WHAT IS MENTAL ILLNESS: What was Nichols talking about?

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2025

Wallace agreed not to ask: In Monday morning's report, we cited the old Gil Scott Heron lyric:

The revolution will not be televised.

At the time, we transitioned that lyric as shown:

The truth about the demise of the American nation will not be reported or discussed in the New York Times.

Today, we take things one step further. This very morning, as the Trump administration shuts down funding to more than a dozen Blue American states, we will go ahead and state this largely disappeared fact:

The secession has already happened.

We're speaking here of the second secession. We're speaking of the current secession, the secession which follows on the heels of the secession of 1861.

An irony prevails:

Back then, it was the southern, slavery-endorsing states which chose to secede from the northern states, who had come in control of the White House. 

(That action by those southern states reflects on no one living today.)

Today, it's the political leaders of the Red American states—the political leaders who control the White House—who have chosen to secede from their Blue American counterparts. They're seceding thanks to their political success, not in the wake of their political defeat,.

At any rate, the revolution won't be televised, and that secession won't be announced. Nor will Blue America's tribunes ever report this ongoing state of affairs as clearly as we have just done.

We think today of a striking confession from Jim Sheridan's brilliant 2003 movie, In America.  (The film received Oscar nominations in two acting categories and for best original screenplay.)

Midway through the film, a striking confession occurs. Driven mad by the death of a child, the distraught young father, an Irish immigrant to the U.S., confesses the loss of his person:

You know, I asked [God] a favor. I asked him to take me instead of him—and he took the both of us. And look what he put in my place.

I'm a f***ing ghost! I don't exist. I can't think. I can't laugh. I can't cry.

I can't feel!

We aren't in love with the way that confession was performed. But to watch that confession, click here.

That father couldn't laugh of cry. Today, those of us in Blue America are unable to speak. Our tribunes keep refusing to speak—keep refusing to give us key words.

Is something wrong with President Trump? At this site, we've asked that (fairly obvious) question for a very long time. 

If the answer is yes, that's a personal human tragedy—but it's also a danger to the nation and to the world. As part of our own presentation, we've often transcribed the claims of the president's niece, a doctorate-wielding clinical therapist, about the vast extent of what she described in her best-selling book as her uncle's many "psychopathologies."

The fact that she said it doesn't mean that it's true! But as with President Biden, so too with President Trump:

Over here in Blue America, our corporate tribunes have refused, every step of the way, to ask the obvious question about the possibility that something is seriously wrong:

In yesterday afternoon's report, we discussed the latest example. We discussed this essay in The Atlantic—an essay by Tom Nichols, an impressive and good decent person.

Who the Sam Hill is Brother Nichols? The leading authority speaks:

Tom Nichols (academic)

Thomas Michael Nichols (born 1960) is an American writer, academic specialist on international affairs, and retired professor at the U.S. Naval War College. His work dealt with issues involving Russia, nuclear weapons, and national security affairs.

Born in Holyoke, Massachusetts, Nichols grew up in Chicopee, Massachusetts, where he attended public schools in the 1960s and 1970s...He stated in a speech at the Heritage Foundation that he did not come from an educated family, noting that his parents were "both Depression era kids who dropped out of high school".

Nichols was awarded a BA degree in political science from Boston University in 1983, an MA degree in political science from Columbia University in 1984, a certificate from the Harriman Institute of Columbia University in 1985, and a PhD in government from Georgetown University in 1988. His doctoral thesis was entitled The politics of doctrine: Khrushchev, Gorbachev and the Soviet military.

[...]

Nichols registered with the Republican Party in 1979. He described himself in 2016 as a Never Trump conservative. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Nichols argued that conservatives should vote for Hillary Clinton, whom he detested, because Trump was "too mentally unstable" to serve as commander-in-chief....

And so on from there. Nichols is an impressive, experienced person. He was also refusing to speak in his essay for The Atlantic.

From his first few paragraphs (and his headline) on, Nichols said the president "isn't OK," but he kept failing to say what he specifically meant by that. Yesterday afternoon, this refusal to speak was extended to a lengthy segment of the MSNBC TV show, Deadline: White House, where Nicolle Wallace had assembled a panel of three Blue American tribunes, all of whom failed to speak.

They were refusing to speak—or possibly they simply can't! In the present circumstance, it may be that they simply they don't know how to do so. In the current circumstance, it may be that our human wiring doesn't equip us "rational animals" to engage in such conduct as that.

It may be that we humans aren't built for that line of work! But there sat Wallace, speaking with the three-member panel, and no one ever stood up and was willing—or able—to speak.

Wallace spoke with her three-person panel from shortly after 5 o'clock right on through 5:32. She started with a twenty-minute segment. After a commercial break, a shorter segment followed.

At the Deadline: White House site, you can watch the first twelve minutes of that initial segment. As you will see, the segment is summarized thusly:

Is Trump 'unwell?' New questions emerge after 'striking low-energy and rambling' military speech
Donald Trump's "low-energy and rambling" speech to military leaders on Tuesday is raising new questions about his fitness for office, MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace reports. Tom Nichols, Mark Hertling and Maya Wiley join Deadline: White House to discuss.

We'll disagree with one part of that summary. In our view, the second part of that summary should actually say this:

Donald Trump's "low-energy and rambling" speech to military leaders on Tuesday is raising new questions about his fitness for office, MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace reports. Tom Nichols, Mark Hertling and Maya Wiley join Deadline: White House to pretend to discuss.

In fact, Wallace was pretending to conduct a discussion with her trio of guests. Their own rambling statements were so disjointed—were so non-specific—that no real discussion or assertion ever emerged.

For starters, let's go with this:

Wallace's initial segment was explicitly built around the essay by Nichols. Rather than simply speak with him about what he had written and meant, she and her producers had assembled that trio of guests.

Nichols was only given one real chance to speak with specificity about what he'd meant when he said, at the start of his essay, that the president "didn't seem OK" when he delivered his rambling address. 

In his essay for The Atlantic, Nichols had eventually seemed to question whether the president is "sane." That had seemed like a very strong insinuation—but so what? In their headline, Wallace' producers had turned their segment into discussion of whether the president is "unwell." 

That's a extremely vague formulation. In its lack of specificity, it gave all the performers, most especially Wallace herself, a safe space in which they could hide.

Along the way, a type of problem had emerged:

A person can be "unwell" in a wide assortment of ways. To some extent, discussion of the president's speech to the admirals and generals had generated questions about possible physical illness. Also, the word "dementia" had been cited by Lawrence O'Donnell.

With all that in mind, what exactly was now being said about the way in which the president may not be OK—may be "unwell?" That never became clear on Deadline: White House. In truth, the segment may have been designed toward that unhelpful end.

Question:

Is dementia a "mental illness?" Using the language which may now be preferred, is dementia a "mental disorder?" 

We find contradictory answers to that question in presentations made by the leading authority. That said, the president's niece had spoken of the likelihood that the president suffers, in effect, from "sociopathy"—and sociopathy (technically, "antisocial personality disorder") is not the same thing as dementia.

So what was Nichols talking about in his Atlantic essay? In his first chance to speak on yesterday show, he sensibly and intelligently told Wallace this:

NICHOLS (10/1/25): What inspired the piece was Trump...I did hear afterwards that, you know, a lot of folks, right? He just doesn't seem well. He's not OK.

I'm not a doctor. I'm not making a diagnosis. I'm saying, as a lay person and a man of advancing years myself, that I looked at the president and I thought, "He's not OK"—and that it's not just his physical demeanor. 

I mean, this—I think for too long we haven't been willing to talk about the weird, rambling—you know, the president tries to call it "The Weave." It's not The Weave. It is some kind of emotional disordered condition where he just cannot hold a thought in his head...And it just disturbed me, and I thought I ought to say something about it.

I'm not a doctor, Nichols said. I'm not making a diagnosis. But this is precisely where the anger here in Blue America should start to flow:

No one else on yesterday's panel was a doctor either! Nichols isn't capable of bringing medical expertise to any discussion of what he saw, but neither were the other two people Wallace's bosses had directed her to pretend to conduct a discussion with.

Listening to what Nichols did say, he seems to be thinking of something like "dementia" as opposed to something like physical illness or "sociopathy." Either way, he isn't able to being specialized knowledge to any discussion of what he saw—and producers had booked two other people who were also unable to do that!

Nearing the end of the first segment, Wallace made matters considerably worse. She recalled the way serious concerns about the president's mental condition had been raised by administration insiders in Trump's first term, as early as 2017 and 2018. 

That had even included the possible removing the president from office through the 25th amendment, Wallace accurately said. Without seeming to understand the sweep of her self-indictment, Wallace was thereby telling us that she and her corporate owners have agreed, for all those years, that we must never discuss the possible shape of those serious concerns.

I can't think. I can't laugh. I can't cry. I can't feel! That's what the distraught father says in that Oscar-nominated film. 

People like Wallace keep refusing to speak. It may be that they can't speak—that they simply lack the requisite intellectual skills. 

But nothing is going to come from their failures, and nothing is going to change what they do. Nichols had suggested that the president may not be "sane." When the subsequent pseudo-discussion was staged, that word never came up.

The revolution won't be televised! Also, the president's possible mental condition will never be discussed on your favorite TV shows.

Had the admirals and generals been watching a person who's "sane?" That was the specific question with which Nichols had ended his essay.

Yesterday, no one uttered that challenging word in the course of a full half hour. Instead, they settled for the fuzzy term, "unwell." 

Everyone knows the rules of these games. Everyone except us rubes out here in Blue America as a second secession takes place.

This afternoon: Mika refuses to say who she means

Tomorrow: Pretending to profile Kat Timpf