The Mental Decline of Donald Trump: A Growing Problem for the GOP

Time to ask if he’s fit to serve

The question of the day is: What is happening with Donald Trump?

We should ask this because in the last week, he seems to have both fallen off the map and fallen into a state of undeniable incoherence, no matter what his toadies claim.

Gone is the Trump who stumped in battleground states. Here now is a man who prefers friendly locales (deep red Montana anyone?) where the faithful will queue up hours in advance to pack a fieldhouse. But elsewhere his crowds have been smaller than they were in pre-pandemic 2016.

Meanwhile, what Trump says at his rallies makes less and less sense.  For example, he told the friendly Montana crowd, “ We’re going to get Joe Biden out of the White House.” Doesn’t he know that Biden has already opted for a one-term presidency and will leave the White House of his own accord?

Although Trump has always lied – a lot – he may have set a record at a recent news conference where, according to NPR, he told 162 lies – more than two per minute – and did so as if he were uttering God’s honest truth. He also deployed his usual doom-and-gloom rhetoric, claiming the country is “very, very sick” and that  “we’re very close to a world war.” And, as he did in 2016 and 2020, he’s sowing the seeds of unrest by  claiming the election is being “rigged” and that if he loses the outcome will have been determined by fraud,

Trump’s advisors are begging him to get serious in his statements, but the man can’t seem to control himself.  He recently offered up an internet conspiracy theory about Kamala Harris’s rally crowds, insisting that her team used artificial intelligence to create images showing a packed house at a recent event.  “There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!” wrote Trump on social media.

The crowd thing has long been a Trump obsession, and he’s had several meltdowns over the turnout at Harris events.  Ever sensitive to signs his celebrity may be waning, he even claimed that the crowd for the rally that preceded his followers’  January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol exceeded the one that attended Marin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech in 1963. (Let’s set the record straight. King spoke to 250,000 people. Trump addressed about one-fifth that number, generously.)

Although he can still tap into his old style, Trump is showing far less enthusiasm whenever he appears in public and he’s spending a lot of time at home in his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. He has no events planned for this week and intends to continue his hiatus during the Democratic National Convention, which begins next Monday.  (Just imagine how he’ll stew over the size of the crowd that will cheer Harris at the DNC.)

Although his word-salad rhetoric makes it hard to tell, I think that Trump seems to be slipping mentally.  The health news site Stat recently published an article citing six experts who say he is having trouble staying on topic. For example, at one recent event he tried to talk about President Biden’s recent visit to the beach. After belittling Biden, he drifted into mentions of Cary Grant and Michael Jackson. He’s always had this problem but according to the experts it’s getting worse.

Finally, there’s the matter of Elon Musk’s recent interview of Trump, which was distributed via the social media site X (formerly Twitter). As many people noticed, at points in that conversation Trump’s speech was slurred and he seemed to have developed a lisp. Is this a sign of neurological problems? Or perhaps exhaustion? I don’t know. But what I do know is that now that Biden has dropped out, it is Trump’s age that deserves consideration. I’m not alone. According to a recent Morning Consult poll, half of Americans believe Trump is too old to be president.

Which brings us back to the question posed at the start of this article, namely – What is happening with Donald Trump? The answer is two-fold. First, age, which can be cruel, is sapping his mental and physical stamina. Second, he faces an opponent in Harris whose rising star power makes him feel bad. Together they seem to be driving him a bit mad.