Trump's brain is goneI've been pushing back on Trump is in an advanced state of dementia!!1!!!! since 2017. Everything I heard in his first term about his supposedly self-evident dementia strongly implied that by this time he'd need round-the-clock memory care within a few years. But eight years later, here he is, still functioning, still ruining our lives. His 2025 rambling nonsense sounds exactly like his 2017 rambling nonsense. Why hasn't it gotten worse? Why is he able to form sentences at all, however preposterous they are?
It really should be a bigger story.
Donald Trump’s recent interviews with Time and The Atlantic revealed a president who is completely unhinged and incoherent. Sadly, that’s not news. But what stood out is that Trump is consistently confused and disconnected from reality even on issues that are supposedly in his wheelhouse.
Trump has always been an ignoramus who masks his intellectual shortcomings with bombast and declarations of his own brilliance, but his rambling nonsensical responses in these latest interviews should set off alarms — especially in light of all the media attention and scrutiny Joe Biden received after his disastrous debate performance or when Special Counsel Robert Hur described him as “a well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”
I will die on this hill: Trump sounds incoherent not because he has dementia, but because he's an incurious ignoramus who has never willingly read a book, or even a briefing document longer than a page or two. His answers to questions about politics are incoherent because he gets the vast majority of his ideas from Fox News, where the goal is to get Grandpa enraged, not to offer a coherent view of the world. Trump clings to any idea that validates his prejudices and his sense of his own genius. In addition, he loves to lie and get away with it, as he has for his entire adult life. And he insists on describing even his worst failures as smashing successes. All of this is why he sounds addled to those of us who know things. But it's not dementia.
The reason I think Trump's brain is still working is that he still remembers how to bullshit (or bully) his way through every interaction with a reporter. He has a limited repertoire of defensive tactics, but those tactics repeatedly get him out of jams and often put reporters on the defensive. In a culture with a better press, many of these tactics wouldn't work. But they work here. The day Trump forgets how to bullshit and bully is the day I'll agree he has dementia.
Robinson writes:
... in the [Time] interview, after Trump boasted that Biden would have never given an extensive interview “because he was grossly incompetent,” Time reminded him that Biden had in fact done so, just last June....Trump isn't "befuddled" or "hopelessly confused." He's doing what he's always done: he's gambling that he can get away with holding forth on a subject he knows nothing about as long as he does it confidently and arrogantly. He has no idea that Biden gave Time an interview, but he appears to be operating on the assumption that Biden probably didn't -- and it's true that Biden was more press-averse than most presidents, so that was a reasonable guess, even if a less reckless person would avoid saying no such interview took place without knowing for sure. When he's corrected, he momentarily loses his grip ("How did he do?"), but when he's told he can read the interview himself, he switches to a different line of bullshit, insisting that he knew that all along and that Biden's interview sucked and was full of softballs, unlike the tough questions directed as his poor besieged self. (Trump assumes that most readers of his interview will not know anything about Biden's. He's probably right about that.)
Notice Trump’s befuddled reaction:We spoke to [Biden] last year, Mr. President.Biden’s interview was 35 minutes. Trump was either outright lying, hopelessly confused, or some combination thereof. In any event, it’s not a great look for a sitting president.
Huh?
We spoke to him a year ago.
How did he do?
You can read the interview yourself.
Not too good. I did read the interview. He didn't do well. He didn't do well at all. He didn't do well at anything. And he cut that interview off to being a matter of minutes, and you weren't asking him questions like you're asking me.
I'm not saying this is effective bullshit. But the fact that he remembers all his time-tested tactics (attack Biden; feel sorry for himself) tells me his mind is still working. It's never been much of a mind. But it works just about as well as it did in his first term, and it pleases his base.
Like an arrogant high school jock who never does the reading, Trump assumes he can always bullshit his way past a question when he doesn't know the answer:
MORAN: What does it (the Declaration of Independence) mean to you? TRUMP: It means exactly what it says; it's a declaration of unity, love and respect and it means a lot. It's something very special to our country.
— Molly Ploofkins (@mollyploofkins.bsky.social) May 1, 2025 at 4:18 PM
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What he says may cause informed people to roll their eyes, but let's face it, there are millions of Americans who know no more about the Declaration of Independence than he does. Is this answer a major national scandal? No. Did it cost him public support? No. So as far as he's concerned, it worked.
And he remembers how to bully. Obviously, in the now-famous clip of Trump discussing the "MS13" labels added to a photo of Kilmar Abrego Garcia's knuckle tattoos, it's clear that he believes the labels themselves are on Abrego Garcia's fingers, but there are a lot of elderly people who fall for Photoshop and AI slop, and in most cases it has nothing to do with dementia. The thing to watch here is how Trump parcels out the menace: addressing Moran by his first name, accusing him of being "not very nice," insisting he's never heard of Moran, declaring that Moran's journalism is untrustworthy.
Reposting by request the exchange from Trump's ABC interview about Abrego Garcia's tattoos here on Bluesky 👇👇👇 TRUMP: He had MS-13 on his knuckles, tattooed! MORAN: That was photoshopped TRUMP: Terry, they're giving you the big break of a lifetime. I picked you. But you're not being very nice.
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) April 30, 2025 at 11:34 AM
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Does this work on you? Of course not. It doesn't work on me either. But Trump's base eats it up. If Trump were slipping, he wouldn't be able to deliver a base-pleasing attack on Moran this way. He'd be fumbling for words. Trump has few mental skills, but he knows how to go on offense when his arguments don't hold up -- how to pound the table when the facts aren't on his side. When he forgets how to deliver this kind of menacing attack, I'll agree that he has dementia.
And even if you're skeptical, watch how, later in the Moran interview, he takes the grievance against Moran, which he's clearly been nursing, and injects it into a response to a question about Vladmir Putin:
“hitting me with fake questions” https://t.co/KRx6pd4dzD
— demarkco fleming (@yessuhitslive) April 30, 2025
MORAN: Do you trust him [Putin]?I don't think this is admirable. I don't think it's a sign of intelligence as we normally refer to it. But Trump has intimidation skills, and he successfully deploys them here. His brain is nimble enough to summon up the tattoo exchange, and nimble enough to deploy it as an unexpected weapon. Moran genuinely seems to be put on the defensive. Trump displays an ugly form of intelligence. It's what he knows best: how to be mean and vicious, how to treat every human encounter as a zero-sum battle.
TRUMP: I don't trust you. I don't trust -- I don't trust a lot of people. I don't trust you. Look at you. You come in all -- shooting for bear, you're so happy to do the interview, and then you start hitting me with fake questions, you start telling me that a guy whose hand is covered with a tattoo doesn't have the tattoo. I mean, you're being dishonest.
MORAN: No, I'm not! No, I am not.
When he forgets how to be this kind of flaming asshole, I'll agree that he has dementia. Not before then.
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