Trump’s Erratic Behavior and
Extreme Comments Revive Mental Health Debate
As the president threatens to wipe out Iran and attacks the
pope, even some former allies and advisers are questioning whether he has grown
increasingly unbalanced, describing him as “lunatic” and “clearly insane.”
By Peter Baker
Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent, is
covering his sixth presidency and wrote a book about President Trump’s first
term with Susan B. Glasser.
- April 13, 2026Updated 3:21
p.m. ET
President Trump’s
erratic behavior and extreme comments in recent days and weeks have
turbocharged the crazy-like-a-fox-or-just-plain-crazy debate that has followed
him on the national political stage for a decade.
A series of disjointed,
hard-to-follow and sometimes-profane statements capped by his “a whole civilization will die tonight” threat to
wipe Iran off the map last week and his head-spinning attack on the “WEAK on Crime, and terrible
for Foreign Policy” pope on Sunday night have left many with
the impression of a deranged autocrat mad with power.
The White House rejected
such assessments, saying that Mr. Trump is sharp and keeping his opponents on
edge. But the president’s eruptions have raised questions about America’s
leadership in a time of war. While the country has had presidents whose capacity
came under question before, most recently the octogenarian Joseph R. Biden Jr.
as he aged demonstrably before the public’s eyes, never in modern times has the
stability of a president been so publicly and forensically debated — and with
such profound consequences.
Democrats who have long challenged Mr.
Trump’s psychological fitness have issued a fresh chorus of calls to invoke the
25th Amendment to remove the president from power for disability. But it is not
just a concern voiced by partisans on the left, late-night comics or mental
health professionals making long-distance diagnoses. It can be heard now among
retired generals, diplomats and foreign officials.
And most strikingly, it can be heard now on the political right among onetime allies of the
president.
Former Representative Marjorie Taylor
Greene, the Georgia Republican who recently broke with Mr. Trump, advocated
using the 25th Amendment, telling CNN that threatening to destroy Iran’s
civilization was “not tough rhetoric, it’s
insanity.” Candace Owens, the far-right podcaster, called him “a genocidal lunatic.” Alex Jones, the conspiracy
theorist and founder of Infowars, said Mr. Trump “does babble and sounds like
the brain’s not doing too hot.”
Some of the questions
about Mr. Trump’s soundness come from people who once worked with him and have
since become critics. Even before the civilization post, Ty Cobb, a White House
lawyer in Mr. Trump’s first term, told the journalist Jim Acosta that the
president is “a man who is clearly insane” and
that his recent string of belligerent, middle-of-the-night social media posts
“highlights the level of his insanity.” Stephanie Grisham, a former White House
press secretary for Mr. Trump, wrote online last week that “he’s clearly not well.”
Mr. Trump fired back in
a long, angry social media post that did not exactly radiate calm stability.
“They have one thing in common, Low IQs,” he wrote of Ms.
Owens, Mr. Jones, Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson. “They’re stupid people, they
know it, their families know it, and everyone else knows it, too!” He threw the
crazy charge back at them. “They’re NUT JOBS, TROUBLEMAKERS, and will say
anything necessary for some ‘free’ and cheap publicity.”
The dissent on the right has not
extended to Congress, where Republican lawmakers remain publicly loyal to the
president, nor has it reached the cabinet, which would have to approve any
invocation of the 25th Amendment, rendering that idea moot. But it reflects
growing unease among Americans who in recent surveys have increasingly
questioned the fitness of Mr. Trump, already the oldest president ever
inaugurated, as he approaches his 80th birthday.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll in February found
that 61 percent of Americans think Mr. Trump has become more erratic with age
and just 45 percent say he is “mentally sharp and able to deal with
challenges,” down from 54 percent in 2023. Roughly half of Americans, 49
percent, deemed Mr. Trump too old to be president when asked in a YouGov poll in September,
up from 34 percent in February 2024, while just 39 percent said he was not too
old.
Democrats have pressed the point in
recent days. Mr. Trump is “an extremely sick person” (Senator Chuck Schumer
of New York), “unhinged” and “out of control” (Representative
Hakeem Jeffries of New York) or, more bluntly, “batshit crazy” (Representative Ted Lieu of
California). Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, wrote the White House
physician requesting an evaluation, noting “signs consistent with dementia and
cognitive decline” and “increasingly incoherent, volatile, profane, deranged,
and threatening” tantrums.
The president’s
defenders pushed back. What critics call psychosis, they call strategy.
“Trump knows exactly
what he is doing,” wrote Liz Peek,
a columnist for the Hill and Fox News contributor. “Trump will continue to use
maximalist (and sometimes outrageous) military and diplomatic pressure in his
campaign to rid the Middle East of Iran’s near 50-year campaign of terror.”
Mr. Trump, who in his first term
described himself as “a very stable genius” and has regularly boasted
of passing cognitive tests meant to detect dementia, dismissed the criticism of
his mental state when asked by a reporter last week.
“I haven’t heard that,”
he said. “But if that’s the case, you’re going to have to have more people like
me because our country was being ripped off on trade, on everything, for many
years until I came along. So if that’s the case, you’re going to have to have
more people.”
Asked for elaboration,
Davis Ingle, a White House spokesman, said in an email: “President Trump’s
sharpness, unmatched energy, and historic accessibility stand in stark contrast
to what we saw during the past four years.” He argued that Mr. Biden had declined
physically and mentally in that time and that The New York Times and other
media had covered it up. (The Times covered Mr. Biden’s health and age extensively in multiple stories.)
Mr. Trump’s stability has been a
recurring issue since he first sought the presidency in 2016. Numerous
psychiatrists and other mental health professionals have weighed in with their
own opinions even without the opportunity to evaluate him. John F. Kelly, his
longest serving White House chief of staff in the first term, even bought a
book by 27 of those specialists called “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” in
an effort to understand his boss and came to the conclusion that he was
mentally ill.
This is not the first time a
president’s mental fitness has been called into doubt. John Adams, Andrew
Jackson and both Roosevelts were from time to time accused of being unbalanced
by political foes.
Abraham Lincoln
struggled with depression. Woodrow Wilson was never the same after a stroke.
Lyndon B. Johnson veered between manic energy and bouts of gloominess. Ronald
Reagan seemed to slip late in his presidency, and many wondered whether the
Alzheimer’s disease announced years later might have already begun affecting
him.
Some Trump admirers have
compared him to Richard M. Nixon, who espoused what he reportedly called “the
madman theory,” instructing Henry A. Kissinger, his national security adviser
leading Vietnam peace talks, to tell negotiators that the president was unstable
and unpredictable as a bargaining tool to secure a better agreement. But
privately some of Nixon’s own advisers did not think it was all an act.
Mr. Trump has at times
tried to leverage his madman reputation. “Make them think I’m crazy,” he told
Nikki Haley, his first-term ambassador to the United Nations, referring to the
North Koreans. “Do you know what the secret is of a really good tweet?” he once
asked William P. Barr, then his attorney general. “Just the right amount of
crazy.”
Yet Mr. Trump told The New York Post last
week that this time, at least, he was not pretending. “I was willing to do it,”
he said of his threat to destroy Iran’s civilization.
The public focus on Mr. Trump’s state
of mind, goes further than with almost any past president. “Other than Nixon,
there has never been this level of concern over time,” said Julian E. Zelizer,
a Princeton historian and editor of a book on Mr. Trump’s first term.
Indeed, the situation
today eclipses even Nixon. Unlike in the 1970s, “so much of this is playing out
in public,” especially with social media and cable television, Mr. Zelizer
said. And, he added, “as a president who naturally disregards any guardrails or
sense of decorum, Trump feels much freer, even than Nixon, to unleash his inner
rage and to act on impulse.”
In his second term, Mr.
Trump seems even less restrained and more incoherent at times. He uses more
profanity, speaks longer and regularly makes comments rooted in fantasy rather
than fact. He keeps saying that his father was born in Germany when
in fact he was born in the Bronx. He repeats an invented story about his uncle,
an M.I.T. professor, telling him about teaching the terrorist known
as the Unabomber.
He wanders off into odd
tangents — an eight-minute ramble at a Christmas reception about poisonous snakes in Peru,
a long digression during a cabinet meeting about Sharpie pens, an interruption of an Iran war update
to praise the White House drapes. He has confused Greenland with Iceland and more than once
boasted of ending a fictional war between Cambodia and Azerbaijan,
two countries separated by nearly 4,000 miles. (He evidently means Armenia and
Azerbaijan).
Even before lashing out at Pope Leo XIV on Sunday night, and
then posting an image of himself as a Jesus-like figure before deleting it, Mr. Trump
had shocked many with his outbursts at critics. He accuses those who anger him
of sedition, a crime punishable by death. He claimed bizarrely that the
Hollywood director Rob Reiner, who was allegedly stabbed to death by his son,
was killed “due to the anger he caused” by opposing Mr.
Trump. When Robert S. Mueller III, the former F.B.I. director and special
counsel, died, Mr. Trump said, “Good, I’m glad he’s dead.”
In recent days, he
declared that “Iran’s New Regime President” was “much less Radicalized and far
more intelligent than his predecessors.” Except that Iran’s new
president is the same as the old president. There has been no change in
presidents. Mr. Trump may have meant the new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba
Khamenei, but he is considered even more hard-line than his father, Ayatollah
Ali Khamenei, who was killed in the war.
One difference from the
first term is that there are few if any advisers like Mr. Kelly who consider it
their responsibility to keep Mr. Trump from going too far. “When he does what
he does, everyone around him keeps their eyes to the floor and says nothing,”
Mr. Zelizer said. “Unlike the first term, they don’t even seem to maneuver
behind the scenes to stop him.”
But there may be political latitude
for it with his base. “There is an element of American politics in the age of
polarization, particularly within the G.O.P., that likes this style of
leadership,” Mr. Zelizer said. “What can be more anti-establishment than
someone who is willing to be out of control?”
Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The Times.
He is covering his sixth presidency and sometimes writes analytical pieces that
place presidents and their administrations in a larger context and historical
framework.