WSJ analyst: Time to 'take away gramp's phone’

U.S. President Donald Trump arrives to board Air Force One for travel to Tennessee from Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, US, September 26, 2026.

Conservative Wall Street Journal columnist Holman W. Jenkins, Jr is quick with advice for any world leader trying to look able-minded while rendering globe-spanning and potentially terrible decisions.

“My political advice to the president: Avoid giving signs of senility, an imminent hazard given his constant need to be on stage. Nothing would more quickly resolve the growing cognitive dissonance of his base than the idea that he’s no longer the same Mr. Trump,” said Jenkins. “Then even a Democratic impeachment won’t save him.”

But that’s not the persona President Donald Trump has been presenting in his doings with Russian President Vladimir Putin. He said the Putin lines that Trump keeps falling for are making the nation’s ‘very stable genius’ look — at the very least — like something other than “a strategic genius.”

“Speaking of senility, it will be time to take away gramps’s phone if he falls for the Putin telemarketer line ‘Donald, just get me a couple more small cities in the Donbas. I’ll get you a Nobel Prize,’” said Jenkins.

The columnist said critics who invest 10 words decrying Trump’s controversial diesel deal are probably investing more thought in their critique than Trump did in accepting the deal. Trump, he said, is all “carrot” and no “stick” when it comes to pressing his Russian buddy to get out of its invaded Ukrainian neighbor.

But Putin knows his war effort is out of gas, and Jenkins said “hopefully Mr. Trump isn’t too addled to figure this out” himself. Russia’s advance has been halted. The U.S. and Europe are already invested in Ukraine’s defense, and Kyiv has plenty of cards as it destroys Russian refineries despite Trump’s begging for them to stop.

However, Trump doesn’t pick up on the obvious, said Jenkins. He wants lower diesel prices at all costs, even if that means flailing with the “strategic vacuity” of the diesel gambit. And the president clearly can’t see very far into the future, said Jenkins because he’s missing the GOP souring all around him as the war drones on.

“Trump, until now, has been a bit cavalier in playing off the investigations to come from a Democratic Congress. He shouldn’t be. Less implausible by the day is his own party turning on him in the last two years of his presidency. A good way of pushing it over the edge? His current circus of ‘improving relations’ with Russia by selling out Ukraine.”

But that’s Trump, said Jenkins, the president who doesn’t see more than a step or two ahead.

“I find myself joking with die-hard Russiagate believers that their theory of Trump treason explains only half of Mr. Trump’s Russia actions. My theory explains 100 percent,” said Jenkins. “Mr. Trump says and does whatever, in his cynical mind, he thinks will benefit Mr. Trump in the next five minutes. This is a universal theory of Trump behavior to which I have yet to find a significant exception.”

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