Let me be frank: The President of the United States is out of his mind, and nobody’s doing a goddamned thing about it. What do I mean? Any number of red flags, really, but in particular right now it’s the latest five hundred words of blithering lunacy he shared on his bitcoin mining operation social media site Tuesday night.
They are not the words of a man elected to lead the world’s most powerful nation. They are, instead, those of a malevolent Don Quixote tilting at a cancer-causing, bird-killing windmill which exists only to billow stale air around in the space between his ears.
Since the start of his second regime, Trump has roared against any suggestion that he’s not the man he used to be. But it is true nonetheless. I mean, his cankles have now swollen to twice their pre-presidential girth. The formerly truculent stride has been replaced by a wobbly gait more suitable to a listing sailboat than the captain of the ship of state. The make-up which used only to coat his doughy face has now migrated southward to his hands, covering mysterious bruises—bruises no doubt related to all the arm-twisting he’s done to solve all those wars, right? Wrong!
Trump is no lion in winter; he is, instead, lying in winter.
“There has never been a President that has worked as hard as me!” his rant began. To which I say, “Golfing isn’t work, Mr. President.” Nor is napping during Cabinet meetings. You see, our hardest-working POTUS famously keeps a light schedule. “Executive time” (TV watching, yelling at people on the phone) usually keeps the nearly 80-year-old in the residence until late morning, when he begins his official day. Which is packed.
Today, for example, Trump’s publicly available schedule has him doing a 9:00 a.m. press pool, followed by a 2:00 p.m. roundtable (closed to the press), ending the day with a 5:00 p.m. Oval Office event described as “The President greets Pastors.” How does he have the stamina?!
Remember when DOGE was out there haranguing federal employees to detail lists of accomplishments in order to root out the redundant, the lazy and the incompetent? I have some news for Elon—you missed somebody.
Trump’s “weave” only degrades from there. No, he didn’t stop eight wars. No, he hasn’t saved millions of lives. In fact, cuts to USAID have likely already cost hundreds of thousands; research published in prestigious medical journal The Lancet estimates that the cuts could cost 14 million by 2030, putting Trump on par with some of history’s greatest mass murderers.
As for our financial situation, no, you wethead, it is not “the Greatest Economy in the History of our Country.” By nearly all metrics—GDP growth, unemployment, inflation, and wage growth—the current economy is worsening. Hardly the stuff of a Nobel Prize for Economics, which he will surely be demanding just as soon as he gets that Peace Prize.
Nor has he created an ‘aura’ around the United States that has led “every Country in the World to respect us more than ever before.” Just today, journalist Matt Gurney published an account from his time at the Halifax International Security Forum, an annual gathering of military, defense, and intelligence bigwigs from across the globe. There, Gurney describes an off-the-record dinner in which one officer from a “major allied nation” said regarding America’s moral leadership in the world: “we will never f---ing trust you again.”
Oh.
And let’s get to the really good stuff before, you know, it’s a crime to talk about it: the bizarre bragging about the fact that he’s had to get multiple cognitive exams tests. He makes a point of stating that no other president has gone through the battery of tests to which he has been subjected. The reason, unstated: most other presidents haven’t demonstrated the level of cognitive impairment our current one displays on a minute-to-minute basis.
I mean, does he think his doctors are just pulling him away from his duties as president to ask him to count to seventeen or spell “autocracy” for funsies?
What we’re seeing from Trump is way worse than anything that came out of our last gerontocratic president, Gampy Joe.
Most alarming of all is Trump’s notion that telling the truth amounts to treason. We’ve seen this battering of the press since his first campaign, but the vitriol is getting worse. The political prosecutions show no sign of slowing down, despite the administration’s unenviable record of failing to secure indictments against James Comey, Letitia James or even that villain-to-end-all-villains, the Guy Who Threw The Sandwich. How long until some Trump flunky decides that the perfect gift you give to the man who has everything (but loves nothing) is a journalistic prosecution? An FBI raid on an unfriendly outlet?
Or worse?
Taken together, this latest Trumpian screed ought to be Exhibit A in a discharge of the 25th Amendment. If he were a more stable genius, I would assume the president to be exercising a certain degree of hyperbole. I no longer make such assumptions. Scarily enough, I think Trump actually believes what he’s saying. I no longer believe he’s capable of separating reality from fantasy.
Donny Demento is slowing up. His health is bad. His brain is mush. His ego has swollen to the size of a thousand suns. He’s transformed 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue from a dignified seat of American governance to a gold-gilded cuckoo’s nest of his own design. And, for some reason, most of the American establishment is still bending over backward to avoid saying the obvious: The Burger King is cooked.
