Donald Trump Is Finally Cracking Up for Real

His recent tirades confirmed what more than half of America now believes: The president is mentally unfit. How will we survive two and a half more years of this? And what’s he got in store for us?

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 photo9:50pm Trump tower on moon10:10pm dumb meme10:32pm news clip10:53pm news clip12:43am announcing Hormuz blockade2:35am article about Biden2:36am article on naval blockade2:37am article on [now former] Representative Eric Swalwell2:37am posted the same article about Biden again2:38am article on his ballroom4:10am article on Iran

9:49pm AI Jesus photo9:50pm Trump tower on moon10:10pm dumb meme10:32pm news clip10:53pm news clip12:43am announcing Hormuz blockade2:35am article about Biden2:36am article on naval blockade2:37am article on [now former] Representative Eric Swalwell2:37am posted the same article about Biden again2:38am article on his ballroom4:10am 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?

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.

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.

“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........

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