FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump delivers remarks on tariffs in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 2, 2025. REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File Photo
During former President Joe Biden's four years in the White House, Donald Trump repeatedly called him "Sleepy Joe" and claimed that he was suffering serious mental decline. Biden, who overcame a speech impediment, was always prone to gaffes — and those gaffes were covered exhaustively by Fox News and other right-wing media outlets.
President Trump, since returning to the White House, has accused Democrats of using the autopen to get Biden to sign things he didn't understand. And Trump insists that unlike the former president, he is as mentally sharp as ever.
But conservative attorney Chris Truax, in an op-ed published by The Hill on August 1, argues that Trump is showing signs of mental decline with frequent "confabulation."
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The word "confabulation" refers to telling distorted or inaccurate stories but, because of mental decline, not realizing how distorted they are.
"Confabulation is sometimes called 'honest lying,' because the person doing it genuinely believes what he's saying, even if it is obviously and patently false," explains Truax, who served as Southern California chairman of the late conservative Sen. John McCain's (R-Arizona) GOP presidential primary campaign in 2008. "A person confabulates when they are telling completely invented stories that don't provide them any particular tangible benefit. In other words, it's not like lying to try and get out of a speeding ticket."
Truax elaborates, "Confabulation isn’t misremembering a date or forgetting something. The mistakes of memory we are all subject to become confabulation when people remember false information in vivid detail — detail so vivid and complete that people who don't know otherwise often believe what they are hearing is true. In older people, confabulation is one of the clearest early signs of dementia."
According to Truax, an example of confabulation with Trump occurred when, on July 15, he "told a lengthy story about his uncle, John Trump, who he claimed taught at MIT and held three degrees in 'nuclear, chemical, and math.'"
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"His uncle, according to Trump, once told him how he had taught Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, and how very smart Kaczynski was," Truax observes. "Trump's uncle was indeed a professor at MIT, but everything else in this story is pure confabulation. Trump's uncle didn't have degrees in 'nuclear, chemical, and math' — he had degrees in electrical engineering and physics. And Kaczynski did not go to MIT at all — he went to Harvard."
Truax continues, "But most telling of all, it is categorically impossible for Trump’s uncle to have told him any such story. Kaczynski became publicly known as the Unabomber when he was arrested in 1996. Trump’s uncle, the MIT professor, died in 1985. In other words, Trump's uncle could not have told him the story because there was, literally, no story to tell during his lifetime."
According to Truax, Trump is also showing signs of struggling with "mathematical concepts" — which is an "early warning sign of dementia."
"Now, watch Trump attempting to explain how he is going to make drug prices go down by '1000 percent, 600 percent, 500 percent, 1500 percent," Truax writes. "That's complete nonsense, unless drug companies will be paying patients to accept prescriptions, since reducing drug prices by 100 percent would mean they were free. Certainly, someone who got a business degree from Wharton and has spent his life running a company would know how percentages work…. If you aren't comfortable with labeling this as dementia, that’s fine. But there is no question that the president — the man tasked with making critical life and death decisions for both the country and the world — is struggling with mathematical concepts, has vivid 'memories' that are not rooted in reality and has an increasingly foggy grasp of past events that did happen."
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Chris Truax's full op-ed for The Hill is available at this link.