President Donald Trump’s former White House lawyer says the “insane” 79-year-old is displaying “great deterioration.”
Ty Cobb, who served as a White House lawyer during Trump’s first term, said during an appearance on MS NOW on Thursday that the “deterioration” of the president’s mental state has “accelerated” since his first administration, with his penchant for late-night Truth Social rants being a prime example.
“This is somebody who just is lost,” Cobb, 75, told host Ari Melber on The Beat. “He gets into these screeds at odd times. And one of the classic symptoms of Alzheimer’s is the sleep-wake reversal.”
“So we see these screeds coming out at 4 a.m., and we see him falling asleep in Cabinet meetings in the mornings and in the afternoon. That’s a classic symptom of dementia,” he said.
The attorney appeared on the program just after the network shared a compilation of some of Trump’s most eyebrow-raising moments, including an almost 10-minute rant about snakes in Peru from an event in December.
“So we’ve got snakes, drapes, pens. It’s just crazy. But it’s not unheard of,” Cobb said. “What we see in a man who insists that Rob Reiner—who was murdered by a mentally incapacitated relative—Trump tried to personalize that as being, he was murdered because of the anger that he had caused by being opposed by Trump."
Cobb, who left the first Trump administration in 2018 after managing the White House’s internal legal team on matters related to Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation into Russian election interference in 2016, also mentioned the president’s incredibly insensitive reaction to Mueller’s death as well as his beef with Pope Leo XIV that began on Sunday.
“It just shows you how crazy this man is,” he said about Trump’s assertion that the pope is OK with Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, despite the pontiff having expressed his disdain for weapons of mass destruction.
Melber then asked Cobb about how Trump’s mental decline has differed from his first administration.
“It’s definitely accelerated,” he said. “When I was there, his narcissism would be on display because he would passionately want to do something that seemed out of bounds. But people like Gen. Kelly and Gen. Mattis, Nikki Haley, were there to talk him out of it. They don’t have those guardrails there today.”
“In fact, there should be some concern that people are using this, using his incapacity, to manipulate decisions, as Netanyahu did in connection with the decision to go into Iran,” Cobb continued. “But now, his vocabulary has shrunk, he’s resorted to profanity and threats, totally impulsive, suggestive of the absence of any frontal lobe controls.”
The lawyer argued that Joe Biden’s “benevolent grandpa losing his memory” version of cognitive decline was much less destructive than Trump’s brand of “malignant narcissism.”
“Along with the other things that we were talking about and the difficulty he has undertaking new tasks, absorbing information, and simply just the amorality of some of the things he says. Those are all suggestive of great deterioration, and it’s tragic.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
