Person, Woman, Man, Camera, TV

Up until a few days ago when the Court of International Trade ruled that Trump did not have the authority to impose broad tariffs on US trading partners¹, one of the noisiest news stories was the release of the book titled Original Sin, by CNN news anchor Jake Tapper and British journalist Alex Thomson. As its subtitle conveniently informs us, the book claims to document “President Biden’s decline, its cover-up, and his disastrous choice to run again.” The “original sin,” in the authors’ view, Axios’s Mike Allen tells us, was Biden’s decision to run again. Setting aside Democratic party insiders such as Jaime Harrison and Jake Sullivan disputing key claims made in the book, and setting aside the sloppy and unclear appropriation of a term that theologians have debated since at least the time of St. Augustine, I would assert that the bigger story is Trump’s very public cognitive deterioration and its effect on what passes for policy in the current administration.

In an apparent attempt to limit publicly available evidence of Trump’s decline, his aides have stopped providing transcripts of his public statements. Transcripts, provided by the career civil servants of the non-political stenography office, have for decades been made available in print, email, and on the White House website. The current administration stopped providing transcripts via email in early January, and seems to have stopped posting transcripts to the White House website in mid-March. (Videos of most of Trump’s public remarks are available from C-Span; they are not searchable by keyword.)

Trump’s diminished capacity was on display recently when he was asked at a news conference to comment on the administration’s announced pause in foreign student visa interviews. “Foreign visas for what?” Trump asked the inquiring reporter, apparently not recognizing his own administration’s initiative. “Well, we’re gonna see,” he responded after the questioner clarified that she was referring to “All the foreign students.”

Trump’s confusion about student visas followed a Memorial Day weekend of what the New Republic labeled fumbles and “weird rants.” In a speech at West Point Military Academy on May 24 Trump urged the class to “not lose momentum,” and then launched into a protracted tale of real estate developer Bill Levitt, creator of Levittowns in New York, Pennsylvania, and Puerto Rico, as well as other similar developments. Levitt sold his company to ITT in 1967, remaining as president, but signing an agreement that he would not be associated with another home building company for 10 years. Levitt reportedly assumed that he would continue to be involved in home building, but the new owners sidelined him, apparently finding him “too old.” Various ventures he undertook in the 70s and 80s failed, the renamed Levitt Corporation had its business license in Maryland revoked for code violations in a development, and Levitt was accused of misappropriation of funds from the charitable foundation that bore his name. He died in 1994.

In recounting Levitt’s story to the West Point officer class, Trump seemed to some observers to be drawing parallels to himself. Levitt sold the name Levitt to another company; Trump sells the name Trump to 3rd party ventures. Like Trump Levitt had three wives. (In his speech Trump referred to Levitt’s wives as “trophy wives,” adding that “it doesn’t work out, a lot of trophy wives,” as if speaking from experience.) The point of the story was nominally that Levitt “lost his momentum,” although that seemed to refer to Levitt having dealt himself out of the real estate business where he made his name. And it was not at all clear what message the West Pointers were intended to take from Trump’s tale of another’s woe.

During his Memorial Day speech at Arlington Cemetery, while acknowledging US Navy Chief Petty Officer Shanon Kent, he could not pronounce her job function of “cryptologic linguist,” calling it “cryptologogic.”²

On Sunday, May 25, speaking to reporters in Morristown, NJ, Trump revealed that he did not understand a recently announced deal between US Steel corporation and the Japanese Nippon Steel, confusing Nippon with Nissan. “It’s a good company – Nissan – a very good company,” he said, praising the deal as a “good investment.” (Nissan has no role in the deal between steel companies.)

On Friday, May 23, at a ceremony in the Oval Office, Trump revealed that he was not aware of the contents of a set of executive orders he was signing. The orders purport to correct what nuclear energy advocates have labeled a restrictive regulatory climate. Trump seemed only tangentially aware of the orders’ contents, asking Constellation Energy CEO Joseph Dominquez, who was among the industry representatives present for the signing, “Are we doing something about the regulatory in here?” After receiving assurances from several people present, including Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Trump asked vaguely for confirmation that the drafters had “contemplated just about everything, right?”

On Thursday May 15, speaking in Doha, Qatar, Trump’s comments about military aircraft were not really comprehensible. “I’m not a huge believer in stealth,” he said, “because stealth is, basically a lot of it is the design and shape.” Addressing Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg who was traveling with him, he continued, “I’m sure you maybe think, but also, if that’s the case they’re going to figure it out pretty fast, I think. So you’re going to design an ugly plane for stealth reasons, and then six months later, they’re gonna figure out this and then you’re stuck with a plane.” Noting that stealth technology renders aircraft harder for radar to detect The New Republic’s Hafiz Rashid labeled Trump’s “they’re going to figure it out” nonsensical.

On Sunday May 5 Trump posted on Truth Social that he was directing the Bureau of Prisons, the Department of Homeland Security, and the FBI to reopen, enlarge, and rebuild the former U.S. Penitentiary Alcatraz. Asked the following day by a reporter how he came up with the idea and how he envisioned using the prison, Trump said: “Well, I guess I was supposed to be a moviemaker. We’re talking—we started with the moviemaking, and it will end. It represents something very strong, very powerful, in terms of law and order. Our country needs law and order. Alcatraz is, I would say, the ultimate, right? Alcatraz, Sing Sing, and Alcatraz, the movies.” He continued, noting that no one had ever escaped from Alcatraz, and that it “represented something strong having to do with law and order.”

In an April 30 interview with Stephen A. Smith for NewsNation, Trump fabricated a response to a question about his legal actions against Harvard University, possibly confusing Harvard with Harlem, and inventing a protest in support of his policies. Smith asked Trump how he would respond to criticism of his administration’s actions as “an attack on academic freedom.”

“Well, I say this. We had riots in Harlem, in Harlem,” Trump responded, “and frankly if you look at what’s gone on—and people from Harlem went up and they protested, Stephen, and they protested very strongly against Harvard. They happened to be on my side.” Trump added that he had received a “very high Black vote.”

Commenting on the incident The New Republic’s Edith Olmsted suggested Trump might have realized halfway through his response that Smith had asked about Harvard and not Harlem, although the remark about the Black vote was “entirely off topic.”

In an interview for The Atlantic on April 24, staff writer Michael Scherer asked Trump whether people should be “concerned that the nature of the presidency is changing” under him, referring to a post of Trump’s on Truth Social that said “He who saves his Country does not violate any law.”  Unwilling or unable to answer the question, Trump launched a tirade about former FBI Director James Comey.

In his April 22 interview with Time, Trump was asked about his then recent memo calling for investigation of Chris Krebs, who was head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in the first Trump administration. Trump did not attempt to answer the question, first labeling Krebs “a disgrace to our country,” then quickly claiming that he hadn’t met him.

Asked if he was concentrating power in the presidency, Trump responded by talking about border security, concluding “I completed the wall, what I was doing, but we have, I wanted to build additional because it was working so well.” “Trump is apparently still building the wall that he already built, quipped Public Notice’s Stephen Robinson.

Later in the same interview Trump declared that Joe Biden would never have sat for an extended interview because he was “grossly incompetent,” only be reminded that Time had indeed interviewed Biden “a year ago.” Trump at first asked how Biden did, but then claimed he had read the interview and that Biden had cut it short. (Biden’s interview lasted 35 minutes.) It is not clear whether Trump was confused or lying.

Asked about his promise to lower consumer prices Trump asserted falsely that only interest rates had not gone down. Elsewhere in the magazine Time documented that as of March grocery prices had increased 2.4% year-over-year, with eggs, meat, fish, and poultry showing the sharpest increases at 7.9%.

Trump also seemed shocked to learn that in an earlier interview he had committed to complying with the Supreme Court, responding “I said what?” When the interviewer clarified that, specifically, the Supreme Court had ordered the administration fo facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from an El Salvadoran prison, Trump claimed “people told” him otherwise. “[T]he nine to nothing was entirely different.” Public Notice’s Robinson found the response significant: not a strong assertion of the correctness of his position, but a delusional blame shifting that his lawyers had told him he had won in court. 

Pressed by the Time interviewers about trade deals, Trump simply denied reality. He insisted there were “many deals,” in place, despite none having been announced as of the time of the interview. Asked when they would be announced, Trump ignored the question and repeated that there were “200 deals.” Asked with whom the deals had been reached Trump responded:

Because the deal is a deal that I choose. View it differently: We are a department store, and we set the price. I meet with the companies, and then I set a fair price, what I consider to be a fair price, and they can pay it, or they don't have to pay it. They don't have to do business with the United States, but I set a tariff on countries. Some have been horrible to us. Some have been okay. Nobody's been great. Nobody's been great. Everybody took advantage of us. What I'm doing is I will, at a certain point in the not too distant future, I will set a fair price of tariffs for different countries. These are countries—some of them have made hundreds of billions of dollars, and some of them have made just a lot of money. Very few of them have made nothing because the United States was being ripped off by every, almost every country in the world, in the entire world. So I will set a price, and when I set the price, and I will set it fairly according to the statistics, and according to everything else. For instance, do they have the VAT system in play? Do they charge us tariffs? How much are they charging us? How much have they been charging us? Many, many different factors, right. How are we being treated by that country? And then I will set a tariff. Are we paying for their military? You know, as an example, we have Korea. We pay billions of dollars for the military. Japan, billions for those and others. But that, I'm going to keep us a separate item, the paying of the military. Germany, we have 50,000 soldiers—

Asked again why he didn’t announce the deals, Trump claimed he’d be “finished” over the next three to four weeks.³

The last question in the interview was about Trump’s redecorating the Oval Office, which included adding portraits of all his predecessors. The interviewer noted that among the portraits was John Adams who “said we’re a government ruled by laws, not men.” “Do you agree with that?” the interviewer asked. “John Adams said that? Where was the painting?” Trump wanted to know, apparently oblivious to what he had supposedly directed. “It’s right there,” the interviewer responded. (Trump added that he didn’t agree with Adams “100%”.)

Other incidents reporters have noted include:

• On April 2 at a Rose Garden ceremony for signing executive orders Trump wandered away, apparently oblivious, before being guided back to the desk that had been erected.
• In March when discussing Saint Patrick he referred to him as the “patriot saint” of Ireland.
• After an October 2024 event in Oaks, PA, that had been publicized as an opportunity for audience members to ask questions was interrupted so two attendees could receive medical attention, Trump stopped answering questions and spent the next 30-40 minutes swaying to music or performing his iconic two-fisted semi-dance.

In an April interview, psychologist John Gartner, who in 2017 put together a petition declaring Trump mentally ill that received 41,000 signatures, told MindSite News he had “no doubt” that Trump was exhibiting symptoms of dementia. In the 80s Trump was “actually quite articulate,” Gartner said, whereas “now he has difficulty even finishing a sentence….” Then “[h]is thoughts were logical and related: now they’re tangential." Specifically Gartner has collected dozens of examples of Trump’s “phonemic paraphrasis,” in which sounds are used in place of words, such as saying “mishiz,” while trying to say “missles,” or “Chrishus” trying to say “Christmas.” Gartner also described Trump’s “semantic paraphrasis,” in which words are used incorrectly, such as Trump saying the “oranges of the situation” where ne means origins. And then there is physical deterioration. Gartner described Trump’s “wide-based gait” in which he “sometimes swings his right leg in a semi-circle” as “typical of frontotemporal lobe dementia.”

While refraining from making an explicit diagnosis, the brain-information site NeuroLaunch labels Trump’s situation a “perfect storm” for promoting cognitive decline. “The constant demands, high-stakes decisions, and relentless scrutiny create a pressure cooker environment that can exacerbate cognitive challenges,” NeuroLaunch notes. Adding that “[s]leep patterns and lifestyle factors” influence cognitive health, Neuralink warns that  “Trump’s reported habit of sleeping only a few hours a night and his self-proclaimed addiction to fast food raise red flags.” And the site’s writers acknowledge the role of family history and genetic predisposition. “It’s like having a loaded dice in the game of mental acuity….”

Speaking to People magazine in November 2024 Trump’s nephew, Fred C. Trump III drew explicit comparisons between his uncle and his grandfather, Fred Trump Sr. Fred Sr. was formally diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at age 85 and died of the disease in combination with pneumonia. In his People interview Fred III noted that Trump’s cousin John W. Walter, who died in 2018, had dementia, and Trump’s sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, who died in 2023, exhibited symptoms of dementia, although she was apparently never formally diagnosed. Fred III recalled a conversation toward the end of her life in which she bemoaned having met Fred’s wife Lisa only once. In fact, Fred clarified, Maryanne had known Lisa for forty years and met her hundreds of times.

With regard to his uncle Donald, Fred III told People that in recent years he had recognized behavior similar to what he had observed in his grandfather’s declining years. Citing an encounter at Mar-a-Lago in 2023, Fred III described Trump as “disoriented” and “repeating things,” adding that he looked different. “He looked tired.” Fred III also mentioned that his uncle had lost some of his inhibition about cursing. Acknowledging that Trump had always cursed, Fred III nonetheless found hist uncle's recent behavior to have taken a turn toward the nasty. (Loss of inhibitions is recognized as a possible symptom of dementia.)

Bloomberg’s Timothy L. Obrien, speaking on MSNBC about Trump’s imagining a third term, suggested that age and the Trump family history with dementia should be Trump’s primary concern. ““He lives in fear of going down the path his father went down, which was dementia, followed by Alzheimer’s,” Obrien said. “[H]e slurs his words a little, he is slouched.” And in a comment that brought to mind Trump’s meandering West Point speech, Obrien added, “… I don’t know how much authentic enthusiasm he has for the power and the office he holds, other than the fact that it keeps him out of jail and it keeps him center stage.”

At the 2023 Pray Vote Summit, Trump repeatedly referred to Obama as president, saying he was “leading a lot” against him, and that “with Obama we won an election everyone said couldn’t be won,” presumably referring to the 2016 election vs. Hillary Clinton. In his January 2025 commentary on “Project 2025 and Trump’s Cognitive Decline,” Orlando Advocate publisher Kevin Seraaj notes that “who is the president” is “a sort of litmus test of cognition.”

Seraaj also recalls the September 2024 speech during which Trump offered incoherent observations of a fly. “Oh, there’s a fly,” he said. “I wonder where the fly came from?  See, two years ago, I wouldn’t have had a fly up here. You’re changing rapidly. We can’t take it any longer.”

Seraaj goes on to point out that the infamous Project 2025, which appears to be driving the Trump II agenda, describes the Director of the Office of Management and Budget – currently Russell Vought, chief author of Project 2025 – as the “keeper of ‘commander’s intent.” Seraaj reads this language as designating the Director of OMB as the principal interpreter of the president’s plans and objectives. Seraaj suggests that, in the event the president is incapacitated, it would be Vought who would insulate the President from 25th Amendment challenges, and continue “executing the [President’s] policy agenda throughout the bureaucracy.”

¹ On May 29 a federal appeals court paused the trade court ruling and ordered a response by June 5. 
² Difficulties with language are common in frontotemporal dementia and related disorders. See John Gartner’s observations later in the article.
³ As of the end of May Trump had announced a grab bag of tariffs affecting the EU, China, Canada and Mexico, and separate levies on steel and aluminum, cars, smartphones, computres, and 10% “baseline” tariffs affecting most nations. The Court of International Trade ruled Trump’s tariffs unconstitutional, and that only Congress had the power to regulate commerce. As noted above, an appeals court subsequently paused the trade court’s ruling, allowing the tariffs to remain in place pending hearings in June.