U.S. President Donald Trump attends a ceremony marking the 24th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States at the Pentagon, in Washington D.C., U.S., September 11, 2025. REUTERSEvelyn Hockstein
Writer Rafi Schwartz is puzzled how President Donald Trump’s apparent mental deterioration isn’t ringing alarms and scaring people.
“Are we just going to sit around and pretend that the president isn’t having a lot of … questionable moments these days?” Schwartz told the Nation. “I’m saying that something is rotten in the fizzling neurons and squelching gray matter sluicing around Trump’s skull — you know, the stuff that is supposed to interpret the world around him, differentiating reality from whatever phantoms must haunt septuagenarian billionaires with lifelong daddy issues.”
But questions about the president’s mental state are largely absent from the public discourse during his second term. Schwartz argued that Trump is an increasingly senile president working to “consolidate fascistic power in the hands of an imperial executive branch.”
Trump recently let slip that he’d been given an MRI during his last doctor’s checkup without explaining why he’d been ordered to take the test to begin with.
“And … shortly after this admission, Trump was filmed meandering aimlessly beside an uncomfortable-looking Sanae Takaichi, Japan’s new prime minister, as if in search of an aide to place a ‘Caution: Wet Floor’ sign under the soupy brain dripping from his ears,” said Schwartz.
Trump’s first term contained plenty of “incoherent gibberish,” but Schwartz warns there’s been a big change in both the frequency of those upsetting moments and the relative “lack of cumulative accounting for their larger implications.”
Trump displayed a moment of self-reflection last month during a call with Oregon Governor Tina Kotek (D) over his claim of Portland being “war-ravaged.” He later admitted to the press that he’d asked Kotek: “Am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? … My people tell me different.”
That revelation, said Schwartz, looked like “an unexpected acknowledgement of decidedly un-MAGA vulnerability,” that “Trump is aware his relationship with reality may be more malleable than a ‘very good brain’ would have us believe.”
It also suggests that people around Trump know this and are manipulating his vulnerability.
“Is it so out of the realm of possibility to imagine Stephen Miller flashing Trump a Sora2-rendered fantasy on his phone to convince the president that fishing boats are full of drugs and the streets of Chicago are soaked with the blood of law-abiding white folks?” Schwartz asked. “More importantly, is it so out of the realm of possibility to imagine Trump actually buying it?”
“The dangers of an executive with degraded executive functions are not simply a question of what he might do but also of what others will try to get him to do on their behalf,” Schwartz said.
Schwartz said a decade’s worth of scandal and broken behavior “has turned most of us into frogs boiling in the waters of our national melting pot.”
“We’ve become helplessly inured to the odd and outrageous behavior from Trump that not too long ago may have prompted serious … questions about his cognition — and would have justifiably caused a national meltdown if another president were in charge,” Schwartz said.
Trump also has the advantage of swarming news watchers with government shutdowns, SNAP benefits, masked deportation squads and Trump personally “demolishing a third of the White House to make way for an oligarch-funded ballroom in his honor.”
“There are only so many hours in the day,” argued Schwartz, but with Trump’s advanced age, “the time may soon come when thinking about it becomes unavoidable.”
“And when that day comes, the question on everyone’s lips will be: What took us so long?”
Read the Slate report at this link.