Non Compos Mentis

One of our two choices for president is losing his mind

“…I say what would happen if the boat sank from its weight and you’re in the boat and you have this tremendously powerful battery and the battery is now underwater and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there. By the way, a lot of shark attacks lately. You notice that? A lot of shark. I watched some guys justifying it today. Well, they weren’t really that angry. They bit off the young lady’s leg because of the fact that they were, they were not hungry, but they misunderstood what, who she was. These people are cray. He said there’s no problem with sharks they just didn’t really understand a young woman swimming. Now really got decimated and other people too. A lot of shark attacks. So I said, so there’s a shark 10 yards away from the boat. 10 yards over here. Do I get electrocuted if the boat is sinking, water goes over the battery, the boat is sinking. Do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted because, I will tell you, he didnt know the answer. He said, you know, nobody’s ever asked that question. I said, I think it’s a good question. I think there’s a lot of electric current coming through that water, but you know what I’d do if there was a shark or you get electrocuted? I’ll take electrocution every single time. I’m not getting near the shark.” —Donald Trump, at campaign rally in Nevada, June 9th

Last Thursday former president Trump returned to the scene of the crime, as it were. He visited Washington, D.C. for the first time since he launched an attempt to overthrow the U.S. government three years ago. Trump held closed-door meetings with Republican congressmen and senators, and on the record the attendees were effusive in their praise of their party’s leader, who is a convicted felon. One GOP senator described the atmosphere as “electric.” Another, South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, who in 2016 assailed Trump as a “kook” and a “bigot", claimed “it was the best meeting I’ve ever seen between Republican senators and President Trump. I can’t wait to have him back.” Off the record, however, some of the participants described Trump as “rambling like a drunk uncle”; he called the city of Milwaukee- where the GOP is having its convention this summer- “a horrible place.” Trump attacked fellow Republicans for voting to impeach him in 2019 and 2021. He groused about the singer Taylor Swift “endorsing that dope,” apparently a reference to President Biden. He also once again expressed his admiration for the fictional serial killer and cannibal Hannibal Lecter.

The former president them moved on to a roundtable with business leaders, who found him to be “remarkably meandering” and “unable to keep a thought straight.” When Trump was asked about his proposal to lower the corporate tax rate from 21% to 20%, he explained that he chose the 20% figure “because it’s a round number.”

Earlier in the week the Republican presidential nominee had agreed with two young right-wing podcasters that the Deep State was concealing evidence of the existence of aliens from him.

On Saturday night Trump spoke to members of a right-wing youth organization and offered up these thoughts on future U.S. weapons development: “The problem with the Army tanks, like cars and like trucks, the problem is that you would have to bring a battery pack along. You're going to pull it like a little wagon, like a child pulls a wagon. So they want to build an army tank. But, you know, the battery is very big.”

When I read about episodes such as these I’m reminded of a 1965 novel entitled Night of Camp David, in which an American president appears to be losing his grip on reality and succumbing to paranoia. The story packed a particular punch in those days because the United States was engaged in a global confrontation with the Soviet Union, which (we believed) might attack the U.S. at any moment. Our commander-in-chief’s mental stability was of immense importance to the voters. Almost 60 years later, the threat of an attack on the U.S. by Russia or China has lessened. Nevertheless the U.S. still has roughly 3,700 nuclear warheads mounted on a variety of platforms. Though the exact details of nuclear launch procedures are classified, it’s not a secret that our system is designed for speed, for executing a launch order from the president as quickly as possible. As long as the president’s instructions constitute a lawful order, the military is duty-bound to carry them out with dispatch. The president- the national command authority- is presumed to be of sound mind.

Scene from the 1983 movie “The Day After”

I’ve written previously about Trump’s authoritarian instincts as well as his severe personality disorders, but his worsening verbal struggles and frequent confabulations indicate that his cognitive abilities are deteriorating. He was never an articulate man, but comparisons of him speaking in 2016 or even in 2020 reveal a startling loss of fluency since then. America has certainly had presidents in the nuclear age who at times struggled with the intense pressures of the job, for example Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Were the American people to reelect Donald Trump this fall they would be selecting a commander-in-chief whose fitness is more suspect than any previous occupant of the Oval Office since the U.S. first acquired nuclear weapons. Cognitive decline is not linear; it may plateau for a time. But the Trump of 2016 or 2020 is not coming back. The 25th Amendment to the Constitution provides for the ability to remove a president if he is unfit, but it is hard to imagine that Trump’s cabinet in his second term would contain individuals who possess the fortitude necessary to take such a momentous step. We could very well find ourselves with a president who in his lucid moments is a vengeful autocrat and at other times is a pawn of various officials in his government who seek to use the authority of his office for their own ends. This outcome can still be avoided if enough citizens stop treating politics as a reality show without consequences and think seriously about the stakes. None of this has to happen.