Trump has dementia

There has been at least modest concern of late over theories that Donald Trump, adjudicated rapist and convicted omnifelon, does not intend to leave office when his latest crime spree comes to an end in January, 2029. Some of of the theories stem from the trolling "Trump 2028" hats that a few Republicans have handed out to each other; more of it comes from the Trump minions' apparent conviction that no matter what actual real-world crimes the manchild's thugs engage in to sate their appetites for government destruction, there is zero chance that any of it will ever be prosecuted.

And then there's Trump's own behavior, ordering the military to kit out a Emirate sky palace to use as Air Force One despite a good likelihood that it won't be ready to fly until very late in the term, or the newest announcement: tearing down the White House's East Wing to build a $200 million, 90,000 square foot(!) convention-center sized ballroom that, at least in artist renditions, seems a homage to Trump's belief that colors other than piss-gold simply do not exist.

There is something particularly apt about Republicans erecting a gilded pleasure palace for the elegant class while systemically pulling out every load-bearing pillar of the American economy. There is something even more apt about Trump constructing an enormous new ballroom for a political class that doesn't have any.

All this construction can be more easily explained through less paranoid means, though, and is likely another manifestation of what caused Trump to unilaterally seize control of the Kennedy Center: The man is bored out of his mind, he leaves almost every aspect of "being president" to others, and is instead retreated into the comfort of his "slap gold paint on everything and call it classy" real estate "career." The man does not want to be president. He wants to be the owner-operator of a new luxury resort built in the aftermath of another country's genocide. He wants to be the old-timey land developer who something-somethinged his way into owning Greenland.

And as for the seeming indifference of Trump's inner circle to doing brazenly crooked or criminal things with no apparent worry that any future prosecutor will give a damn, that can be better explained by the other omnipresent Trump vice: surrounding himself with the stupidest people you have ever met.

That is Trump in his purest form: a Pied Piper for crooks, idiots, and predators, and a Johnny Appleseed of shitty, ostentatious, piss-gold private spaces meant to appeal to the same.

Oh, and then of course there's the other dynamic at work here; The Heritage Foundation and the Claremont Institute's longtime project to turn America into a fascist nation in which white nationalists and archconservative religious freaks run everything forever, jailing or genociding everyone who objects to that. But that's a project that runs almost entirely independent from Trump himself. He doesn't care about it, he mostly doesn't know about it, and while he has stumbled into much of the same ideologies by virtue of being the worst person this nation has ever produced, that is by coincidence, not design.

The American Nazi project saw his thuggery and misogyny and immediately declared him their natural leader and god-king, but from his perspective all he knows is that the toilet paper stuck to his shoe sometimes breaks out into wild cheering for him—pretty much the one reason Trump will ever put up with anything gross that clings to him, and the same reason Elon Musk kept winding up in the Oval Office earlier this year.

So no, I don't think any of this is evidence per se of a Trump plan to stay in office past 2028, and if you think it is you have to first argue that Trump has a "plan" for anything that goes beyond yelling at whoever's nearby and hoping it all works out somehow. But there's a considerably more fundamental reason why the end of the Trump era will soon be upon us, no matter what Trump or the people stuck to his shoes might want:

Donald Trump has dementia. This is obvious to a lot of people who have experience with family members with dementia, because the symptoms may be subtle one-by-one but are much less so when you see them all together. It's obvious to me, as one of those many people. And it certainly looks to be the case that Donald Trump's dementia is accelerating in ways that even the most sycophantic allies will find it difficult to hide.

I can't say I ever saw myself again linking to The Hill in my life, but here we are and damn it if credit isn't due. We are now at the stage where many people are saying Trump's symptoms are consistent with dementia, to use one of the man's favorite rote phrases, and we had better all start getting used to the idea sooner rather than later.

Are there medical or psychological problems that cause dementia-like behavior but are not dementia? Of course. But what Donald J. Trump is exhibiting here, six months after America wished itself into the cornfield, are some of dementia's most classic symptoms.

For Trump, the day we could no longer pretend everything is fine came on July 15, when 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.” His uncle, according to Trump, once told him how he had taught Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, and how very smart Kaczynski was.

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.

The word confabulation is the important one. "John Barron" may have gone through his life a notorious liar, but confabulation is a dementia symptom, not a moral failing. It is also something that a great many Americans have the ill fortune to experience personally; many, many families have cared for a loved one with dementia at this point, and each has a lived-through understanding of what it is.

"Confabulation" isn't lying. Confabulation is the fancy word for what happens when memories start to fade out, piecewise rather than all at once, and the brain does a mysterious something to fill in the gaps with what it has left. Perhaps the person once met their favorite author, and decades later visited the Grand Canyon; the new memory might have them insisting that they met their favorite author at the Grand Canyon, where they played tennis.

They can tell you who won the match, and by how much, and what the weather was like, and none of it happened. If you argue to the contrary or, on the occasions when ironclad evidence exists that their memories are wrong, you'll run up against one of the other commonplace dementia symptoms: rage. Sometimes controlled, but other times violent, coupled with an insistence that everyone around them are conspiring against them.

And this is something that Trump now does All. The. Time.

There are other common dementia symptoms that Trump now plainly shows.

Once you have seen that Donald Trump is confabulating, it cannot be unseen — and all sorts of other mildly disturbing incidents suddenly fall into place.

Difficulty with mathematical concepts is another early warning sign of dementia. Now watch Trump attempting to explain how he is going to make drug prices go down by “1,000 percent, 600 percent, 500 percent, 1,500 percent.” 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.

Trump has always been a liar. His entire career was based on lying of the most shameless kind, the real estate versions of "this car will drive itself just as soon as we finish this next software update." But dyscalculia is not that. And Trump's difficulty understanding numbers even as he bellows about the conspiracies they supposedly represent is, now, commonplace.

One of the more prominent signals that something is not right here is the repetitive nature of Trump's numerical embellishments. The leader of our government has not only forgotten how percentages work—and it is a certainty that he once knew—but now flubs it over and over.

A related cognitive breakdown on Trump's part: the complete and incurable inability to understand what tariffs are, despite having an entire United States federal government at his disposal to explain it to him and despite it being an extraordinarily big deal for him not to know. Of all of Trump's new incoherencies this one may end up the most consequential, not just for the enormous damage being done to the economy but because he remains so invested in the delusion that his advisers have, rather than risk his now also uncontrollable wrath, had to adopt a sort of dementia by proxy.

It might be the case that Lutnick is just following the now-necessary authoritarian policy of never disagreeing with Dear Leader, even when Dear Leader has gone batshit crazy, so that Dear Leader will not fire you and/or murder your entire family. But anyone who has cared for a family member might also recognize it as the go-to medical advice given by dementia experts: Don't argue against the delusions, unless it is necessary for the patient's own safety. It won't work and you're far more likely to trigger a rage spiral. Nod your head and change the subject.

Especially, God help us all, when the dementia patient is watching you on his second-favorite television channel.

"Dementia by proxy" may end up being the best description of the years 2025-2029, presuming we survive them. Future scholars might identify the prime ideology of the Republican Party in these years as not one of authoritarianism, nor fascism, but a nearly compulsive dementia by proxy.

Dementia patients can get hung up on certain words or forget others. From out of nowhere, they will suddenly start using a word like groceries over and over, possibly while explaining to you what it means because they're pretty sure you wouldn't know such an obscure term. This can go on for days, weeks, or months.

(It means things in a bag.)

And if you want a particularly noteworthy example of confabulation, you might take the example of a patient who is asked to take a dementia screening test several times—not usually done unless the patient is exhibiting symptoms that suggest such a test might be of value—only to come away convinced both times that it was an intelligence test and that the test asking him to draw a clock and identify a camel ended with the doctors telling him he had the "best" score ever.

For example.

In the end, though, I am not terribly invested in convincing those who don't see the dramatic changes in Trump's behavior that they are witnessing a medical condition, not some sort of feigned tactical insanity on the part of an near-octogenarian mastermind.

What is going to happen here is that increasingly, many people will be saying Trump is exhibiting all these classic symptoms, because at some point Donald Trump is going to start making claims or issuing orders that cannot be brushed off as eccentric or self-absorbedly criminal.

Donald Trump is a nearly 80-year old man with known medical problems, one who keeps showing up on camera with what look to be the typical bruises of IV treatments, and one who has been exhibiting all the symptoms of cognitive decline for at least ten full years now. Donald Trump is not going to be around ten years from now. It's not happening.

And if Trump's evident decline mirrors what can typically happen to patients who reach the "don't know how numbers work" stage of their disease, there is a very good chance that the man will not be functionally able to pretend at his job even three years from now. It is a very close thing even now, after all.

I do not have a good answer for why The Fucking Media, which is willing to speculate about presidential medical conditions on the thinnest possible of evidence and for weeks at a time when they feel like it, remains surprisingly incurious about the mental state of a sitting president whose public statements have become increasingly incoherent, who insists regularly that things have happened that plainly have not, and vice versa, and whose pronouncements on-camera and on social media increasingly consist of uncontrollable, stream of consciousness tantrums.

I imagine the reason is what we all think it is: The media will cover for Trump as long as possible because the rich-as-sin executives who run the companies and the billionaires that own them are just fine with rampant executive lawbreaking, economic sabotage, concentration camps and the rest of it if in return they get lax government regulations on the things that make them money and little to no tax burden once they've got it. This is, at this point, an open class war, and that the figurehead of it all is a lifelong sex predator, adducted rapist, financial felon, infamous cheat, and three-fourths out of his own gourd already is if anything too on the nose.

The key point here, however, is that regardless of how the various players surrounding Trump, using Trump, and fellating Trump see the next three point five years playing out, it is not going to play out like that because Trump's medical issues are catching up with him much faster than any prosecutor ever did.

There is a very good chance that even six months from now, the current methods of covering for Trump's incoherence are no longer going to work. Something is going to happen. He's going to prop himself up in front of a camera and say something so obviously delusional—no, even more than this—that shakes the whole world. He's going to give an order that cannot be followed, not because staff is unwilling but because submarines can't fly or because lobsters can't do math no matter how many medals you might give them for trying.

And then we're all going to have to have a nice, long talk about how the sitting president of the United States has been incoherent, delusional, and functionally incapacitated since at least the late stages of the 2024 campaign, and suddenly the frantic rush by advisers like Stephen Miller to consolidate as much presidential power as possible in their own hands while Trump goes off to "run the Kennedy Center" or "build a White House ballroom" will make considerably more sense.

It's impossible to say what happens after that, God help us all. But Trump's time wrecking everything he touches comes with a ticking clock attached, and we will not be getting through these four years without Trump's incapacities becoming, sooner or later, widely known. That the man cannot understand what a tariff is or how percentages work would already be scandal-level news in any previous time; Trump has benefited enormously from the longtime press perception that he is so dishonest, about everything, that each new level of incoherence is somehow an intentional choice on his part—a clever new trick, rather than a medical catastrophe.