With Trump’s Mental Decline, Who’s In Charge at the White House?

(Donald Trump posted the above image of himself as the fictional war-loving Colonel Kurtz from the film Apocalypse Now on his website Truth Social. The words in quotes are above his original image).

Even though Joe Biden no longer is in the White House, Republicans in Congress are investigating the role of Biden’s staff in potentially covering up his mental decline.

Now we have legitimate reasons to demand that Trump’s staff be asked the same questions under oath. Trump’s decline is too precipitous and obvious for the media and responsible government leaders to ignore.

Suggesting that Trump is not actually in charge may sound at odds with the bluster he posts each day. But babbling insults and threats is not equivalent to actually managing the myriad responsibilities that come with the office of president of the most powerful nation in the world. In fact, the hundreds of hours he spends at his Truth Social site are diversions from what any normal president would be devoting to the real job people expect their leader to do.

Trump’s Public Behavior Raises Alarms

Even if those endless ALL CAPS postings made sense, such behavior would be worrisome. But what president in his right mind would portray himself as a deranged warrior about to attack a major U.S. city?

Or spend 10 hours over the Labor Day weekend posting 40 times about the “Russia Hoax,” the death of wrestler Hulk Hogan and other diverse unrelated topics.

As bizarre as his posts are, the printed words are models of clarity when compared with his spoken words.

Here’s what Trump had to say after the shooting at the Annunciation Catholic school in Minneapolis that killed two children and wounded 16 others:

“You know, they talk about, you can do things construction wise and that's really — I think nobody knows more about construction than me. You can build the construction doors. You can build what they call safety doors, where they lock on the outside, the inside and everyplace else. But if one of these lunatics happens to get through, then the police can't get in, then they're looking for keys all over the place and it takes them -- a lot of disadvantages to doing, you know, spending billions and billions of dollars and actually making it safer in some way for some of these lunatics that we're dealing with. But I don't think so. You know, I've thrown out the concept. We have great teachers that love our children. The parents love the children; teachers love the children too. And if you took a small percentage of those teachers that were in the military -- that were distinguished in the military, that were in the National Guard, etc., etc., and you let them carry. That's something that a lot of people like. I sort of liked it, it'd have to be studied, but they're trained. They know about weapons. You can't do it with every teacher because most teachers don't know, but I always thought that would be an alternative. But it just -- we've had a lot of instances; other countries have also -- they have different kinds of problems than we have. But we do have this, something going on, something going on. And it's a bad thing.”

If a member of your own family spoke such disjointed thoughts, wouldn’t you be alarmed?

Fabrications and Incoherent Rants

Or if your relative or friend conjured up a story like the one Trump told in July about how his Uncle John, a professor at MIT, taught the Unabomber, a total fabrication since the Unabomber didn’t go to MIT and Uncle John had died before Theodore John Kaczynski was identified as the Unabomber.

At a recent rally in Pennsylvania, Fox News had to cut away from a Trump speech as he went on an 'incoherent' rant about dishwashers. Earlier in the year he similarly ranted about washing machines and shower pressure.

Prominent Johns Hopkins psychoanalyst Dr. John Gartner, who has tracked Trump’s mental health for years, told an interviewer recently:

“When we’re diagnosing dementia, what we need to see is a deterioration of someone’s own baseline of functioning. What we see that a lot of people don’t appreciate is that when Donald Trump was younger in the 1980s, he was actually quite articulate. He spoke in polished paragraphs; now he has difficulty even finishing a sentence. His thoughts were logical and related: now they’re tangential. He goes off on these ramblings where he is confabulating things – weird things in which he’ll talk about Venezuelans and mental hospitals, and then he’ll talk about sharks and batteries or the late, great Hannibal Lector and Silence of the Lambs. And why is he talking about Hannibal Lector – a fictional character who was not great; he was a murderer, a serial killer. It makes sense in Trump’s mind but these are really random associations. And there is an accelerating rate of decline.

“The other way we see deterioration is in his behavior. He is much more impulsive and erratic now. He blurts things out; he makes impulsive decisions that he has to then reverse, like his many reversals on tariffs.” 

Why Congress Must Investigate Trump’s Decline

If all this is obvious to the public and the medical community, Trump’s staff and those who work closely with him must be aware of Trump’s declining mental health. Even for the healthiest and most robust people who have held the office of president, the job is an enormous test of mental and physical acuity. If Trump is not capable of that now, who then is making the decisions in the White House?

That’s a question the appropriate leadership in Congress needs to answer. If it’s important to investigate the leadership situation under Biden, who no longer holds office, it’s certainly far more urgent to investigate it for Trump.

Here’s this week’s STEM Winder: A weekly look into the future.

Comments? Criticism? Contact Joe Rothstein at jrothstein@rothstein.net

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