A mentally diminished Trump is clearly someone's puppet — but who's pulling the strings?

On Friday, the president changed his mind. He decided that he is not going to break the law by withholding $187 million in federal funding for an intelligence and counterterrorism initiative in New York City.

And you should be grateful.

“I am pleased to advise that I reversed the cuts made to Homeland Security and Counterterrorism for New York City …” he said. “It was my Honor to do so. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

But Donald Trump didn’t change his mind. Not really. He just wants us to think so. Fact is, he wasn’t part of the decision to (illegally) cut off the money. Someone in the regime decided for him. Here’s the Times:

The cuts, which represented the largest federal defunding of police operations in New York in decades, were made by the Department of Homeland Security, without explanation and without the approval of President Trump, White House officials said.

Indeed, President Trump was blindsided by the decision to defund the police, not learning of the cuts until Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York called him on Sunday to protest the change after the fact, according to three people with knowledge of the call.

If the cuts had gone through, Trump would have defunded the police more than anyone, ever. That would not have been a good look for a president who bills himself as the great champion of law enforcement, and here’s the thing about that: someone in the White House knew it.

They knew it would hurt Trump to be seen as the president who kneecapped New York cops, seemingly making it harder for them to stop the next 9/11. Yet this someone went ahead and did it anyway, in the knowledge that Big Daddy is preoccupied with other matters.

I don’t want to belabor the obvious, but this sometimes happens when the father of the family, as it were, is old and doddering, and can no longer be trusted to tell the difference between reality and television. This sometimes happens when a “family member” really hates Big Daddy and wants to expose him. That way, everyone sees the truth!

I kid, but only slightly. It wouldn’t surprise me if there’s someone in the White House who really hates Trump, despite working for the hate regimes, and actively seeks ways to humiliate him. (Consider the unknown aide responsible for putting makeup on his hand to cover up whatever ailment he has. The makeup’s color and his skin color are so mismatched that you can’t help thinking it was done on purpose!)

More important is that it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s someone – or a group of someones – that recognizes the chance to seize the reins of power for themselves and if it goes sideways, Trump can take the fall.

The president very often doesn’t seem to know what’s going until an outsider tells him. It could be a congressional Democrat. For instance, Chuck Schumer said Trump didn’t understand the coming spike in insurance premiums, the result of him and the Republicans failing to renew federal subsidies. “We laid out to the president some of the consequences happening in healthcare, and by his face and the way he looked, I think he heard about them for the first time,” Schumer said.

It could be a Democratic governor. After watching a Fox segment that made Portland look like a hellscape, Trump planned to send National Guard troops there. Then he talked to Oregon Governor Tina Kotek, who, New York’s Kathy Hochul, set him straight. Trump told Kotek: “But I said, ‘Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different.’”

But mostly, Trump learns about what his regime is doing when the press corps asks about what it’s doing. This is an ongoing pattern but most recently, Trump did not know that US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had convened a meeting of the top military officials until questioned. The AP: “the president's participation was not part of the original plan for the meeting but that he decided that he wanted to go.”

His speech there was word salad. As I wrote Friday, he twaddled on about Biden’s autopen; about the unfair media; about tariffs; about the border; about “the time he went to a restaurant in Washington to eat dinner”; and even the “Nobel Peace Prize he felt he had earned.”

Then, amid the outpouring of words, there was a moment of clarity, and Trump seemed to remember what his people had been telling him.

“It’s a war from within,” he said. “It’s really a very important mission. We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military ... because we’re going into Chicago very soon.” (Last night, the regime ordered Texas National Guard troops to Illinois against the wishes of JB Pritzker. The Illinois governor has filed suit to stop it.)

Retired Army General Barry McCaffrey told MSNBC the speech was “one of the most bizarre, unsettling events I’ve ever encountered.” And: “The president sounded incoherent, exhausted, rabidly partisan, at times stupid, meandering [and] couldn’t hold a thought together.” (In fairness, Trump isn’t too far gone yet. As Jen Psaki noted, he is still aware enough to put the kibosh on any plan to defund the police.)

This pattern is so frequent and so public that the Washington press corps really should be asking, as Dan Froomkin recently suggested:

• “Is he a confused old man?
• “Is he being manipulated by his staff?
• “Is he delusional? Is he gaslighting us?
• “Who’s in charge?”

On Friday, I argued that the growing awareness of the president’s dementia (so far primarily due to Pritzker’s use of the d-word) could present an opportunity for coalition-building – between anti-Trump partisans who always believed him to be a threat to democracy and non-partisan swing voters who supported him in the mistaken belief that he’d solve pressing problems, like inflation and the cost of living.

The main obstacle to building a coalition is changing minds, namely, that indie voters are not going to admit they were wrong to choose a fascist. It hits different, however, when the same fascist appears to have dementia and, as a result, is doing weird stuff, like trying to defund the police while ordering troops to do the work of the police. At that point, the lift is less heavy. Liberals are not asking swing voters to stand up for democracy, just to stand against demented chaos.

It also hits different when, in the context of dementia, it seems that someone – or a group of someones – is pulling the strings and that Donald Trump is more puppet than president. That framing could also have a powerful effect on swing voters in joining an anti-authoritarian and pro-democracy coalition. They would not have to blame the president, thus blaming themselves by implication. Instead, they could blame the unelected liars and cheats – Russ Vought and Stephen Miller spring to mind – who are conspiring behind his back. Indies might even be encouraged to take the moral high ground. At least some of the power-grab involves humiliating a demented old man in public.

In this light, I think Project 2025 becomes something bigger than the authoritarian playbook that liberals go on and on about, and that indie voters tend to tune out. It becomes a stand-in for the schemers pulling Trump’s strings. They know their policies are so unpopular that they would never become reality if Vought and Miller couldn’t whisper in the ear of a doddering old man who can no longer be trusted to tell the difference between reality and television. For independent voters who may be looking for an off ramp, it’s not Project 2025. It’s Puppet 2025.

To be sure, I don’t trust the press corps to do the work that democracy needs. Reporters are happy to show a live feed of Trump seemingly not knowing what’s going on, but that’s the extent of it. They are not going to ask for the names of the puppet masters. They are not going to hold Trump to the same ageist standards that they held Joe Biden to. (They are certainly not going to flirt with the same conspiracy theories.) The hypocrisy is so baked in that, for now, I have no hope of it changing.

(And to be sure, all my talk of Donald Trump’s dementia might give the impression I don’t think he’s an evil man who’s capable of committing his own atrocities. Let me be the first to disabuse you of that notion.)

But the news media isn’t the only thing that swing voters experience. They also experience the pain and the chaos of unpopular policies pursued by this regime: tariffs, inflation, healthcare cuts, not to mention masked thugs ripping families apart. The more pain and chaos they feel, the more they might be open to the argument that the pain itself is proof that the democratically elected president isn’t in charge.