It’s Time to Talk About Donald
Trump’s Logorrhea
How
many polite ways are there to ask whether the President of the United States is
losing it?
January
22, 2026
Donald Trump is an editor’s nightmare
and a psychiatrist’s dream. Amid all the coverage marking the first anniversary
of his return to the White House, one story—which did not get the attention it
deserved—stood out for me: a Times analysis of how much more the
President has been talking and talking and talking. The findings? One million
nine hundred and seventy-seven thousand six hundred and nine words in the
Presidential appearances, as of January 20th—an increase of two hundred and
forty-five per cent compared with the first year of Trump’s first term in
office, back in 2017.
There are many conclusions to be drawn
from this astonishing statistic, including the obvious one, that our leader
loves the sound of his own voice, and the slightly less obvious corollary that
he has no one around him willing or able to tell him to shut up. It’s also true
that, in rambling on so much, Trump reveals just about everything one could
ever want to know about him—his lack of discipline, his ignorance, his vanity,
insecurity, and crudeness, and a mean streak that knows no limits. “It is remarkable
how a man cannot summarize his thoughts in even the most general sort of way
without betraying himself completely,” Thomas Mann wrote a century ago, in his
novel “The Magic Mountain,” set in a sanitarium perched
above the Swiss mountain town of Davos, where Trump spent the better part of
this week proving to the stunned attendees of the annual World Economic Forum
the continuing relevance of Mann’s observation.
“Sometimes, you need a dictator,”
Trump soliloquized on Wednesday, during a reception for business leaders. A few
hours earlier, in an address that lasted a full hour and a half, the President
had announced that he would not invade Greenland, despite his recent threats;
explained that “stupid people” buy windmills; and admitted that he had decided
to raise tariffs on Switzerland, because its Prime Minister, “a woman,” had
“rubbed me the wrong way.” The speech, during which Trump four times referred
to Iceland when he meant Greenland, was more than twice the combined length of
the addresses of the French President, Emmanuel Macron, and the German
Chancellor, Friedrich Merz. On Tuesday, speaking to the White House press corps
to mark the actual anniversary of his return to office, Trump had discoursed on
everything from his mother telling him he could have been a Major League
baseball player and explaining to him what a mental asylum was to his hatred
for Somalia and its “very low-I.Q. people.” That one lasted a hundred and four
minutes.
Trump, of course, was rude,
untruthful, and excessively, if not quite so egregiously, long-winded in his
first term, too. The difference today, as he presides over a cowed American
government, whose checks and balances no longer function as they used to, is
that his Administration is far more willing and able to turn his fantastical
words into tangible realities. The President, it now seems clear, has the
world’s most consequential case of untreated logorrhea. (Dictionary definition
of this condition: “Excessive and often incoherent talkativeness.”)
And I’m not just referring to the week’s crisis over Greenland and the future of the NATO alliance, a crisis
which began and (sort of) ended with many words being uttered by Trump about
his “psychological” need to own the vast and strategically located Danish
territory. Consider, for example, Trump’s “Board of Peace,” which he débuted
before leaving Davos on Thursday morning. In Trump 1.0, perhaps this would have
been no more than one of his Twitter controversies, in which he posted some
crazy graphic of himself leading a rump group of world powers to overthrow the
United Nations as the new permanent chairman of the global board of directors.
In Trump 2.0, his alternate reality is not just a social-media post or the
subject of an over-my-dead-body fight with his latest panicked national
security adviser but an in-person photo op featuring the President, a real-life
logo copied from the U.N.’s, and a random assortment of world leaders who were
willing to buy a seat on Trump’s committee for a cool billion dollars. (Belarus
and Qatar, yes; Britain, France, Germany, and every other major U.S. ally in
Europe, no.) I highly recommend watching the fully live-streamed event,
a show one might caption “Donald Trump and his pretend League of (Lesser)
Superheroes, with himself as a bizarro Superman in charge of the world.”
My favorite moment was when—after
bragging about how “everybody wants to be a part of” the board that every other
major world leader, with the possible exception of the war-mongering pariah
Vladimir Putin, refused to join—he claimed that the group he himself had
dreamed up was some distinguished independent organization that had solicited
his chairmanship. “I was very honored when they asked me to do it,” he said.
For all I know, he believed it.
Perhaps just as revealing, when Trump
reached the fulsome self-praise section of his speech, he explained that he was
such an incredible peacemaker that he had even managed to end wars in places
where he had not known they were happening. Imagine admitting this about
yourself. Another quote from “The Magic Mountain” sprang to mind: “I know I am
talking nonsense, but I’d rather go rambling on. . . .”
Adecade into the Trump era, Americans
are more or less used to this manic political performance art, proof, if we
still needed it, that millions of our fellow-citizens are all right with having
a clearly disturbed leader who cannot control what he says. (Although, to be
fair, even some partisan Republicans are starting to worry that they could pay
a serious price this fall for what the G.O.P. strategist Karl Rove, no fan of
Trump’s, called Trump’s unnerving“rambling appearances” and “downward spiral”
in his latest Wall Street Journal column, headlined “Is Trump Trying to Lose
the Midterms?”)
But the stunned reaction of so many
Europeans to a week living in the full-on Trump talk cycle ought to remind us
that there’s something to be said for the plainer interpretation of Trump’s
out-of-control behavior, even if years of intensive exposure in the U.S. have
inured us to it.
“This is a wake-up call, a bigger one
than we’ve ever had,” Christine Lagarde, the head of the European Central Bank,
said.
“The time has come to stand up against
Trump,” Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former prime minister of Denmark and
secretary-general of NATO,
said.
It was only a few days before his
speech in Davos, on the eve of his visit to Switzerland, that Trump was
revealed to have sent a text to the Prime Minister of Norway, complaining that,
because Norway had denied him the Nobel Peace Prize, he was under no obligation
to proceed peacefully in his desire to take over Greenland. The message, surely
a first in diplomatic annals, began: “Dear Jonas, Considering your Country
decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I
no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always
be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United
States of America.”
Lars-Christian Brask, a deputy speaker
of the Danish parliament, no doubt spoke for many in Europe when he responded
to this evidence of Trump’s “mad and erratic behavior” by asking on television
whether the President was still capable of running the United States.
What struck me was how calm,
reasonable, and puzzled Brask’s tone was as he said it. But it’s going to be a
long three more years; there’s almost certainly going to be a lot of shouting
before this is all over. How many polite ways, after all, are there to ask
whether the President of the United States has lost his mind?
