TUESDAY: We've been recalling an Oscar winner!

TUESDAY, JANUARY 20, 2026

But first, three cheers for Hall: We've been thinking today about Driving Miss Daisy. It was awarded the Oscar for Best Picture way back in 1990.

Some progressives had objections. First, though, let us say this:

Three cheers for Colby Hall!

Hall was founding editor of Mediaite, a site at which he's been taking a more active role of late. We remain puzzled by his astounding claim that Greg Gutfeld, the "Fox News prankster," presents a brand of "smart, fun, non-lecturey comedy" on his gruesome "cable news" show.

We're still astounded by that assessment! But that was January 2025, and what you see here is right now:

Opinion
Trump’s Bizarre Behavior Has a Clinical Name: Disinhibition

One of the earliest and most underreported warning signs of certain forms of dementia is not memory loss. It is disinhibition—a deterioration of impulse control, judgment, and social restraint that often manifests as reckless behavior, inappropriate speech, and diminished concern for consequences. By the time forgetfulness becomes obvious, the disease process is often well underway.

That framework matters because it closely tracks what President Donald Trump has been displaying with increasing frequency.

In the wee hours of Tuesday morning, Trump posted private messages from confused European leaders, publicly criticized the United Kingdom’s national security posture, and shared a fabricated image depicting the United States in control of Greenland, Canada, Venezuela, and Cuba. This was the sitting president of the United States conducting foreign policy online, overnight, as allies scrambled to contain diplomatic fallout from his threats to “take” Greenland.

[...]

I am not a medical professional, but I have watched close friends and family endure the slow, painful experience of cognitive decline. Disinhibition is familiar to anyone who has lived through it. The tell is not temperament, but change from baseline...

And so on from there.

Meanwhile, it's true! As far as we know, Hall isn't a medical professional. Neither are we, and we aren't prepared to assume that his assessment here is correct.

It's also true that, in this opinion piece, Hall is discussing "cognitive decline," the safer (and more familiar) of the two conditions with which the president may be afflicted. For ourselves, we would wonder if some version of cognitive decline is now being layered atop a pre-existing "personality disorder," or atop a set of some such conditions. 

We'll also quickly take this guess:

As a general matter, people afflicted with serious "personality disorders" didn't choose to be so diminished. As we've noted in the past, antisocial personality disorder—colloquially, sociopathy—is believed to be partly heritable. 

The president's niece has joined other medical specialists in suggesting that the president may have suffered from that variety of "mental illness" all along. If that possible diagnosis is actually accurate, the condition of which we're speaking may have been bred in the bone.

We aren't assuming that Hall's suggestion today is right. On the other hand, we definitely aren't assuming that his suggestion is wrong. We offer three cheers for Hall today because he was willing to get off his aspic and offer some serious thoughts about what may seem to be right there before us. 

Along the way, he cites three people who may—or may not—have been trying to do the same thing:

That shift [in Trump's behavior] helps explain why concern is coming from voices that once defended or accommodated Trump. Sen. Ruben Gallego described Trump as “insane” on CNN...Even Trump’s own former deputy spokesperson, Sarah Matthews, believes Trump’s pursuit of Greenland is “mentally ill” and “deranged.” And CNN medical analyst Dr. Jonathan Reiner has called for a bipartisan congressional inquiry into Trump’s mental fitness, citing the behavioral pattern rather than ideology.

Offhand, we can't say that Senator Gallego ever "accommodated" President Trump. Beyond that, we've edited out a pair of voices who don't seem to fit Hall's stated framework. 

Nor is it clear what Gallego was trying to say when he said the things he said. As for Matthews, to see the remark in which she uses the term "mentally ill," you can just click here.

(We'd say that her statement is a bit hard to parse. She says the president has done "a medically-ill, deranged thing." Does the concept of "mental illness" actually work like that?)

Hall's statement today does parse—though no, he isn't a medical specialist. The president's recent behavior has seemed to be increasingly strange—and, in total truth, the president's endless and constant misstatements of fact have been completely unacceptable, dating all the way back to 2011 when he started making himself king of the birthers.

It was hard to get the Times to speak about that misconduct back then! For something resembling fifteen years, our journalists have insisted on refusing to discuss what seemed to be right there before them. 

As we noted in this morning's report, the whole gang on today's Morning Joe were sunk in a familiar brand of avoidance. That's long been a cognitive trait of Blue America's mainstream press.

Today, Hall has explicitly chosen to speak. He has spoken in a clear-cut way which can be clearly understood. This may help others find ways to speak about a possibility which could, of course, be extremely dangerous.

There's much more to say about all this, but we'll quit today with those three cheers—looking ahead to some possible thoughts about what happens in Driving Miss Daisy.

In closing, holy cow:

"Smart, fun comedy"—from the Fox News Channel's Gutfeld?  How on earth did today's honored trailblazer ever come up with that?