In June of 2021, I published a newsletter headlined “Is Joe Biden okay?”
The president, I wrote, didn’t “seem quite right.” I preemptively shot down critics who thought it was taboo to say what was obvious: Biden was in decline, that decline seemed to be accelerating, and imagining nearly four more years with him governing was worrisome. He was a totally different man than he had been at the end of his vice presidency just five years prior, and it was infuriating that so many people were pretending otherwise.
I published the piece before that opinion was popular among pundits. A full three years passed, almost exactly to the day, before the infamous debate with Trump that squashed Biden’s pursuit of a second term — the debate that made even Democrats start saying what I argued three years earlier: The president didn’t look quite right. In the aftermath of my 2021 piece, droves of Biden supporters canceled their Tangle subscriptions, accused me of ageism, and insisted I was a secret Republican who wanted to help the party by undermining Biden’s presidency.
Today, I feel compelled to deliver a similar message about Biden’s successor: President Donald Trump doesn’t seem quite right.
I don’t think this happened the same way it happened with Biden. Trump has always been a bombastic, norm-breaking, reality TV star of a president. He is pornographic; his actions, words, decorum and decisions as president are so out of bounds, and so quickly move the Overton window, that he constantly has to up the ante to keep people’s attention. When he’s fighting for an issue you care about, or pursuing a policy you want implemented, this is part of his appeal. He will trample any norm, fight any enemy, and stretch any law to get it done. I’ve experienced this and it’s thrilling, though you know somewhere in your heart it’s probably not good — like watching a snarky classmate who picks on you get bullied by someone else. Of course, when he’s doing something you don’t like or don’t want, it’s a different story.
But what was already abnormal and often shocking has now become something completely different.
He’s upped the ante so high that the things he says are increasingly out of orbit with our shared reality, yet he says them so regularly that our reactions have become more and more muted over time. And I’m not the only one noticing. Many Democrats have been insisting for some time that Trump is not well, or that his Cabinet should remove him from office. Longtime Trump allies like Marjorie Taylor Greene have said he’s “gone mad” and questioned whether he’s “mentally stable.” Tucker Carlson recently recounted a private meeting with the president where he said “in the end, we’re all dead anyway,” in response to Carlson’s concerns about a war with Iran. One niche Trump influencer I follow on X recently posted a series of screenshots showing all the “rambling about the Strait of Hormuz” that Trump has done in the last few months. “Closed, open, closed, open, closed, open, closed, open… He is not stable or competent anymore,” the three-time Trump voter wrote. A Tangle reader, himself a former Trump supporter, recently called for the invocation of the 25th Amendment in our comments section, saying that “Trump has lost his mind.” In opinion polls, Trump is experiencing his worst approval ratings and lowest levels of trust ever. A recent survey found nearly a fifth of all Trump voters from 2024 already regret their vote.
And I understand why they feel this way.
Just to start, consider the signs of Trump’s aging that have all the echoes of President Biden toward the end of his term but have evoked very little of the same concern. In May, he blamed the 2021 Abbey Gate bombing on President Obama, who last served in office in 2017. In June, he referred to Elon Musk as “Leon.” In July, he confused Kelly Loeffler with rap star Nicki Minaj. According to The Wall Street Journal, he has referred to Greenland as Iceland, called the Strait of Hormuz the Strait of Iran, and confused conflicts in South America and the Middle East.
In a single day at a NATO summit in July, he called out the “Islamic Republic of Japan” for firing missiles at a U.S. carrier, called the Iran Deal (JCPOA) the “JCPOC,” addressed President Zelensky of Ukraine as President Putin, called TikTok “Tic Tac,” and referred to Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan as the leader of a “great company.”
In August, Trump appeared in Nevada to promote his “no tax on tips” policy. While there, he told the audience that “Michael Whatley should be your governor.” Whatley is running for Senate in North Carolina. As Kevin D. Williamson recently recounted in The Dispatch, Trump remarked how well he remembered the Falklands War despite being a “young boy” during the conflict. “As a matter of fact,” Williamson wrote, “Argentina surrendered to the United Kingdom in that conflict on Donald Trump’s 36th birthday, when he was a ‘young boy’ with a wife and two children.”
Just in the last few months, he has also repeatedly appeared to fall asleep or doze off in meetings and events (or at NBA Finals games).
Now, I’m not here to argue that President Trump seems equally as diminished as President Biden did during his term. But when Biden introduced Zelensky as “President Putin” at a 2024 NATO summit, or referred to Kamala Harris as “Vice President Trump” or called the President of Egypt the president of Mexico, we got endless news stories about his potential dementia and certain demise. Even if Trump undeniably seems more present, more aware of his surroundings and more energetic, comparing the two is really beside the point.
For Trump, what has me worried goes beyond just the signs of his mental acuity deteriorating.
The 80-year-old president’s attachment to reality is what concerns me — an attachment that seems increasingly, well, detached. Among the things that have happened in the last few months, a few examples in particular seem well beyond his usual abnormal behavior or outrage:
