https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/taibbi-madness-of-donald-trump-removal-25th-amendment-w504149
"Is this man losing his mind? And if so, what can be done about it? We've had some real zeros in the White House before, but we've never had a chief executive who barked at the moon or saw ghosts – at least, not one who was so public about it."
Trump wasn't always crazy. He wasn't even always obnoxious. Many Americans don't remember, but the Donald Trump who appeared on TV regularly in the Eighties and Nineties was often engaging, self-deprecating, spoke in complete sentences and (verbally, anyway) usually lived up to his expensive schooling. He'd say things like, "These are the only casinos in the United States that are so rated," and use words and phrases like "a somewhat impersonal life" and "money isn't a totally essential ingredient."
The difference today is striking. Trump has not only completely lost his sense of humor, particularly about himself, but he's a lingual mess. In his current dread of polysyllables – his favorite words include "I," "Trump," "very," "money" and "China" – he makes George W. Bush sound like Vladimir Nabokov. On the page, transcripts of his speaking appearances often look like complete gibberish.
"When I did this now I said, I probably, maybe will confuse people, maybe I'll expand that," he said to Lester Holt in May, "you know, I'll lengthen the time because it should be over with, in my opinion."
The difference even since last year is hard to miss, and why not? The presidency severely ages and stresses even healthy people. From Obama to Bush to Jimmy Carter, presidents on their last day of office often look like med-school cadavers. President Trump already looks older, has a lower frustration threshold and seems only to have two moods, rage and sullen resignation (a.k.a. pre-rage).
He also can barely speak anymore, but without a close-up examination it's impossible to say if this is a neurological problem or just being typically American. As the psychologist Michaelis puts it, one major cause for loss of cognitive function is giving up reading in favor of TV or the Internet, which is basically most people in this country these days.
"In someone of his economic background and age, [the decline] is somewhat uncommon," he says. "Then again, it's a trend. People of my generation got more information from TV than books, and people of the next generation get more information from the Internet, and that exercises less of your cognitive reserve."
This is a huge part of the problem of trying to gauge whether or not Trump is mentally unfit for office. It isn't just that 63 million people specifically endorsed his nuttiest behaviors with a vote. It's also that maintaining modern American media habits can make most anyone seem like a victim of organic brain damage.
In a kind of awful satire of the current American experience, part of what got Trump elected is the camaraderie he shared with other reality-averse Americans who similarly chose to live in castles of self-aggrandizement, denial and blameshifting, a journalistic product we offer to just about everyone these days.
Trump is almost certainly worse than most of his voters. He's likely more grandiose, less empathetic and less capable of handling criticism. But his phobias about science or history or inconvenient facts, along with his countless conspiratorial hatreds and prejudices, are things he shares with millions of people. They voted for this, which creates as confounding and ridiculous a conundrum as has ever been observed in an industrial democracy. Can a country be declared unfit?
This is the paradox of Trump. He is damaged, unwell and delusional, but at critical moments he's able to approximate a functioning human being just long enough to survive. He is the worst-case scenario: embarrassing, mentally disorganized and completely inappropriate, but perhaps not all the way insane. Maybe crimes will soon be discovered and he'll be impeached, or maybe he'll run naked down Pennsylvania Avenue this fall, or nuke someone, and be declared unfit. Until then, he's just the president we deserve, dragging our name down where it belongs. He is miserable, so are we, and we're stuck with each other. Karma really is a bitch.
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