendment for a man who’s clearly insane. And this war highlights that. And these screeds that come out nightly, at 2 a.m. or 4 a.m. or whatever time Trump decides to vent without oversight, it highlights the level of his insanity and depravity,” Cobb told Acosta.
And so on from there. Cobb had made similar comments in the recent past, as we noted in yesterday morning's report.
On Tuesday night, he went there again.
Ty Cobb is a (highly regarded) lawyer—but he's not a medical specialist. Also, "insane" is not a clinical term, eye-catching though it may be.
Is something wrong with President Trump? In the aftermath of last Thursday's televised "cabinet meeting," many observers have seemed to suggest that the answer is yes.
As we've noted in the past few days, some of these observers seemed to be suggesting that the sitting president has experienced some sort of cognitive decline. Other observers seemed to be suggesting that the president may be afflicted with some version of "mental illness."
On Tuesday, speaking with Acosta, Cobb took the latter route. But here we go again in this most restricted of all possible journalistic worlds:
Cobb, a lawyer, isn't an experienced medical specialist. Because our major news orgs have all agreed that issues of mental health must be avoided in the political context, everyone else we've quoted in the past few days shares that same shortcoming.
None of the observers we've cited have been medical specialists! But hold on:
In training, and within a limited range of clinical experience, Mary L. Trump, the president's niece, actually is such a specialist.
As we noted back on March 4, Mary Trump shared her current view of her uncle's health on Thursday evening, February 26. She spoke that evening with CNN's Erin Burnett, on Erin Burnett OutFront.
The fact that she said it doesn't mean that it's right! But Mary Trump is a doctorate-wielding clinical therapist, and these are the views she expressed:
BURNETT (2/26/26): You've known him your whole life. Do you actually see a [cognitive] decline?
MARY L. TRUMP: I do, but I think it's important to remember that Donald has never been fit in any capacity. Obviously, what we're dealing with now are age-related cognitive declines. We're dealing with physical issues that the White House tries to cover over.
But this is somebody who for decades now has had serious, undiagnosed and untreated psychiatric disorders, which are only going to worsen, especially given the pressure he's under and given the cognitive and physical declines.
Rightly or possibly wrongly, so said Mary Trump. She seemed to say that her uncle has experienced an obvious cognitive decline—but it isn't just any such decline. In the view of Mary Trump, it's a cognitive decline which is layered atop decades worth of "serious psychiatric disorders."
Those were her assessments. We repeat them because they were offered, not because they just have to be accurate.
Her assessments may be inaccurate, but there her assessments stand. With respect to our mainstream American discourse—with respect to the modern practice of American journalism—a further fact should be noted at this time:
Of all the people offering recent thoughts about the state of the president's health, Mary Trump is the only such observer who can be assumed to have some basic idea what she's talking about.
She isn't a lawyer, and she isn't a pundit; she's an actual medical specialist! For that reason, it's almost amazing that CNN allowed her to go on the air and, however briefly, offer those medical assessments.
For decades, American news orgs have all agreed—issues of mental health must never be discussed with respect to major political figures. In our view, that was always a very good rule—until the time came when it wasn't.
Now we're engaged in a great Red-Blue civil war, along with a war in Iraq. Many observers seem to be concerned about the state of the president's health. They're concerned about the state of his cognition, perhaps about the possibility of underlying "mental disorders."
Rightly or wrongly, many people hold such concerns; many others don't. In our view, such matters are always a human tragedy—but we think observers are almost surely right when they give voice to such concerns.
He's the most powerful person on the planet. In fairness, you are allowed to voice your opinion about his health at this perilous time--but you're only allowed to do so if you aren't a medical specialist. You're allowed to opine if there's no particular reason to think you know what you're talking about!
"Clearly insane," the lawyer said—but he's only a (very capable) lawyer. In her 2020 best-selling book, Too Much and Never Enough, Mary Trump gave a detailed assessment of her uncle's (many and serious) apparent "psychopathologies."
We've quoted what she said in that book again and again and again. You've read those assessments nowhere else. For better or worse, her assessments were uniformly disappeared by the high-end political press.
Six years later, here we are. For better or worse, our journalists continue to play an understandable but debilitating game:
Lawyers can thunder as much as they like. No medical specialists need apply!
Cognitive decline is a human tragedy. So is (serious) "mental illness."
Is the world's most powerful person possibly tangled in some such dangerous state of affairs? For better or worse, our journalists know the rules of the game:
What might medical specialists think? Our high-end journalists all know this:
Such people must never be asked!
Tomorrow: His fascinating opinion piece carried this headline:
We’ve Stopped Noticing That Trump’s Cabinet Meetings Are Completely Insane
