U.S. President Donald Trump in the Oval Office in on Jan. 14.Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters
The cognitive decline of former U.S. president Joe Biden was undeniable, minutes into his 2024 debate with Donald Trump. He looked confused, bewildered, and couldn’t complete a thought. The people around Mr. Biden had clearly been aware that he was losing his faculties, which is why, for months prior, he had largely been hidden from public view. But that decision made the reveal especially striking: Instead of the public gradually acclimating to the President’s changing demeanour, it was presented with a President who was suddenly incapable of answering a simple question.
Mr. Trump has been a volatile, meandering, eccentric personality his entire life. In a 1991 book entitled Trumped! The Inside Story of the Real Donald Trump, former Trump employee John R. O’Donnell wrote that, as a business mogul, Mr. Trump was “a terrible communicator and didn’t know how to sort out his thoughts on a daily basis, let alone provide long‑term corporate direction.”
For decades, Mr. Trump has often gone off on tangents. During a purportedly motivational speech he gave at a business expo in Colorado in 2005, he railed against his ex-wives and former business associates, and told attendees to “be paranoid” about the intentions of their employees. Mr. Trump has long been delusional (as an early proponent of the Barack Obama birther conspiracy) and has long suffered from false memories (he has repeatedly said he saw footage of thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheering the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11, for which no proof has ever been found).
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So how would anyone know if the enduringly erratic, sometimes deranged Donald Trump was starting to lose his faculties? How could the public possibly ascertain whether the President’s pursuit of a sovereign, allied territory – or his midnight disclosure of private text messages between world leaders, or his decision to put down in writing that he’s going after Greenland because he didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize – is the product of a consistently maniacal mind, or one that is progressively losing its touch with reality?
It is uncouth to diagnose from afar, but it is reasonable to wonder if something is happening to this President. He has fallen asleep during his own criminal trial, and during the U.S. Open, and reportedly during his own cabinet meetings. His speech this week at Davos, in particular, made Mr. Trump appear more unfocused, more delusional, and more scatterbrained than ever.
“I’m helping NATO,” he told the audience, “And I’ve, until the last few days when I told them about Iceland, they loved me. They called me ‘daddy,’ right, last time. Very smart man said, ‘He’s our daddy. He’s running it.’ I was like, running it. I went from running it to being a terrible human being.”
Mr. Trump referred to Iceland three more times during that speech, when he ostensibly meant to say “Greenland.”
And he went off on tangents that were impossible to follow: “I called up Emmanuel Macron, I watched him yesterday with those beautiful sunglasses. What the hell happened? But I watched him sort of be tough. But he was at $10 for a pill, and I said, ‘Emmanuel, you’re going to have to lift the price of that pill to $20, maybe $30.’ ... Might be a tripling, might be a quadrupling. It’s not easy.”
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He wondered aloud why the F-47 fighter jet has “47” in its name, said that windmills cost $1,000 every time they spin around, and called California Gov. Gavin Newsom – with whom he has long feuded – a “good guy.”
Detractors have claimed that Mr. Trump has been unfit for duty since the first day he stepped into the Oval Office in 2017. And indeed, it is reasonable to assert that someone who appears to be malignantly narcissistic, ostentatiously incompetent, and hideously immoral should not be the leader of the free world. But to remove the President from the White House now, which some Democrats are calling for because of his latest imperial-minded antics, would require demonstrating that Mr. Trump is fundamentally unable to do his job. It would also require executive sign-on, which almost certainly wouldn’t happen. Considering all that Republicans have tolerated from Mr. Trump, it is unfathomable to think they would take the extreme step that the Democrats, under Mr. Biden, would not.
Some will claim that the Donald Trump we’re seeing now is the one who he has always been, if slightly more exaggerated, and slightly less restrained. Indeed, it is hard to see the change when we’ve been watching him destroy established norms for years, and ramble on for decades. But there is something different about a U.S. President legitimately risking triggering Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, over a place he keeps mistakenly calling “Iceland,” because he didn’t win a prize, while repeatedly falling asleep in meetings. That President may still be able to win a debate, but he should not be trusted to run the free world.