Angelo Carusone and Aaron Rupar share a distinction that we imagine many Americans would happily cede to them: They have likely watched more Donald Trump rallies, speeches, and press briefings than any other living Americans. Carusone is the chairman and president of Media Matters for America, the liberal media watchdog group; Rupar is an independent journalist who fires off dozens of posts a day about Trump to his two million followers across Bluesky and X. Carusone reckons he’s watched around 650 Trump events over the course of a decade. Rupar estimates that, while he may have missed a few events in that time, he has endured “probably like 98 percent of his speeches and rallies.” And both closely monitor the president’s social media posts.
So they’re pretty well-qualified to assess the question: Has Trump deteriorated over the years?
“The past year, I will say it’s accelerated more than anything,” Carusone said. “It’s really noticeable.” For starters, he said, Trump simply sounds different: “There’s a lack of crispness in his articulation.” And at rallies, which Trump is doing very infrequently these days, “He just reads the room less effectively. He’s less nimble … less responsive to where the crowd is.”
Rupar sees things a bit differently. “He’s always been extremely incoherent, very untruthful, impulsive,” Rupar said. “So I don’t really think any of those core things are new. I just think that it breaks through now more than it did in the past.” Even so, Rupar counted himself surprised, he said, on the morning of Easter Sunday, when someone DM’d him Trump’s latest Truth Social post. “And my very first thought when I saw it was, ‘That’s the craziest thing he’s ever posted,’” Rupar said.
The post he’s referring to is the first of two that, even by Trump’s standards, will live in presidential infamy. For the record: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.” It was followed two days later by the post Trump opened with the sentence: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
These posts were a turning point: They lit a match that started a bonfire of new speculation about Trump’s mental state. It consumed social media and cable news; by the next week, it made A1 of The New York Times. What was happening here? The man was once desperate and insecure enough to label himself a “very stable genius”; that was pathetic enough, but that was eight long years ago. Where is he now? The day between those two posts brought the traditional White House Easter Egg Roll, which saw Trump surrounded by children and regaling them with the story of … the Easter Bunny? The Last Supper? Christ’s Resurrection? Try again. Joe Biden’s autopen. To a bunch of six-year-olds.
Oh, and speaking of Christ … that moment on April 12, when Trump reposted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus, on the same day he was picking a fight with the pope, was a little much even for his admirers. He took it down and, laughably, tried to say it was an image of him as a doctor. That very night and into the next morning, Democratic commentator Harry Sisson monitored Trump’s social media activity:
9:49pm AI Jesus photo
9:50pm Trump tower on moon
10:10pm dumb meme
10:32pm news clip
10:53pm news clip
12:43am announcing Hormuz blockade
2:35am article about Biden
2:36am article on naval blockade
2:37am article on [now former] Representative Eric Swalwell
2:37am posted the same article about Biden again
2:38am article on his ballroom
4:10am article on Iran
Yes, he’s always been like this. But many people think it’s worse now. Is it age? He turns 80 in June; there are millions of compos mentis octogenarians out there, but it’s fair to ask whether age is slowing Trump down, especially given the way that he and his backers carried on relentlessly about Biden. Does he have dementia? Or are we seeing more glaring manifestations of his legendary arrogance, which is rooted in his profound insecurity? Or is it merely the stupidity of a man who not only never reads a book but reportedly can’t even read one-page briefing papers?
Whatever the explanation, the bottom line is sobering: The person with the power to sic the Justice Department on perceived political foes; to send masked, heavily armed, and poorly trained troops out among the populace; and to order a nuclear attack is slipping. Maybe fast. And the chance that his Cabinet or his party will do anything about it is zero, which means we’re going to have to survive two and a half more years of this.
1. Age
“We Barely Talk About It”
In 2025, as he began his second term, Trump was the oldest person ever to be sworn into the presidency. But Trump’s oldness does not exist in a vacuum. He is the successor to Joe Biden, a president who was forced to give up his reelection bid because of a disastrous debate performance that led to his supporters deciding he was, at 81, too old to run for president again.
Trump is less than four years younger than Biden. During Biden’s presidency, Trump and MAGA writ large were laser-focused on Biden’s age. Even the mainstream media reported endlessly about Biden’s use of the back stairs in Air Force One, his bicycle tumble, his fall onstage at the Air Force Academy graduation in 2023, his name mix-ups (he once called Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El Sisi the “president of Mexico”). The mainstream media was so obsessed with Biden’s age that, according to Media Matters for America, The Wall Street Journal published 41 articles in the first six months of 2024 on the topic. There was even a book written by CNN’s Jake Tapper that alleged that there was a cover-up about Biden’s age-related decline (which, essentially, there was). Even Trump’s nonsensical musings about the autopen are in fact callbacks to Biden’s term, when he was accused of being so addled that he couldn’t do the work of the presidency, even including simply affixing his signature to documents. In mid-April, Trump signed his name to a document and remarked, “Oh, that’s a good one. Look at that, Joe. Do you think Biden can do that?”
Donald Trump is not a normal president; he is the most powerful president in modern American history, or maybe all of our history, because of how he has used unitary executive theory and surrounded himself with a Cabinet filled with billionaire sycophants who largely got their jobs because of their willingness to sign off on anything he wanted. Imagine a Cabinet of Mike Johnsons but somehow richer and dumber. While Trump 1.0 featured the president being held back by guardrails, Trump 2.0 feels like it’s lacking a working frontal lobe: Ideas pop into Trump’s head, and he just executes them. He went from bragging about being a peacemaker to stampeding Venezuela and starting an impulsive, dumb, and possibly disastrous war with Iran. Take away that FIFA peace prize.
We would be remiss not to mention Trump’s mystery hand bruise, which seems to appear monthly and is coated in orange makeup that, like all the makeup Trump wears, does not even come close to matching his skin tone. The White House’s explanation is that he bruises easily because he pops aspirin like they’re Tic Tacs, and because he shakes so many hands. And then there are the pictures of Trump’s drooping lip, which sparked a flurry of speculation after a speech he gave in Miami last November.
Maybe it’s all nothing. But this is a guy who ran on being healthier and spryer than the guy before him. He told us that Joe Biden was too old and too sick to be president, but that he would be able to do the job because he had accomplished certain feats: “The White House Doctors have just reported that I am in ‘PERFECT HEALTH,’ and that I ‘ACED (Meaning, was correct on 100% of the questions asked!), for the third straight time, my Cognitive Examination, something which no other President, or previous Vice President, was willing to take,” he wrote in January on Truth Social.
Trump shows his age the most in the apparently diminished functioning of his frontal cortex—the thin layer of gray matter that helps the brain make decisions and regulate itself, the part of the brain that prevents you from saying the unkind or insane thing. Trump appears unable to hold himself back. He called a reporter “piggy.” He called another a “fresh person.” He confuses Greenland (which he wanted to invade) with Iceland.
Graydon Carter, a co-founder of the digital magazine Air Mail, has been tracking Trump closely (and mocking him mercilessly) since his halcyon days at Spy magazine in the 1980s. Carter said the Donald Trump of now is not the same man who went down that escalator 11 years ago. “He has gone from being the chatty, handsy salesman at the office happy hour to the crazed, opinionated antiquity shuffling the mail cart from cubicle to cubicle,” Carter said. His old Spy colleague Kurt Andersen agreed: “When he became a recurring character in Spy, Trump was an angry, needy ignoramus, liar, bully, and braggart more desperate for attention than anyone I’d ever encountered. And a vulgarian with short fingers. He’s the same—except in his forties he had impulse control in public, didn’t ramble and forget and repeat himself or show other signs of mental illness.”
Trump will turn 80 this June. He will be 82 when he leaves office, assuming he does, so we will see what the future holds. He compares favorably to Biden in one respect. Biden aged visibly before our eyes in ways that most of us associate with watching our parents pass through that portal from their seventies, when they can mostly still drive and golf and play tennis, into their eighties, when those things start to be out of reach. Biden’s voice quieted. He held his mouth agape in that old-man way. He hunched over just a little. Trump has none of those issues, for now.
Vin Gupta, the public health physician and MS NOW medical analyst, said he thought Biden was a pretty healthy 80-year-old. “The guy bikes 30 miles in Rehoboth Beach every weekend,” Gupta said. “From a cardiovascular standpoint, [Biden] was way more robust than Trump,” who famously never exercises, unless you count getting in and out of a golf cart. Yet Biden got run out of the race, “and with Trump, we barely talk about it,” Gupta said.
That’s largely because of the right-wing media. Do they even discuss his age on Fox News? Sometimes—like when one Fox host cheerily picked up Trump’s claim that he’s “aging in reverse.” Trump will literally have to be drooling and forgetting his own name before Fox and others will acknowledge his age as an issue. And the same goes, of course, for Republicans in Congress. That wall of denial will prevent Trump’s age from being an issue until some point when it’s utterly impossible to deny.
2. Dementia
Disinhibition and Digression
In early April, Mary Trump—who, in addition to considering her uncle to be a danger to the country and the world is, remember, a clinical psychologist—took note in two interviews of what she called “concerning changes” in her uncle’s behavior. “Sometimes it does not seem like he’s oriented to time and place,” she told New York magazine. “And on occasion, I do see that deer-in-the-headlights look.” Donald’s father, Fred, she said, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, but not till well into his eighties.
No one can say, of course, whether Trump has dementia, an umbrella term for a range of mental conditions, among which Alzheimer’s is the most notable. The common visible symptoms, according to the website of the Alzheimer’s Association, include difficulty performing a number of tasks Trump hasn’t had to perform in years or perhaps ever: paying bills, preparing meals, remembering appointments. The symptoms listed on the Mayo Clinic website are, for present purposes, more on point: problems communicating or finding words; issues with reasoning or problem-solving; confusion and disorientation.
So: Is the president demented? Harry Segal is a clinical psychologist at Cornell University and a former co-host of the podcast Shrinking Trump. (His co-host was psychologist John Gartner, who in 2017 started an organization of mental health professionals, Duty to Warn, that sought to caution Americans about Trump’s unfitness for office.) Shrinking Trump ran for 70 episodes, from May 2024 until October 2025, when it was stopped out of fear of being sued by the president. In an interview, Segal was quick to note that he is not offering a clinical diagnosis of Trump. That, he said, would be unethical. But it’s not unethical to comment on “behaviors so striking that you would recommend an assessment for someone in your family who demonstrated” them.
What has he seen? Three concerning things. One: “He began to have odd quirks of speech where he would begin a word or a phrase and seemingly lose his place, slur, and end up with some kind of compromise word,” Segal said. This is called phonemic paraphasia. It’s a possible sign of dementia (though it could have other sources), and Trump has been doing it for a long time: He coined the “word” “infantroopen,” for example, back in 2019. The same year, he referred twice to the need to look into the “oranges” of the Robert Mueller investigation. He finally carefully enunciated “origins” on the third go.
Second, Segal “began to notice the tangential digressions.” After the mainstream media picked up on how aggressively random and disjointed his stump speeches had become, Trump gave it a name, “The Weave,” and said it was all intentional. But the claim was nonsense. The pattern has continued into his second term—recently, for example, in a late-March Cabinet meeting about the war, when he got lost in a five-minute digression on how much money he’d saved by using Sharpies to sign legislation and executive orders.
The third thing that caught Segal’s ear was that, on certain occasions, Trump said or posted something really shocking even for him: “The outlandish things he’s been saying when people died, right? Like Robert Mueller, I am glad he’s dead, or Rob Reiner.” Maybe that’s just an older man losing patience with decorum, Segal said; but “this feels a little bit more like dysregulation. Like, ‘I have a wildly aggressive thought, I am just going to say it.’”
After Trump’s crazed post on Easter Sunday, Vin Gupta made national headlines by posting on X: “Erratic. Can’t finish sentences. Often confused. Illogical train of thought. Word finding difficulties. Developing and worsening gradually over time. The President is exhibiting all the signs of dementia.”
In an interview, Gupta kept returning to the word “impulsivity.” Speaking the week after Easter, he said: “I think his impulsivity and his erratic behavior, as we’ve all seen just in the last two weeks, seems like it’s getting worse. Like he just has less of a filter. Even at baseline, he had no filter. But it seems like the disinhibition is worse. And when you think about the family history, I think reasonable people can ask reasonable questions.”
Those reasonable questions include, for example: Why does Trump so frequently boast about acing cognitive tests? In January, Trump bragged that he’d nailed his third cognitive test, adding that the tests were “something which no other President, or previous Vice President, was willing to take.” That’s one way of putting it. Another way of thinking about it, Gupta said, is that people are administered these tests on a repeat basis only when concern about possible mental impairment exists. Said Gupta: “He’s using it as a sort of a talking point to say, ‘Look how fit I am,’ and in reality, that should tip off anybody.”
Finally, these questions extend to Trump’s physical health, and the White House’s opacity about it. Last fall, Trump went to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for an examination. The White House said it was for an MRI. Trump later revealed it was a CT scan. Maybe not a big deal, but why the confusion? Over Easter weekend, rumors flew across social media that Trump had been admitted to Walter Reed. There’s been no confirmation of that, but the cartoonish White House denials when such rumors swirl aren’t credible either. That weekend, spokesman Steven Cheung posted about the president who doesn’t read briefing papers, is known to pass his days watching hours of cable news, and has been caught napping in meetings and at events: “There has never been a president who has worked harder for the American people than President Trump. On this Easter weekend, he has been working nonstop in the White House and Oval Office.”
3. Arrogance
Too Much and Never Enough
One thing we know for sure Trump suffers from is his endless, embarrassing, proud, and loud arrogance. It was an unforgettable and, at the time, shocking moment in March 2016 when he was asked on Morning Joe whom he was speaking to on foreign policy: “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain, and I’ve said a lot of things.”
That turned out to be a little amuse-bouche that gave us all a small, early taste of what life with Trump would be like. The constant and utterly unquenchable need to be the center of attention. The ceaseless preening and boasting about very average accomplishments. (How many times has he used the phrase “Nobody’s ever seen anything like it”?) The confidence that long, long ago boiled over into auto-infallibility.
It would be one thing if this were just some tic of his that was dismissible. But it has policy implications, which is to say, it affects all of us. Michael Patrick Lynch is a humanities professor at the University of Connecticut whose 2019 book, The Know-It-All Society: Truth and Arrogance in Political Culture, was more a critique of our social media outrage culture than of Trump per se; nevertheless, Lynch said, Trump very much suits the age of toxic argument, arrogance, and certainty. If you’re certain you’re right, Lynch said, you have nothing to learn from anyone else, and you don’t need to pay attention to evidence. “If you ignore evidence, if you ignore other people’s experience, if you don’t think you have anything to learn, then you are going to end up ignoring reality,” Lynch said. “And we know that’s a central feature of Trump’s universe.”
The thing about arrogance, or at least Trump’s version of it, is that it needs constant feeding, a steady stream of new targets to dominate and conquer. At first, he ran for president just as a vanity project, not expecting or even really wanting to win. Then he won. Then, once he actually became president, he needed to be the greatest ever, in his mind. “This is Donald Trump, hopefully your favorite president of all time, better than Lincoln, better than Washington,” he said in a December 2022 video introducing his “digital trading cards.” In his first term, he needed to dominate his enemies, but as many have observed, there were still some guardrails around him. In the second, with the guardrails gone, he’s extended his reach from the hated deep state to universities and law firms.
He started to run out of domestic enemies, so it was only a matter of time before he turned his gaze outward to the world. This is the precise reason why a person had to be gullible in the extreme to believe him when he said he wouldn’t be starting any wars. He had to start wars. His insatiable arrogance, his grandiosity, made it inevitable. At some point, conquering the United States would not be enough.
“What I really believe is that Trump is struggling with a mix of grandiosity, desperation, and old age,” said Tony Schwartz, who co-wrote Trump: The Art of the Deal (1987) and has been doing penance ever since. “Nothing he’s ever accomplished has been sufficient to overcome his lifelong experience of emptiness and fraudulence. Now, in his final turn, he’s trying to take over the world. It’s only about making himself feel more worthy. He couldn’t care less about the suffering and destruction it causes.”
The problem, though, is this. Once you’re the emperor of the world, at least in your mind; once you’ve “toppled” the Iranian regime and “brought peace” to the Middle East and brokered at least eight other peace deals—what’s next?
This is the really dark and twisted side of Trump’s arrogance. He needs to be right about everything because deep down, he knows that he knows nothing—about history or economic policy or health care. He needs to dominate because deep down, he’s massively insecure. He is contemptuous of everyone—his enemies, of course, and “Sleepy Joe,” and radical left lunatics; but also of a lot of his groveling supporters. (Do you think he has an ounce of respect for, say, Pam Bondi or Ted Cruz?)
But in the end, Schwartz believes, “There is nobody he’s more contemptuous of than himself.” The arrogance and grandiosity are a mask. That’s what makes the title of Mary Trump’s 2020 book about her uncle so brilliant: Too Much and Never Enough. He always needs too much, and yet, it’s never enough for him. And while this personality trait has always been there, and it stands separate in many ways from his age or his possible mental deterioration, it’s implicated in those things, too. The more vulnerable he feels, the more arrogant he’ll become—the more likely he’ll be to post about, oh, destroying an entire civilization. He backed down from doing that. But remember—he has two and a half years left.
4. Stupidity
Every Accusation Is a Confession
In November 2025, Trump berated a reporter for asking him why he blamed Biden over an Afghan national who had shot two National Guard members near the White House. “Because they let him in. Are you stupid? Are you a stupid person? Because they came in on a plane, along with thousands of other people that shouldn’t be here, and you’re just asking questions because you’re a stupid person.”
This was far from the only time Trump has called a reporter stupid, and it won’t be the last. Trump is very much a known name-caller, and “stupid” is one of his favorite insults, though he also enjoys the use of the phrase “low IQ.” The put-down is pretty rich because Trump has to be one of the least intellectually curious people ever to occupy the Oval Office. But despite this, the state of being stupid seems to be an obsession of Trump’s. It’s the thing Trump calls people when he’s done with them. In April, Trump posted that people who had been crucial to him (Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones) were “stupid people, they know it, their families know it, and everyone else knows it, too! Look at their past, look at their record.”
Here’s why this is telling. For Trump, every accusation is a confession, and no accusation of Trump’s seems more of a projection than this one. In 2019, his former lawyer Michael D. Cohen testified before a House committee: “I’m talking about a man who declares himself brilliant but directed me to threaten his high school, his colleges, and the College Board to never release his grades or SAT scores.” Certainly, grades aren’t the sole measure of intelligence, but Trump’s obsession with hiding them speaks to a deep insecurity about his own intelligence. A lot of famous people are more than comfortable being honest about their own poor grades.
One of Trump’s best tricks is his ability to obfuscate his gaffes. With the sheer volume of things he’s said, he’s created a wall of sound, an endless stream of noise that comes at us like a firehorse, one mistake drowned out by the mistake that follows like a Möbius strip of misstatements and lies. But there have been moments when Trump’s stupidity has broken through. One classic came during his first term, in April 2020, when he gave a mind-blowing press conference that broke through the noise. At the time, he was giving nightly press conferences with Covid-related updates. And he said: “So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous—whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light.” He turned to Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, and said, “I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside of the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that too. Sounds interesting.”
Even Trump’s staunchest defenders seemed flummoxed. After that presser, Trump took to X to say it was “not worth the time & effort” to do the Covid pressers. It was one of those moments when Trump’s own stupidity eclipsed the sun.
One of the ways Trump tries to buttress his own intelligence is by bragging about an uncle, John Trump, who taught at MIT. Trump claims that John was the “longest-serving professor” at MIT. This is of course not true, but it’s closer to the truth than a lot of the things Trump cooks up. Trump’s own insecurity betrays his anxiety about his own intellect, which is certainly merited.
Aside from age, possible mental deterioration, and unfathomable and unstable arrogance, we must deal for another two and a half years with the fact that the president of the United States just isn’t a smart man. The specific question that concerns us here is: Which of his many bad decisions are explained mostly by his stupidity?
The answer? It’s not reassuring. It’s not, for example, his decision to start a war with Iran. That’s explained mostly by his arrogance/insecurity: His need to erase from the historical record anything positive Barack Obama did, in this case the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which Iran was evidently abiding by until Trump unilaterally pulled out of the deal in 2018. That deal stands as the most striking example of something Trump had to destroy simply because Obama did it. So that was about his arrogance and insecurity.
No—the answer to the stupidity question, quite unfortunately for the American people, concerns the one issue that most directly impacts most Americans: the economy. Most notably, his commitment to tariffs.
Just stop and ponder this: Trump sincerely appears to believe that tariffs can eliminate the income tax. He has said this arguably more than he’s said anything else in his second term, with respect to actual policy. It’s a deranged fantasy. Before Trump, tariffs brought in about $80 billion in revenue. He has raised that to $264 billion—so, yes, it’s tripled! However, since the Supreme Court ruled against Trump on tariffs, the U.S. government has to return at least $160 billion of that money. And income taxes bring in—ready?—about $2.7 trillion. It’s possible he knows this and chooses to ignore it. But from the way he talks, it just seems like he doesn’t know it and doesn’t care to know it. That’s not age or dementia or arrogance. It’s just stupidity. And it isn’t going to change.
Conclusion
Two and a Half More Years of This?
There’s been a lot of talk over the spring about the Twenty-Fifth Amendment option—removal of a sitting president, due to incapacity, by the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet. But let’s be real. This Cabinet of fatuous fawners is unlikely to do that. Trump would have to do something we can’t imagine today—take his clothes off at a press conference, bomb a U.S. city—for that to happen. Nobody is going to take advantage of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.
The Democrats are still favored to take back the House of Representatives, and they will presumably impeach him over something. (It’s not like there aren’t a lot of choices; as of late April, impeachtrumpagain.org suggests 27 different reasons.) The Senate, however, won’t convict. Even if the Democrats take narrow control of that body, 15 or so Republicans would have to join them to convict Trump of the House charges. Not happening. Said the Lincoln Project’s Stuart Stevens: “No one will stop him. The only people who can stop Trump are Republicans. They’re not going to stop him. They’re going to let him keep crashing and killing and destroying.”
So in all likelihood, we’re stuck with him. What’s he got up his sleeve that he hasn’t unleashed on the nation and the world yet? God only knows. ICE is still hiring like crazy. He’s still building immigrant detention camps. His acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, reindicted James Comey days into the new role; Letitia James can’t be far behind. FBI Director Kash Patel says arrests are coming relating to the 2020 election. He wants to take over Cuba. He still wants Greenland. He hasn’t played the Insurrection Act card. He’s looking at ways to crack down on “domestic terrorists,” a catchall phrase if ever there was one. Said Miles Taylor, the first-term Trump administration official who quit and joined the opposition and now runs defiance.org: “The machine is going to spit out a bunch of fucking prosecutions against these people. That is going to happen, hands down, no doubt about it. There will be nonprofit groups and individuals that are just protesters that are deemed domestic terrorists.”
And there will be outbursts, and Truth Social posts, and accusations, and God knows what else. Two years ago, a nervous nation watched a president who was no longer up to performing the job. That president just couldn’t adequately fill the office. Today, that nation is watching a president who may well destroy it.
