We Have to Talk About Donald Trump's Brain

Something's not right up there.

Anthony Wallace/AFP via Getty Images

This piece was also published in The Nation.

Something is rotten in the state of Donald Trump’s mind.

“No kidding,” you say. “Tell us something we don’t know.” But I’m not talking about the bigotry and gleeful cruelty that have animated the president’s second sweep through the halls of federal power. I’m saying that something is rotten in the fizzling neurons and squelching gray matter sluicing around Trump’s skull—you know, the stuff that is supposed to interpret the world around him, differentiating reality from whatever phantoms must haunt septuagenarian billionaires with lifelong daddy issues.

Last year’s brief electoral debate over “sanewashing” Trump notwithstanding, questions about the president’s mental state have been largely absent from the public discourse during his second term. But those questions have become all the more urgent as his regime consolidates fascistic power in the hands of an imperial executive branch. With Trump retreating to his emotional safe space of gaudy construction projects to distract from something he saw on TV (or is it the other way around?), the public has a legitimate right to know if the most powerful man on the planet fully grasps the material world around him.