WHAT WAS "MENTAL ILLNESS?" Is President Trump "mentally ill?"

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2025

Our Blue stars didn't ask: Is the sitting president, Donald J. Trump, afflicted with some (serious) version of (what used to be referred to as) "mental illness?"

You'd almost think that we the people would actually want to know! At present, the children who pose as Blue America's journalists are happily noting the aforementioned gentleman's descent in several polls.

To appearances, the gentleman's behavior has become so disordered that some of his voters are starting to notice! But uh-oh! As our journalists gambol and play, this question goes unasked:

What might such a ("mentally ill") person decide to do if the bottom completely falls out?

Along the way in this vale of tears, two (2) best-selling books have used a certain word in discussing the person in question. One book appeared in 2017. The other appeared three years later:

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President
Bandy Lee, M.D., M.Div. (ed.). MacMillan, 2017.

Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man
Mary L. Trump, Ph.D. Simon & Schuster, 2020.

The word in question was "dangerous." If the bottom falls out on President Trump, could he place the nation, even the world, in a state of real danger?

You'd almost think we'd want to know that! But if you thought some such thing, you were misjudging the capabilities of the species in question.

At any rate, this very Monday, there he went again! 

Last week, the gentleman ranted, for two consecutive days, about all the human "garbage" he'd spotted in Minnesota. Over the weekend, at a White House Christmas reception, he spent ten (10) minutes inventing wild claims about a terrible bite from a terrible snake in Peru. 

What was the point of that extremely strange story? The president ended up pretending that a book about this terrible bite had become the nation's number one best seller—all because he, President Donald J. Trump, had mentioned the book on Truth Social. 

All self-praise to the glorious Trump! That was the obvious point of the fantasized snake bite story.

That said, the president burned ten minutes away in that lunatic way—at a Christmas reception, no less! And on Monday, there he went again, with a pair of lunatic declarations in which he savaged the memory of a widely admired public figure who had been murdered, over the weekend, by his own disordered son.

It was the "garbage," followed by the snake, then on to the crackpot double denigration of the murdered Rob Reiner and his wife. This followed a steady succession of lunatic behaviors over the past few months, most of which have been disappeared by Blue American "journalists."

In previous weeks, the person in question had dropped tons of poop from an airplane down onto his subjects' heads. He had told the world that the Democratic Party was actually "the party of Satan."

He kept making lunatic claims about a succession of policy matters—lunatic claims he kept repeating after endless public corrections of his ludicrous assertions. Within the past few weeks, he had taken to insulting a stream of female journalists when they asked obvious questions at official press events.

Could there perhaps be room for concern about these strange behaviors? A respected physician, Dr. Vin Gupta, had now offered a public statement alleging "age-related cognitive decline."

Also, a respected psychologist, Dr. John Gartner, had recently cited a second point of concern. Headline included, a report by The Daily Beast started off like this:

We Can See Trump Is in Gross Decline: Psychologist

A top psychologist has warned that 79-year-old Donald Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior likely points toward a personality disorder being rapidly worsened by dementia.

“When people develop dementia, they become the worst versions of themselves,” Dr. John Gartner—a therapist, activist, author, and former professor at Johns Hopkins—told Joanna Coles Sunday on the latest episode of The Daily Beast Podcast.

Gartner has previously shared with the show how he sees the aging president’s verbal gaffes, growing confusion, and frequent memory lapses as “clinical signs of dementia,” which have in turn exacerbated what he believes to be Trump’s underlying “malignant narcissism.”

“Whatever personality issues or problems [people with dementia] have, [those issues] begin to deteriorate and they become even more crude, disorganized, aggressive, confused versions of that personality disorder,” Gartner added. 

So the pair of respected medical specialists had now said.

On Monday, the president's pair of statements were so bizarre that a stream of members of MAGA world had rushed to object to his behavior. On this campus, we turned to the giants of MS NOW, waiting to see their analysis of what had now occurred. 

We might as well have tried to catch the wind! At 9 p.m. on Monday night, Rachel Maddow appeared on our giant screen.

Rightly or wrongly, Maddow has long been accepted as Blue America's resident genius. After accepting the throw from The Weeknight's three co-hosts, she started her weekly program in the familiar way:

MADDOW (2/15/25): And thanks to you at home for joining us this hour. Really happy to have you here.

If things look a little bit different tonight, if the lighting seems different, if the background looks a little different, that's because I'm joining you from somewhere I almost never am. I'm in Los Angeles right now. I was here in L.A. last night, we had a big event at the Orpheum Theater in downtown L.A. with some of the people that helped us make my new podcast, Burn Order, which is about the decision to incarcerate Japanese-Americans during World War II, and the people who fought that decision, and the thriller, the investigative thriller, at the heart of that.

"I I I I I I I," our young analysts instantly cried. Skillfully, we calmed them down. The full open went like this:

MADDOW (2/15/25): And thanks to you at home for joining us this hour. Really happy to have you here.

If things look a little bit different tonight, if the lighting seems different, if the background looks a little different, that's because I'm joining you from somewhere I almost never am. I'm in Los Angeles right now. I was here in L.A. last night, we had a big event at the Orpheum Theater in downtown L.A. with some of the people that helped us make my new podcast, Burn Order, which is about the decision to incarcerate Japanese-Americans during World War II, and the people who fought that decision, and the thriller, the investigative thriller, at the heart of that.

All six episodes of Burn Order are now out, the whole thing is out, everything's posted, free to listen to the whole series on any podcast app.

Here in L. A., there's a lot going on. There is honestly a lot of shock and anger from all sorts of different people—from people connected to show business and not—shock and anger about the murder of beloved actor and director Rob Reiner and his wife.

I will say also, a lot of just visceral revulsion about President Trump's ghoulish, really ugly, disgusting comments, sneering at Mr. Reiner's death, almost seeming to celebrate his murder.

In L.A., today is also the day that Donald Trump's deployment of National Guard troops to this city fell apart. The federalized National Guard troops were forced to leave L.A. today because of a federal court order, because what Trump did in deploying them here,  according to a judge, was illegal. We're going to have more to come on both of those stories, and much more, tonight.

But I want to start somewhere tonight that is much colder than it is here. Let's start in Minnesota, specifically about fifteen miles southwest of Minneapolis...

By now, the timestamp said 9:02 p.m. For better or worse, we'd now heard everything Maddow was going to say about that day's stunningly strange behavior by the sitting president.

But wait, the true believer will say. As anyone can see, Maddow had seemed to say that we "were going to have more" about the story in question!

And yes, we agree-—that is what she'd seemed to say. But the bizarre new behavior by President Trump was never mentioned again during the rest of the hour.

Maddow never came back to the president's latest disordered behavior—but she had already said more about that disordered behavior than other hosts on MS NOW were going to say that night.

All across the fruited plain, that latest bizarre behavior was being discussed this day. This latest behavior had been so weird that one MAGA stalwart after another had stepped forward to voice concern and disgust about the president's conduct.

Our question:

Is the sitting president "mentally ill" in some potentially dangerous way? Over the weekend, part of the answer had seemed clear to us as we watched him rattle on about that dreadful snake. But Blue America's journalists and academics have made one thing abundantly clear:

Given the limitations of our species, they seem to be unable to see what is right there before them. Or they're simply unwilling to report what they see, given their blind obedience to tribal Storyline and to corporate dicta.

On this campus, we're inclined to pity the man who is (severely) mentally ill. But why on earth would we do that? Also, what happened at 4 p.m. that day, when Nicolle Wallace and three guests did attempt to discuss the president's bizarre behavior in the wake of that double murder?

Is President Trump a public danger? At 4 p.m. that day, Wallace and her guests attempted to tackle a version of that question.

After that, silence prevailed on MS NOW, right on through to midnight. Last week, they disappeared his remarks about "garbage." Now, as the rest of the nation condemned his remarks, they weirdly all disappeared this!

Is President Trump a public danger? Perhaps by decree from the channel's new suits, the obedient children of MS NOW don't seem to be willing to ask!

Tomorrow: The politics of mercy