Those of us in the reality-based world face a challenge in the current US political climate. Trump and his cult followers can say anything they like without feeling the need to provide a shred of evidence in support. On the other hand, we feel that we need to provide at least some evidence for any claim.
The most recent example of this is Trump’s claim that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has rigged the latest appalling jobs numbers report to make him and Republicans look bad. Not only that, he said that the head of the bureau had faked the numbers even last year to make the economy under Joe Biden look good.
Contrast this with the increasing suspicion that Trump is suffering from severe cognitive deterioration, that he might already be in the throes of dementia. Most people will hesitate to openly say this because dementia is a medical condition that needs to be diagnosed by a professional.
But a conservative Republican attorney by the name of Chris Truax says that the evidence of Trump’s dementia has become so obvious that pretty much anyone, and definitely those who have had loved ones suffer from it, should be able to recognize it easily, especially the confabulation. He says that the kind of confabulation that Trump is demonstrating goes well beyond the more common problems of misremembering past events or conflating distinct events into one.
Confabulation is sometimes called “honest lying,” because the person doing it genuinely believes what he’s saying, even if it is obviously and patently false. A person confabulates when they are telling completely invented stories that don’t provide them any particular tangible benefit. In other words, it’s not like lying to try and get out of a speeding ticket. Confabulation isn’t misremembering a date or forgetting something. The mistakes of memory we are all subject to become confabulation when people remember false information in vivid detail — detail so vivid and complete that people who don’t know otherwise often believe what they are hearing is true. In older people, confabulation is one of the clearest early signs of dementia. The day you witness someone confabulate is often the day you are forced to admit to yourself that a beloved parent needs help, and that all the little slips and oddities you’ve been seeing can no longer be rationalized away.
In Trump’s case, the example Truax provides is really startling.
For Trump, the day we could no longer pretend everything is fine came on July 15, when he told a lengthy story about his uncle, John Trump, who he claimed taught at MIT and held three degrees in “nuclear, chemical, and math.” His uncle, according to Trump, once told him how he had taught Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, and how very smart Kaczynski was.
Trump’s uncle was indeed a professor at MIT, but everything else in this story is pure confabulation. Trump’s uncle didn’t have degrees in “nuclear, chemical, and math” — he had degrees in electrical engineering and physics. And Kaczynski did not go to MIT at all — he went to Harvard.
But most telling of all, it is categorically impossible for Trump’s uncle to have told him any such story. Kaczynski became publicly known as the Unabomber when he was arrested in 1996. Trump’s uncle, the MIT professor, died in 1985. In other words, Trump’s uncle could not have told him the story because there was, literally, no story to tell during his lifetime.
Trump had piled on the details when he told that story.
Trump was speaking at a Pennsylvania event about energy and innovation when he said he had to “brag just for a second” about his uncle’s intelligence. After wrongly saying his uncle was “the longest-serving professor in the history of MIT” (he was one of the longest-serving but not the very longest) and wrongly saying his uncle’s three university degrees were “in nuclear, chemical, and math” (two were in electrical engineering and one was in physics), the president claimed, “Kaczynski was one of his students.”
He went on to tell a story about having asked his uncle about what Kaczynski was like. “‘I said, ‘What kind of a student was he, Uncle John?’ Dr. John Trump. I said, ‘What kind of a student?’ And then he said, ‘Seriously, good.’ He said, ‘He’d correct – he’d go around correcting everybody.’ But it didn’t work out too well for him.”
But that is not all. Truax says that another sign of dementia is difficulty with simple mathematical concepts that one used to know.
Difficulty with mathematical concepts is another early warning sign of dementia. Now watch Trump attempting to explain how he is going to make drug prices go down by “1,000 percent, 600 percent, 500 percent, 1,500 percent.” That’s complete nonsense, unless drug companies will be paying patients to accept prescriptions, since reducing drug prices by 100 percent would mean they were free. Certainly, someone who got a business degree from Wharton and has spent his life running a company would know how percentages work.
Truax warns that ignoring these signs is dangerous.
If you aren’t comfortable with labeling this as dementia, that’s fine. But there is no question that the president — the man tasked with making critical life and death decisions for both the country and the world — is struggling with mathematical concepts, has vivid “memories” that are not rooted in reality and has an increasingly foggy grasp of past events that did happen. That’s not a medical diagnosis. These are facts we can see for ourselves and we all know, even those of us who voted for Trump three times, that this can’t be allowed to continue.
…Donald Trump is showing all the signs of suffering from dementia. If this were a neighbor, a parent, or a family friend, you would have no trouble seeing it. We should not turn our heads just because it is the president.
We seem to be in an ‘Emperor has no clothes’ situation, in which many people are studiously avoiding seeing what is obvious to those outside the bubble.
Donald will soon die of this. Too bad, so sad.
We need to worry about his successor.
Most people will hesitate to openly say this because dementia is a medical condition that needs to be diagnosed by a professional.
Um, two things about this. First, there’s another reason “Most people will hesitate to openly say this,” which is that no one has any way of doing anything about it that doesn’t involve replacing Trump with someone who is no better, and might possibly be worse, such as Vance or Trump’s Little Johnson. Also, no one in Trump’s “team” wants to rick losing whatever position they’ve managed to finagle for themselves by sucking up to an incapacitated boss; nor do any of them want to risk an undisciplined mob reaction from Trump’s deranged cult.
And second, medical professionals make diagnoses for their patients’ benefit. We, the American public, aren’t required to make such decisions; we’re required to perform threat assessment for OUR benefit, not that of the mental patient. A professional medical diagnosis might help, of course, but we don’t necessarily have to wait for one — it’s ourselves we’re trying to help, not the patient.
I am reminded of the episode regarding someone’s hand tattoos supposedly signifying MS13 membership. Trump showed the photograph of the hand, annotated with M, S, 1, 3, helpfully placed above each tattoo. In another interview a month or two later, he clearly misremembers the annotations as actual tattoos -- insisting the guy has ‘M S 1 3’ as a literal tattoo across the knuckles.
@3 He wasn’t misremembering, he never understood that the M S 1 3 was Photoshopped onto the picture. Even holding up the picture for the press, he insisted it was tattooed. Just like he still refuses to understand who pays tariffs no matter how many times he’s called out on it.
Ridana: Trump may be repeating that drivel about tariffs because he has dementia; or he may be repeating it because he knows it gets him the response he wants from his base. Sort of like his endless repetitive lies about the Central Park Five — it doesn’t matter how blatantly false it is, as long as enough of his audience cheer whenever he says it. He’s never been anything more than a carny-barker, and that’s what carny-barkers do, whether or not their brains are fully functional.
They have read their Goebbels.
https://www.azquotes.com/author/5626-Joseph_Goebbels
“If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.”
Note the three phases: (I) repeat a lie often enough, (II) people will believe it, and (III) you will even come to believe it yourself. Trump may be in phase III.
The best explanation I’ve heard for Trump’s demented and malevolent actions is simple.
The has nothing to lose and just doesn’t care any more.
He ha been impeached twice, lost the 2020 election, tried to reverse it and failed on January 06, and then won the recent election.
He is 79, a very rich billionaire, in poor health, and his mind is clearly far gone into senile dementia. He will die soon, at least mentally if not also physically.
Nobody can do anything to him now that he is president, the GOP is 100% behind him, and the US Supreme court has become totally controlled by right wing extremists. .
Trump is ultra-rich, powerful, invulnerable, and sick and dying.
He has nothing to lose so he is ruling by whims and whatever passes through his mind, put out in Executive Orders.
It isn’t even clear how much of what comes out of the White House in Trump’s name are actions that he has actually decreed.
There is a large group of people around him that use him as a meat puppet as much as they can.
Trump can no longer think clearly or write grammatically correct, coherent, and spelled correctly Executive Orders.
Whenever you see something in one of his Tweets on X or Executive Orders that looks like it was written by an educated adult, you know that he didn’t write it.
It may have been his, heavily edited.
It may also have been something that someone else wrote that he put out with his name on it.
Even dementia-addled Trump will retain a hyper-acute sense of when someone around him is suggesting he is weakened. And he will strike back.
They are all legitimately scared of the violent toddler in him.
They even model his behaviour: look at the ways he reacts to journalists who ask difficult questions and lashes out to threaten them. Now the MAGA retinue do the same thing even when Trump isn’t looking.
This is disturbing, but seems a quite plausible explanation.
.
“Epstein twist could explain Trump’s false Unabomber story”
.https://youtube.com/shorts/BeZhmer-s9E
More from The Guardian.
‘He has trouble completing a thought’: bizarre public appearances again cast doubt on Trump’s mental acuity.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/03/donald-trump-mental-fitness
It’s more a certainty than a suspicion. The fella IS an Alzheimer sufferer, we are at the point where you don’t need a doctor to see it.
Look at his expressions, his posture, his walk and above all the way he talks, for Pandemonium’s sake. Moreover, his circle of bootlickers know this very well, and I can only imagine how much their pants are filling up right now.
Mind you this means he’s even more dangerous now, he ain’t a nice old uncle he’s a bagful of spite, rage and malice and now well on the way to complete irrationality.
There is a precedent, as Ron Reagan was much in the same condition by the end of his second mandate but at least he had around a few people able to corral him somewhat. This one is unhinged and unchained, good luck restraining him.
I am sorry for those Americans who did not want the guy and got him anyways. Hang on in there.
Trump’s claim that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has rigged the latest appalling jobs numbers report to make him and Republicans look bad.
IANA psychologist, but this reminds me of a neighbor with mental health issues not including dementia. This person would, when frustrated, accuse people of hostile motivations (with no evidence), which we would take as a sign that the medications needed adjustment or refill -- and usually that particular behavior declined or disappeared for a while after a pharmacy visit. None of the symptoms of senescence per se appeared, just what some might call paranoiac ideation.
Not that this bogus diagnosis provides any reassurance in the present presidential context…
Maybe send Mr. Herbert to deal with DJT, he fixed Lt. Slechtnacht good.
He is another XXXXXX, so fight fire with fire.
I’m sorry, I just can’t get past “even those of us who voted for Trump three times, that this can’t be allowed to continue.” Even though the guy’s very likely correct about all of this, he is a flaming asshole that should be ignored and shunned by decent people.
mikey @#15,
In his article, Truax says “I have opposed Trump since he came down that famous escalator in 2015” so I think he was using ‘us’ in a very expansive sense, meant to include Trump supporters in general but not him personally.
For a long time Mr. Trump has been quite an interesting specimen for any psychiatrist. And now pseudologia fantastica seems to be seamlessly segeuing into the confabulations of dementia. Fabulously fascinating (if one manages to blend out the horrible repercussions of his reign of darkness).
@16 Thank you, professor. That comports much better with the rest of the excerpt. I guess this is what comes from being constantly bombarded with unfathomable craziness all day, every day.
From my perspective these things are in different buckets. Trump’s mental health and remaining mental state are personal issues for him and the grifters, fellow con-men, and sycophants that stand in the place of loved ones for him. His actions can be assessed and reacted to without worrying about why he did them.
When he lies or tries to blow up the economy I can react just fine to the fact that he has done these things and that he keeps doing them. I don’t require excuses for why he does them and frankly I don’t accept any excuses for why he does these things. The President of the United States of America does not get to tell me that the dog ate his homework or that he’s been a racist, mysogynist, fascist screw-up only because he’s got brain rot of one kind or another. I only care that he has done these things and that he continues to do these things. No excuse is good enough and there can be no exceptions.
For what it’s worth, if you are worried about his mental health for some reason you can rest easy. He’s already getting what is likely one of the greatest set of accomodations in history for this. He has key people all over the excecutive branch and in congress who are doing their level best to help him. Even the US Supreme Court is clearly going a fair bit out of its way to help. This gives him almost the entire unrestrained might and capabilities of the US government to aid and accomodate his mental health.
This is used to alter reality, alter perceptions of reality, and where neither of those are an option alter the stories we tell ourselves about reality to the fullest extent possible. All so that whatever delusional ideas Trump comes up with, however bizarre, need never be exposed to their inherent contradictions and falsehoods.
So he’s doing just fine. We need to worry about everyone else. And remember all the fellow con-men who’ve been supporting him so they don’t just get to wash their hands of it all once he’s gone.
#19 @ lanir
QFT