HEALTH: He said the press is holding back...

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.

We're not sure why Hall made those statements. It seems to us that the mainstream press was much less aggressive in its description of President Biden's (unfortunate) decline.

At any rate, Hall alleges that journalists were persistent and serious in their treatment of President Biden. He says it hasn't been like that with respect to President Trump. This is the way he continues:

[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.

What was Hall saying there? We have no clear idea. He seems to be saying that the press corps offered clear descriptions of President Biden's "deterioration," but is failing to describe something that's right before them in the case of President Trump.

He said the press corps lacks "a vocabulary" for the kind of "presidential communication failure" taking place with President Trump. That may be, he suggests, because "this isn't what [presidential communication] has ever looked like before."

Is the press corps holding something back? It almost seems like Hall himself is doing so, even as he voices this intriguing complaint!

For the record, there's a bit more to Hall's essay. This is the way he ends:

[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. 

According to Hall, there's something the press corps is failing or refusing to write—but he never quite says what it is! In closing, we ourselves would say this:

"Cognitive decline" is a human tragedy. So can be the various forms of (significant) "mental illness." It's also true that terrible dangers can be involved.

Is that medical language the vocabulary the press is avoiding in the case of President Trump? We don't know what Hall meant in this oddly fuzzy column—but some extremely aggressive language was sitting up there in his headline, including the word "insane."

A final point:

"Mental illness" (and "cognitive decline") should not be wielded as an insult. In our view, it should be viewed sympathetically, as an unfortunate form of "illness" (as an unfortunate form of disease). 

The danger involved can be great—but we should remember that we're dealing with an "illness." 

We say that if we want to be good, or if we want to win.

This afternoon: The vocabulary of Hank Williams ("He was some mother's son...")