Trump’s mental decline is
undeniable — so what now?
by
Chris Truax, opinion contributor - 08/01/25 11:00 AM ET
“Confabulation.” It’s a
word you are going to be hearing a lot in the coming months.
President Trump has
always been willing to mislead people when it was to his advantage. Even his
supporters recognize this. Hence the famous admonition to “take Trump seriously, not literally.”
But what Trump is doing
now is something different.
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.
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.
Once you have seen
that Donald Trump is confabulating, it cannot
be unseen — and all sorts of other mildly disturbing incidents suddenly fall
into place.
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.
Or take his insistence
that former President Obama and his FBI director, James
Comey, made up the Epstein files, even though
they were long out of office by the time Epstein was most recently arrested in
2019. Again, that’s very troubling, because being unable to correctly process
when past events took place is a common feature in confabulation. The same goes
for being unable to remember that
he himself appointed Jerome Powell as
the chair of the federal reserve. And then, of course, there are all the little lapses in judgment that
Trump has been displaying recently.
I have opposed Trump
since he came down that famous escalator in
2015. But I want to step away from partisan sniping for a
moment. I know a lot of people genuinely love the man, even if I don’t. I
recognize how hard this must be for them. After the death of a child, watching
someone you love and respect struggle with dementia may be one of the worst
experiences a person can have, whether it’s a parent or a president.
But when the time comes,
it’s something that must be faced squarely. That goes double when we are
talking about the president.
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.
Whatever dementia issues Joe Biden may have,
there is no denying that his staff was superb at managing them and protecting
both Biden and the country. Trump, however,
doesn’t have those guardrails. That’s one of the reasons we are seeing what we
are seeing. Can you imagine Pete
Hegseth or Kristi
Noem managing Trump’s dementia or even simply telling him “no”
and threatening to resign?
Given this lack of
independence in Trump’s Cabinet, I’m not sure what the ultimate solution is.
But I know that the first step is for Trump’s most loyal supporters to admit,
even if only to themselves, that there is a problem, just as Biden’s supporters
did for him.
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.
Chris Truax is an appellate
attorney who served as Southern California chair for John McCain’s primary
campaign in 2008.
