The familiar can obfuscate the obvious. Trump’s mental facilities, never high, are declining. Brad DeLong May 2025:
What happens when a president cannot follow a basic question, let alone a policy debate? We are watching it unfold, daily. And yet the machinery of media and politics continues pretending everything is fine. Donald Trump’s understanding of American governance is now as foggy as his syntax. That would be comic if it weren’t also lethal to democracy. This isn’t politics—it’s eldercare with nuclear codes.
Every single day. Every single day. Every single day, we see new evidence—always humiliating, always alarming—that Donald Trump is not mentally capable of discharging the duties of the presidency. Yet the dominant political and media culture insists on maintaining the fiction that everything is still within the bounds of normal democratic governance.
When Trump, on national television, points to the Declaration of Independence and mutters about it being a “declaration of unity and love and respect,” we are not just witnessing confusion—we are witnessing profound cognitive decline. The Declaration is not about love. It is not about unity. It is not about respect. Jefferson and company had zero respect for King George III Hanover and his ministers. It is about revolt. It is about the severing of political bonds. It is about the violation of inalienable rights by those who control but do not love us.
But let’s be brutally honest: Trump doesn’t know what he’s saying.
And he doesn’t care that he doesn’t know.
Nor does he trust anyone enough to delegate power.
What fills the vacuum is a swarm of advisors, staffers, and opportunists who act in his name without his input—“chaos monkeys” launching random policies and edicts that disrupt lives, markets, alliances.
And the Republican leaders? They watch in silence.
I’ve posted before that I want him to have a massive stroke, live on TV at one of his rallies, preceded by an extremely loud and malodorous evacuation of his bowls, and followed by gibbering like an animal. Bonus points for saying how much he hates his cultists.
Every time I see this thread title, I get an involuntary wave of joy, only to remember it’s not an actual announcement. Kind of like the day my brother texted “Trump just got shot”, and I had those few moments of glee before I turned on the tv only to find he got a booboo on his ear.
I can’t tell you how many times I have turned to Tom_Scud over the past few months to exclaim, “Please tell me all these people are going to be serving really long prison sentences 5 years from now for all this illegal crap.”
Snopes has weighed in to say that rumors of Trump’s imminent demise don’t come from doctors and they take the White House statements about Trump’s health at face value:
However, the point being made by the TikTok user who got the ball rolling here is that one doesn’t need to be a medical doctor to see clear as day that Trump is not doing well. We aren’t going to get an official diagnosis from an honest doctor who will be able to examine Trump up close and report back uncensored findings.
It may be the average but, the standard deviation is fairly high. Most of us go somewhere between the early 60’s and the early 90’s. We can hope that the extra weight and McDonald’s diet have a significant influence.
Yup, and as @Measure_for_Measure pointed out upthread a bit, once you make it up into your upper 70s, you’re still likely to live more than a couple of more years, on average.
Trump certainly has health issues, and his remaining years may well be marked by continued, even accelerating, deterioration in his overall health, but unless he has a major health issue which has been kept quiet, or he experiences a sudden health crisis (e.g., a stroke, cancer), he’s probably not going to be at death’s door in the immediate future.
Also, church is an easy way for people with limited energy and mobility, whose friends are dying off, to socialize. We don’t have a lot of other organized “anyone can show up” social structures, but senior centers can serve the same purpose for those allergic to church.
Dunno about Trump, but i don’t think most seniors at church are really there because of heaven. I know my synagogue gets a lot of elderly, too, and we completely lack the whole “heaven and hell” thing in our teachings. It’s just about who has time and who needs company.
That’s certainly why I’m following the thread. Yes, he is obviously suffering from the ailments of old age. And also, I’ve known people with all those symptoms who lived a long time with them.
I wasn’t implying that he’s going to drop dead, but rather that he’s at that stage of life where stuff starts to accumulate and compound.
I mean, we look at Joe Biden, and we see frail old man and we saw him decline over the course of his term pretty dramatically. And Trump’s the same age; I suspect we’re seeing the wheels starting to seriously wobble on Trump’s health, even if the wheels haven’t flown off yet. And when they do, the decline is likely to be pretty precipitous, because 79 year olds rarely have graceful health challenges like that.
I agree. I also think it would be best if he becomes incapacitated/bedridden to the point that he can’t perform any presidential duties, but he’d still hang on enough to prevent invoking the Twenty-fifth Amendment. That would pause or at least slow down some of the damage he’s doing, and it would also stop Vance et al. from taking over that role for as long as possible.
Plus then Vance is in a delightful (to us) dilemma. Act too slowly and have the Presidency weaken through inaction, and thus your own chances for power, or act too soon and have Trump go all Mustache Man on you like that german guy did when he was holed up in Berlin and his underlings were wondering who his successor would be.