WEDNESDAY: Tom Nichols inches towards the question!

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2025

The bill has now come due: Over here in Blue America, there exists a tremendous reluctance to come to terms with what seems to be right before us.

We refer to the fairly obvious conclusion that something seems to be wrong with President Trump—that there may be issues of mental health floating around in the mix. 

As we noted in this morning's report, Lawrence O'Donnell has been willing to go there this week, as he has done in the past. Later, over at The Atlantic, we saw an essay by Tom Nichols, found beneath this dual headline:

The Commander in Chief Is Not Okay
Trump put on a disturbing show for America’s generals and admirals.

The president isn't OK, Nichols says. And yesterday's speech was "disturbing."

At least, that's what the headlines say. Below, you see where the relevant part of Nichols' text starts up. Question—is Nichols talking about issues of mental health and mental illness at this point in his piece?

The Commander in Chief Is Not Okay
Trump put on a disturbing show for America’s generals and admirals.

[...]

The president talked at length, and his comments should have confirmed to even the most sympathetic observer that he is, as the kids say, not okay. Several of Hegseth’s people said in advance of the senior-officer conclave that its goal was to energize America’s top military leaders and get them to focus on Hegseth’s vision for a new Department of War. But the generals and admirals should be forgiven if they walked out of the auditorium and wondered: What on earth is wrong with the commander in chief?

Italics by Nichols. We'd say the suggestion is already strong, but it remains a slightly coy suggestion. We're asking you to note the cultural reluctance to raise such a question directly.

As his essay continues, Nichols directs some standard jibes at the president's speech. Soon, though, it seemed to us that he was hinting further:

And so it went, as Trump recycled old rally speeches, full of his usual grievances, lies, and misrepresentations; his obsessions with former Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama; and his sour disappointment in the Nobel Prize committee. (“They’ll give it to some guy that didn’t do a damn thing,” he said.) He congratulated himself on tariffs, noting that the money could buy a lot of battleships, “to use an old term.” And come to think of it, he said, maybe America should build battleships again, from steel, not that papier-mâché and aluminum stuff the Navy is apparently using now: “Aluminum that melts if it looks at a missile coming at it. It starts melting as the missile is about two miles away.”

Ohhhkayyyy.

We'd say the insinuation is stronger there, but it's still an insinuation.

The word "unhinged" appears in the next paragraph, though only as a description of the president's "diatribe."  Applied to the president himself, that word has long been a standard journalistic dodge—a standard way of avoiding direct language about his mental state.

A few grafs later, the criticism is possibly stronger, but Nichols seems to be describing a simple act of demagoguing, transferred yesterday to a deeply inappropriate place:

This farrago of fantasy, menace, and autocratic peacocking is the kind of thing that the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan evocatively called “boob bait for the Bubbas” and that George Orwell might have called “prolefeed.” It’s one thing to serve it up to an adoring MAGA crowd: They know that most of it is nonsense and only some of it is real. They find it entertaining, and they can take or leave as much of Trump’s rhetorical junk-food buffet as they would like. It is another thing entirely to aim this kind of sludge at military officers, who are trained and acculturated to treat every word from the president with respect, and to regard his thoughts as policy.

All in all, it's just a bunch of boob bait, Nichols now seems to be saying.

Three paragraphs remain at this point. Does Nichols turn the temperature up—speak with clear precision? The language has started to take a turn in this next paragraph:

But American officers have never had to contend with a president like Trump. Plenty of presidents behaved badly and suffered mental and emotional setbacks: John F. Kennedy cavorted with secretaries in the White House pool, Lyndon Johnson unleashed foul-mouthed tirades on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Nixon fell into depression and paranoia, Ronald Reagan and Joe Biden wrestled with the indignities of age. But the officer corps knew that presidents were basically normal men surrounded by other normal men and women, and that the American constitutional system would insulate the military from any mad orders that might emerge from the Oval Office.

The specter of possible "madness" has now perhaps been raised. This president may not be "normal."

In the penultimate graf, Nichols has the generals wondering "who will shield them from the impulses of the person they just saw onstage," from "his nuttiest—and most dangerous—ideas."  But it isn't until his final paragraph that he lets his message fly:

In 1973, an Air Force nuclear-missile officer named Harold Hering asked a simple question during a training session: “How can I know that an order I receive to launch my missiles came from a sane president?” The question cost him his career. Military members are trained to execute orders, not question them. But today, both the man who can order the use of nuclear arms and the man who would likely verify such an order gave disgraceful and unnerving performances in Quantico. How many officers left the room asking themselves Major Hering’s question?

Accordingto Nichols. officers may have left the room yesterday wondering if the president is sane. Nichols took a long time to get there, and even there, the implication is stated in the form of a question.

Over here in Blue America, our major journalists are very timid when it comes to saying what they mean, and what they must think, about this grotesquely important question. Our own suggestion would be this:

We don't know how to talk about this in the way we might want to do.

We don't know how to talk about this topic! Beyond that, we've failed and we've failed, in various other ways, over the course of the past sixty years, and the bill has now come due.

Regarding this one particular topic:

(Severe) mental illness, with possible dementia included, is always a tragedy. You have to start by saying that.

You have to start by saying that. You have to say it every time. It helps if you know that it's true.