U.S. President Donald Trump gestures during a breakfast with Republican Senators at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S. November 5, 2025. REUTERS Kevin Lamarque
President Donald Trump seems to have lost his marbles, according to some critics, but one former Trump official said the man was already in decline in his first term.
Trump’s former Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor on Wednesday took to task MS NOW anchor Nicole Wallace's point about Trump’s behavior getting bizarre, saying that he picked up on hints of breakdown during his "two and a half years inside the administration."
"[W]e would go in to talk ... in the Oval Office [about] matters of life and death. And there was always a weird non-sequitur, a complete distraction, unfocused, couldn't remember things. The guy was a basket case," said Taylor. "There's no better way to put it. There's no academic way to put it. He was a basket case. Any normal person would have sat there on the couch in the Oval Office and said, 'What's this guy taking? What's he on? He's acting in such a bizarre manner, given the subject. So that was always true.”
Other Trump critics and even many allies are similarly taking notice, including conservative institutions like the Washington Examiner and thought leaders like commentator Megyn Kelly and former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. Taylor added that it was not merely Trump’s anti-Papal rhetoric that was turning off Trump's former MAGA backers.
“One of the things that I think drove it more than anything, Nicole — Donald Trump could not have encapsulated his crazy better than he did two weeks ago when he said, 'I'm going to destroy an entire civilization tonight,'” Taylor told Wallace. “Effectively, that's what he said. The people he has spent years promising he would avoid World War Three and protect them from World War Three saw that sentence and said, 'Things are getting really scary in the Oval Office.' And it's been a downhill slide since then."
Wallace replied, "It is — still, just as we've all sort of been in and around politics for a really long time — it is remarkable in the moment to see it happen, you know. And I think there were some people who, either out of fear or self-preservation, thought it would never happen. To watch this collapse is still staggering and stunning. And because of who he is, and all the things we've been talking about, still frightening."
Speaking to AlterNet about Trump’s hostility to Pope Leo XIV, Christendom College associate professor of history Dr. Christopher Shannon pointed out that Trump — though no doubt partially motivated by his frustration with the Pope’s personal disagreements with his policies — is also playing into latent anti-Catholic prejudices.
“Anti-Catholicism is baked into Anglo-American political culture,” Shannon told AlterNet. “During the Revolution, patriot leaders from [future president] John Adams to Thomas Paine repeatedly denounced British oppression in language drawn directly from earlier denunciations of the Catholic Church. For example, in Common Sense, Paine likened monarchy to ‘popery.’”
Taking an even more extreme position Shaun Blanchard, a University of Notre Dame Australia theologian, wrote for the Jesuit magazine America: The Jesuit Review that “my attention, however, has been turned back to the Antichrist, a figure who haunted my upbringing in the evangelical South but about whom, until the other day, I had given hardly a second of thought in decades. For this renewed attention, I must credit not the oracles of Peter Thiel but the blunt observations of a former champion of the MAGA movement.”
Blanchard then quoted Greene’s response to Trump’s post comparing himself to Christ, agreeing that it is “more than blasphemy. It’s an Antichrist spirit.”