President Donald Trump has evolved significantly over the ten years that he's been on the political stage, and it's starting to show.
Writing on Thursday for iPaper, Miles Taylor, former chief of staff of the US Department of Homeland Security, recalled some of Trump's more "jarring" moments in the Oval Office during his first term.
One 2018 incident involved Trump's bizarre tangent about helicopters having too many parts. He was supposed to be talking about the Category 5 hurricane heading toward the United States, putting millions in danger.
"We finally got him back on track, but the clock was ticking," Taylor wrote. "I filed it away as a data point. But I now think it was an eye-opening preview." Family members have warned that it will only get worse.
He alleged that the press keeps dancing around the debate about Trump's mental fitness for the top job in the free world. He's always been "somewhat misdirected," Taylor wrote, a euphemism for Trump's tendency toward tangents.
At that time, Taylor said, "the question was never simply, Is he sharp? It was always, can the system around him absorb his worst impulses? In his first term, it just barely could. In his second, it cannot."
He called it "far more alarming" than any of the allegations that the media wrote about former President Joe Biden's "cognitive decline."
During the first term, there were capable people who could tell Trump "no," "that's illegal," or outright ignore his more absurd demands. But now, Taylor said Trump is "surrounded by people who are hyping those characteristics rather than helping him exercise any semblance of self-control."
Taylor said that after years of watching Trump "at close range," he felt Trump was in an "unusual cognitive disarray." In the first administration, Trump "was disorganized in ways that were structurally alarming for a commander-in-chief," said Taylor, noting Trump's "sudden associations" and "not sequences."
The only way he could absorb or retain information was "through flattery and visual repetition rather than briefings." Gone were the days of Presidential Daily Briefings (PDB) that could go 70 to 90 minutes long. They shortened Trump's to 20 to 30.
On Wednesday, it was reported that Trump's briefings have been turned into 2-minute videos that are made up of bombings. Taylor recalls that Homeland Security was told outright to stop sending Trump documents that were longer than a page and, wherever possible, "provide information in pictures instead of words." Even those mechanisms in place are no longer there, Taylor said.
He recalled Trump growing "red-faced, sputtering obsenities" after he saw a news story that made him look unflattering or alleged he was willing to break the law.
Taylor described it as the bomb still being there, but now the "blast shielding" is gone.
Now that Trump's worst instincts are no longer managed, his cognitive decline is only compounding the problem. "Speech pathologists and neurologists have noted the deterioration publicly, and while I’m not qualified to diagnose it, what I can tell you is that the contrast with even five years ago is striking. The man I observed in the first term was erratic, but the man I observe now is erratic," said Taylor.
The irony, he pointed out, is that Trump spent so long pointing to Biden as too cognitively impaired to lead. Even after just five years, Taylor said that Trump is the one facing those charges.
Reporters were quick to jump on Biden with every stumble, every tangent, every mistaken name, even his long-documented stutter became fair game for the media hanging on every word searching for fault. Now, they're silent. Taylor alleged, they "have adopted the collective posture of people who have suddenly gone blind (or are, perhaps, too scared to criticise a man who threatens to prosecute their newspapers or revoke the broadcast licenses of their cable networks)."
Taylor said he's not trying to diagnose Trump, he's merely arguing whether the office of the presidency can "support the person holding it when that person errs, missteps, or fumbles on serious matters of war and peace? Are there people around willing to correct him to his face? Or, in the case of something like the Iran war, are aides prepared to explain to him the deadly consequences of a failure to prepare?"
Today, Taylor closed, Trump's team is only magnifying his worst instincts. "And in the face of storms on the global horizon, they won’t help the President avoid catastrophe."
