Donald Trump Is Finally Cracking Up
for Real
His recent tirades confirmed what more
than half of America now believes: The president is mentally unfit. How will we
survive two and a half more years of this? And what’s he got in store for us?
Molly Jong-Fast, Michael Tomasky/May 21, 2026
Illustration by Brian Ajhar
Angelo
Carusone and Aaron Rupar share a distinction that we imagine many Americans
would happily cede to them: They have likely watched more Donald Trump rallies,
speeches, and press briefings than any other living Americans. Carusone is the
chairman and president of Media Matters for America,
the liberal media watchdog group; Rupar is an independent journalist who fires
off dozens of posts a day about Trump to his two million followers across Bluesky and X. Carusone reckons he’s watched around
650 Trump events over the course of a decade. Rupar estimates that, while he
may have missed a few events in that time, he has endured “probably like 98
percent of his speeches and rallies.” And both closely monitor the president’s
social media posts.
So
they’re pretty well-qualified to assess the question: Has Trump deteriorated
over the years?
“The
past year, I will say it’s accelerated more than anything,” Carusone said.
“It’s really noticeable.” For starters, he said, Trump simply sounds different:
“There’s a lack of crispness in his articulation.” And at rallies, which Trump
is doing very infrequently these days, “He just reads the room less
effectively. He’s less nimble … less responsive to where the crowd is.”
Rupar
sees things a bit differently. “He’s always been extremely incoherent, very
untruthful, impulsive,” Rupar said. “So I don’t really think any of those core
things are new. I just think that it breaks through now more than it did in the
past.” Even so, Rupar counted himself surprised, he said, on the morning of
Easter Sunday, when someone DM’d him Trump’s latest Truth Social post. “And my
very first thought when I saw it was, ‘That’s the craziest thing he’s ever
posted,’” Rupar said.
The post he’s referring to is the first of two that, even by Trump’s standards,
will live in presidential infamy. For the record: “Tuesday will be Power Plant
Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like
it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell
- JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.” It was followed
two days later by the post Trump opened with the sentence: “A whole civilization
will die tonight, never to be brought back again. These posts were a turning
point: They lit a match that started a bonfire of new speculation about
Trump’s mental state. It consumed social media and cable news; by the next
week, it made A1 of The New York Times. What was happening here? The man
was once desperate and insecure enough to label himself a “very stable genius”;
that was pathetic enough, but that was eight long years ago. Where is he now?
The day between those two posts brought the traditional White House Easter Egg
Roll, which saw Trump surrounded by children and regaling them with the story
of … the Easter Bunny? The Last Supper? Christ’s Resurrection? Try again. Joe Biden’s autopen. To
a bunch of six-year-olds.
Oh,
and speaking of Christ … that moment on April 12, when Trump reposted an
AI-generated image of himself as Jesus, on the same day he was picking a fight with the pope, was
a little much even for his admirers. He took it down and, laughably, tried to
say it was an image of him as a doctor. That very night and into the next
morning, Democratic commentator Harry Sisson monitored Trump’s
social media activity:
9:49pm AI Jesus photo
9:50pm Trump tower on moon
10:10pm dumb meme
10:32pm news clip
10:53pm news clip
12:43am announcing Hormuz blockade
2:35am article about Biden
2:36am article on naval blockade
2:37am article on [now former] Representative Eric Swalwell
2:37am posted the same article about Biden again
2:38am article on his ballroom
4:10am article on Iran
The person with the power to sic the Justice Department on
perceived political foes; to send masked, heavily armed, and poorly trained
troops out among the populace; and to order a nuclear attack is slipping. Maybe
fast.
Yes,
he’s always been like this. But many people think it’s worse now. Is it age? He
turns 80 in June; there are millions of compos mentis octogenarians out there,
but it’s fair to ask whether age is slowing Trump down, especially given the
way that he and his backers carried on relentlessly about Biden. Does he have
dementia? Or are we seeing more glaring manifestations of his legendary
arrogance, which is rooted in his profound insecurity? Or is it merely the
stupidity of a man who not only never reads a book but reportedly can’t even read one-page briefing
papers?
Whatever
the explanation, the bottom line is sobering: The person with the power to sic
the Justice Department on perceived political foes; to send masked, heavily
armed, and poorly trained troops out among the populace; and to order a nuclear
attack is slipping. Maybe fast. And the chance that his Cabinet or his party
will do anything about it is zero, which means we’re going to have to survive
two and a half more years of this.
1.
Age
“We Barely Talk About It”
In 2025,
as he began his second term, Trump was the oldest person ever to
be sworn into the presidency. But Trump’s oldness does not exist in a vacuum.
He is the successor to Joe Biden, a president who was forced to give up his reelection bid because of a disastrous debate
performance that led to his supporters deciding he was, at 81, too old to run
for president again.
Trump
is less than four years younger than Biden. During Biden’s presidency, Trump
and MAGA writ large were laser-focused on Biden’s age. Even the mainstream
media reported endlessly about Biden’s use of the back stairs in Air Force One, his bicycle tumble, his fall onstage at the Air Force Academy graduation in 2023, his name mix-ups (he once called Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El
Sisi the “president of Mexico”). The mainstream media was so obsessed with
Biden’s age that, according to Media Matters for America, The Wall
Street Journal published 41 articles in the first six months of 2024 on the topic. There
was even a book written by CNN’s Jake Tapper that alleged that there was a
cover-up about Biden’s age-related decline (which, essentially, there was).
Even Trump’s nonsensical musings about the autopen are in fact callbacks to
Biden’s term, when he was accused of being so addled that he couldn’t do the
work of the presidency, even including simply affixing his signature to
documents. In mid-April, Trump signed his name to a document and remarked, “Oh, that’s a good one. Look at that,
Joe. Do you think Biden can do that?”
SCREENSHOTS VIA @REALDONALDTRUMP/TRUTH SOCIAL (X7)
Donald
Trump is not a normal president; he is the most powerful president in modern
American history, or maybe all of our history, because of how he has used unitary executive theory and surrounded himself with a Cabinet filled with billionaire sycophants who largely got their jobs because of their
willingness to sign off on anything he wanted. Imagine a Cabinet of Mike
Johnsons but somehow richer and dumber. While Trump 1.0 featured the president
being held back by guardrails, Trump 2.0 feels like it’s lacking a working
frontal lobe: Ideas pop into Trump’s head, and he just executes them. He went
from bragging about being a peacemaker to stampeding Venezuela and starting an
impulsive, dumb, and possibly disastrous war with Iran. Take away that FIFA peace prize.
We
would be remiss not to mention Trump’s mystery hand bruise, which seems to
appear monthly and is coated in orange makeup that, like all the makeup Trump
wears, does not even come close to matching his skin tone. The White House’s
explanation is that he bruises easily because he pops aspirin like they’re Tic
Tacs, and because he shakes so many hands. And then there are the pictures of
Trump’s drooping lip, which sparked a flurry of speculation after a speech he
gave in Miami last November.
Maybe
it’s all nothing. But this is a guy who ran on being healthier and spryer than
the guy before him. He told us that Joe Biden was too old and too sick to be
president, but that he would be able to do the job because he had accomplished
certain feats: “The White House Doctors have just reported that I am in
‘PERFECT HEALTH,’ and that I ‘ACED (Meaning, was correct on 100% of the
questions asked!), for the third straight time, my Cognitive Examination,
something which no other President, or previous Vice President, was willing to
take,” he wrote in January on Truth Social.
Trump
shows his age the most in the apparently diminished functioning of his frontal
cortex—the thin layer of gray matter that helps the brain make decisions and
regulate itself, the part of the brain that prevents you from saying the unkind
or insane thing. Trump appears unable to hold himself back. He called a
reporter “piggy.” He called another a “fresh person.” He confuses Greenland (which he wanted to invade) with Iceland.
Graydon
Carter, a co-founder of the digital magazine Air
Mail, has been tracking Trump closely (and
mocking him mercilessly) since his halcyon days at Spy magazine
in the 1980s. Carter said the Donald Trump of now is not the same man who went
down that escalator 11 years ago. “He has gone from being the chatty, handsy
salesman at the office happy hour to the crazed, opinionated antiquity
shuffling the mail cart from cubicle to cubicle,” Carter said. His old Spy colleague
Kurt Andersen agreed: “When he became a recurring character in Spy, Trump
was an angry, needy ignoramus, liar, bully, and braggart more desperate for
attention than anyone I’d ever encountered. And a vulgarian with short fingers.
He’s the same—except in his forties he had impulse control in public, didn’t
ramble and forget and repeat himself or show other signs of mental illness.”
Trump
will turn 80 this June. He will be 82 when he leaves office, assuming he does,
so we will see what the future holds. He compares favorably to Biden in one
respect. Biden aged visibly before our eyes in ways that most of us associate
with watching our parents pass through that portal from their seventies, when
they can mostly still drive and golf and play tennis, into their eighties, when
those things start to be out of reach. Biden’s voice quieted. He held his mouth
agape in that old-man way. He hunched over just a little. Trump has none of
those issues, for now.
Vin
Gupta, the public health physician and MS NOW medical analyst, said he thought
Biden was a pretty healthy 80-year-old. “The guy bikes 30 miles in Rehoboth
Beach every weekend,” Gupta said. “From a cardiovascular standpoint, [Biden]
was way more robust than Trump,” who famously never exercises, unless you count
getting in and out of a golf cart. Yet Biden got run out of the race, “and with
Trump, we barely talk about it,” Gupta said.
That’s
largely because of the right-wing media. Do they even discuss his age on Fox
News? Sometimes—like when one Fox host cheerily picked up Trump’s claim that he’s “aging in reverse.” Trump will literally
have to be drooling and forgetting his own name before Fox and others will
acknowledge his age as an issue. And the same goes, of course, for Republicans
in Congress. That wall of denial will prevent Trump’s age from being an issue
until some point when it’s utterly impossible to deny.
2. Dementia
Disinhibition and Digression
In
early April, Mary Trump—who, in addition to considering her uncle to be a
danger to the country and the world is, remember, a clinical psychologist—took
note in two interviews of what she called “concerning changes” in her uncle’s
behavior. “Sometimes it does not seem like he’s oriented to time and
place,” she told New York magazine. “And on occasion, I do
see that deer-in-the-headlights look.” Donald’s father, Fred, she said, was
diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, but not till well into his eighties.
No
one can say, of course, whether Trump has dementia, an umbrella term for a
range of mental conditions, among which Alzheimer’s is the most notable. The
common visible symptoms, according to the website of the Alzheimer’s Association, include difficulty performing a number of tasks Trump
hasn’t had to perform in years or perhaps ever: paying bills, preparing meals,
remembering appointments. The symptoms listed on the Mayo Clinic website are, for present purposes, more on point: problems
communicating or finding words; issues with reasoning or problem-solving;
confusion and disorientation.
So:
Is the president demented? Harry Segal is a clinical psychologist at Cornell
University and a former co-host of the podcast Shrinking Trump. (His co-host was psychologist John Gartner, who in 2017
started an organization of mental health professionals, Duty to Warn, that
sought to caution Americans about Trump’s unfitness for office.) Shrinking
Trump ran for 70 episodes, from May 2024 until October 2025, when it
was stopped out of fear of being sued by the president. In an interview, Segal
was quick to note that he is not offering a clinical diagnosis of Trump. That,
he said, would be unethical. But it’s not unethical to comment on “behaviors so
striking that you would recommend an assessment for someone in your family who
demonstrated” them.
What
has he seen? Three concerning things. One: “He began to have odd quirks of
speech where he would begin a word or a phrase and seemingly lose his place,
slur, and end up with some kind of compromise word,” Segal said. This is
called phonemic paraphasia. It’s a possible sign of dementia (though it could have
other sources), and Trump has been doing it for a long time: He coined the
“word” “infantroopen,” for
example, back in 2019. The same year, he referred twice to the need to look into the “oranges” of the Robert
Mueller investigation. He finally carefully enunciated “origins” on the third
go.
Second,
Segal “began to notice the tangential digressions.” After the mainstream media
picked up on how aggressively random and disjointed his stump speeches had
become, Trump gave it a name, “The Weave,” and said it was all intentional. But
the claim was nonsense. The pattern has continued into his second
term—recently, for example, in a late-March Cabinet meeting about the war, when
he got lost in a five-minute digression on how much money he’d saved by using Sharpies to
sign legislation and executive orders.
The
third thing that caught Segal’s ear was that, on certain occasions, Trump said
or posted something really shocking even for him: “The outlandish things he’s
been saying when people died, right? Like Robert Mueller, I am glad he’s dead,
or Rob Reiner.” Maybe that’s just an older man losing patience with decorum,
Segal said; but “this feels a little bit more like dysregulation. Like, ‘I have
a wildly aggressive thought, I am just going to say it.’”
After
Trump’s crazed post on Easter Sunday, Vin Gupta made national headlines
by posting on X: “Erratic. Can’t finish sentences. Often confused.
Illogical train of thought. Word finding difficulties. Developing and worsening
gradually over time. The President is exhibiting all the signs of dementia.”
In
an interview, Gupta kept returning to the word “impulsivity.” Speaking the week
after Easter, he said: “I think his impulsivity and his erratic behavior, as
we’ve all seen just in the last two weeks, seems like it’s getting worse. Like
he just has less of a filter. Even at baseline, he had no filter. But it seems
like the disinhibition is worse. And when you think about the family history, I
think reasonable people can ask reasonable questions.”
Those
reasonable questions include, for example: Why does Trump so frequently boast
about acing cognitive tests? In January, Trump bragged that he’d nailed his third cognitive test, adding that the
tests were “something which no other President, or previous Vice President, was
willing to take.” That’s one way of putting it. Another way of thinking about
it, Gupta said, is that people are administered these tests on a repeat basis
only when concern about possible mental impairment exists. Said Gupta: “He’s
using it as a sort of a talking point to say, ‘Look how fit I am,’ and in
reality, that should tip off anybody.”
Finally,
these questions extend to Trump’s physical health, and the White House’s
opacity about it. Last fall, Trump went to Walter
Reed National Military Medical Center for an examination. The White House said
it was for an MRI. Trump later revealed it was a CT scan. Maybe not a big deal, but why the confusion? Over Easter
weekend, rumors flew across social media that Trump had been admitted to
Walter Reed. There’s been no confirmation of that, but the cartoonish White
House denials when such rumors swirl aren’t credible either. That weekend,
spokesman Steven Cheung posted about the president who doesn’t read briefing papers, is known to
pass his days watching hours of cable news, and has been caught napping in
meetings and at events: “There has never been a president who has worked harder
for the American people than President Trump. On this Easter weekend, he has
been working nonstop in the White House and Oval Office.”
3. Arrogance
Too Much and Never Enough
One
thing we know for sure Trump suffers from is his endless, embarrassing, proud,
and loud arrogance. It was an unforgettable and, at the time, shocking moment
in March 2016 when he was asked on Morning Joe whom he was speaking to on
foreign policy: “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very
good brain, and I’ve said a lot of things.”
That
turned out to be a little amuse-bouche that gave us all a small, early taste of
what life with Trump would be like. The constant and utterly unquenchable need
to be the center of attention. The ceaseless preening and boasting about very
average accomplishments. (How many times has he used the phrase “Nobody’s ever
seen anything like it”?) The confidence that long, long ago boiled over into
auto-infallibility.
It
would be one thing if this were just some tic of his that was dismissible. But
it has policy implications, which is to say, it affects all of us. Michael
Patrick Lynch is a humanities professor at the University of Connecticut whose
2019 book, The Know-It-All Society: Truth and
Arrogance in Political Culture, was more a critique of our social media outrage
culture than of Trump per se; nevertheless, Lynch said, Trump very much suits
the age of toxic argument, arrogance, and certainty. If you’re certain you’re
right, Lynch said, you have nothing to learn from anyone else, and you don’t
need to pay attention to evidence. “If you ignore evidence, if you ignore other
people’s experience, if you don’t think you have anything to learn, then you
are going to end up ignoring reality,” Lynch said. “And we know that’s a
central feature of Trump’s universe.”
The
thing about arrogance, or at least Trump’s version of it, is that it needs
constant feeding, a steady stream of new targets to dominate and conquer. At
first, he ran for president just as a vanity project, not expecting or even
really wanting to win. Then he won. Then, once he actually became president, he
needed to be the greatest ever, in his mind. “This is Donald Trump, hopefully
your favorite president of all time, better than Lincoln, better than
Washington,” he said in a December 2022 video introducing his “digital
trading cards.” In his first term, he needed to
dominate his enemies, but as many have observed, there were still some
guardrails around him. In the second, with the guardrails gone, he’s extended
his reach from the hated deep state to universities and law firms.
He
started to run out of domestic enemies, so it was only a matter of time before
he turned his gaze outward to the world. This is the precise reason why a
person had to be gullible in the extreme to believe him when he said he
wouldn’t be starting any wars. He had to start wars. His insatiable arrogance,
his grandiosity, made it inevitable. At some point, conquering the United
States would not be enough.
“What
I really believe is that Trump is struggling with a mix of grandiosity,
desperation, and old age,” said Tony Schwartz, who co-wrote Trump: The Art of the Deal (1987) and has
been doing penance ever since. “Nothing he’s ever accomplished has been
sufficient to overcome his lifelong experience of emptiness and fraudulence.
Now, in his final turn, he’s trying to take over the world. It’s only about
making himself feel more worthy. He couldn’t care less about the suffering and
destruction it causes.”
The
problem, though, is this. Once you’re the emperor of the world, at least in
your mind; once you’ve “toppled” the Iranian regime and “brought peace” to the
Middle East and brokered at least eight other peace deals—what’s next?
This
is the really dark and twisted side of Trump’s arrogance. He needs to be right
about everything because deep down, he knows that he knows nothing—about
history or economic policy or health care. He needs to dominate because deep
down, he’s massively insecure. He is contemptuous of everyone—his enemies, of
course, and “Sleepy Joe,” and radical left lunatics; but also of a lot of his
groveling supporters. (Do you think he has an ounce of respect for, say, Pam
Bondi or Ted Cruz?)
The more vulnerable he feels, the more arrogant he’ll
become—the more likely he’ll be to post about, oh, destroying an entire
civilization. He backed down from doing that. But remember—he has two and a
half years left.
But
in the end, Schwartz believes, “There is nobody he’s more contemptuous of than
himself.” The arrogance and grandiosity are a mask. That’s what makes the title
of Mary Trump’s 2020 book about her uncle so brilliant: Too Much and Never Enough. He always needs too much, and yet, it’s never enough for
him. And while this personality trait has always been there, and it stands
separate in many ways from his age or his possible mental deterioration, it’s
implicated in those things, too. The more vulnerable he feels, the more
arrogant he’ll become—the more likely he’ll be to post about, oh, destroying an
entire civilization. He backed down from doing that. But remember—he has two
and a half years left.
4. Stupidity
Every Accusation Is a Confession
In
November 2025, Trump berated a reporter for asking him why he blamed Biden
over an Afghan national who had shot two National Guard members near the
White House. “Because they let him in. Are you stupid? Are you a stupid person?
Because they came in on a plane, along with thousands of other people that
shouldn’t be here, and you’re just asking questions because you’re a stupid
person.”
This
was far from the only time Trump has called a reporter stupid, and it won’t be
the last. Trump is very much a known name-caller, and “stupid” is one of his favorite insults, though he also enjoys the
use of the phrase “low IQ.” The put-down is pretty rich because Trump has to be one
of the least intellectually curious people ever to occupy the Oval Office. But
despite this, the state of being stupid seems to be an obsession of Trump’s.
It’s the thing Trump calls people when he’s done with them. In April, Trump
posted that people who had been crucial to him (Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace
Owens, and Alex Jones) were “stupid people, they know it,
their families know it, and everyone else knows it, too! Look at their past,
look at their record.”
Here’s
why this is telling. For Trump, every accusation is a confession, and no
accusation of Trump’s seems more of a projection than this one. In 2019, his
former lawyer Michael D. Cohen testified before a House committee: “I’m talking about a man who
declares himself brilliant but directed me to threaten his high school, his
colleges, and the College Board to never release his grades or SAT scores.”
Certainly, grades aren’t the sole measure of intelligence, but Trump’s
obsession with hiding them speaks to a deep insecurity about his own
intelligence. A lot of famous people are more than comfortable being honest
about their own poor grades.
One
of Trump’s best tricks is his ability to obfuscate his gaffes. With the sheer volume of things he’s said, he’s created a
wall of sound, an endless stream of noise that comes at us like a firehorse,
one mistake drowned out by the mistake that follows like a Möbius strip of
misstatements and lies. But there have been moments when Trump’s stupidity has
broken through. One classic came during his first term, in April 2020,
when he gave a mind-blowing press conference that broke through the noise. At
the time, he was giving nightly press conferences with Covid-related updates.
And he said: “So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous—whether it’s
ultraviolet or just very powerful light.” He turned to Dr. Deborah Birx, the
White House coronavirus response coordinator, and said, “I
think you said that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it. And then
I said, supposing you brought the light inside of the body, which you can do
either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going
to test that too. Sounds interesting.”
Even
Trump’s staunchest defenders seemed flummoxed. After that presser, Trump took
to X to say it was “not worth the time & effort” to do the Covid pressers. It was one of those moments
when Trump’s own stupidity eclipsed the sun.
One
of the ways Trump tries to buttress his own intelligence is by bragging about
an uncle, John Trump, who taught at MIT. Trump claims that John was the
“longest-serving professor” at MIT. This is of course not true, but it’s closer
to the truth than a lot of the things Trump cooks up. Trump’s own insecurity
betrays his anxiety about his own intellect, which is certainly merited.
Aside
from age, possible mental deterioration, and unfathomable and unstable
arrogance, we must deal for another two and a half years with the fact that the
president of the United States just isn’t a smart man. The specific question
that concerns us here is: Which of his many bad decisions are explained mostly
by his stupidity?
The
answer? It’s not reassuring. It’s not, for example, his decision to start a war
with Iran. That’s explained mostly by his arrogance/insecurity: His need to
erase from the historical record anything positive Barack Obama did, in this
case the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which Iran was evidently
abiding by until Trump unilaterally pulled out of the deal in 2018. That deal
stands as the most striking example of something Trump had to destroy simply
because Obama did it. So that was about his arrogance and insecurity.
No—the
answer to the stupidity question, quite unfortunately for the American people,
concerns the one issue that most directly impacts most Americans: the economy.
Most notably, his commitment to tariffs.
Just
stop and ponder this: Trump sincerely appears to believe that tariffs can
eliminate the income tax. He has said this arguably more than he’s said
anything else in his second term, with respect to actual policy. It’s a
deranged fantasy. Before Trump, tariffs brought in about $80 billion in revenue. He has raised that to $264 billion—so, yes, it’s tripled! However, since the Supreme Court
ruled against Trump on tariffs, the U.S. government has to return at
least $160 billion of that money. And income taxes bring
in—ready?—about $2.7 trillion. It’s possible he knows this and chooses to ignore it. But
from the way he talks, it just seems like he doesn’t know it and doesn’t care
to know it. That’s not age or dementia or arrogance. It’s just stupidity. And
it isn’t going to change.
Conclusion
Two and a Half More Years of This?
There’s
been a lot of talk over the spring about the Twenty-Fifth Amendment option—removal of a sitting president, due to
incapacity, by the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet. But let’s be
real. This Cabinet of fatuous fawners is unlikely to do that. Trump would have
to do something we can’t imagine today—take his clothes off at a press
conference, bomb a U.S. city—for that to happen. Nobody is going to take
advantage of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.
The
Democrats are still favored to take back the House of Representatives, and they
will presumably impeach him over something. (It’s not like there aren’t a lot
of choices; as of late April, impeachtrumpagain.org suggests 27 different reasons.)
The Senate, however, won’t convict. Even if the Democrats take narrow control
of that body, 15 or so Republicans would have to join them to convict Trump of
the House charges. Not happening. Said the Lincoln
Project’s Stuart Stevens: “No one will stop
him. The only people who can stop Trump are Republicans. They’re not going to
stop him. They’re going to let him keep crashing and killing and destroying.”
So
in all likelihood, we’re stuck with him. What’s he got up his sleeve that he
hasn’t unleashed on the nation and the world yet? God only knows. ICE is still hiring like crazy. He’s still building immigrant detention camps. His acting attorney
general, Todd Blanche, reindicted James Comey days into the new role; Letitia James can’t be
far behind. FBI Director Kash Patel says arrests are coming relating to the 2020 election. He wants to take over Cuba. He still wants Greenland. He hasn’t played the
Insurrection Act card. He’s looking at ways to crack down on “domestic terrorists,” a catchall phrase if ever there was one. Said Miles
Taylor, the first-term Trump administration official who quit and joined the
opposition and now runs defiance.org: “The machine is going to spit out a bunch
of fucking prosecutions against these people. That is going to happen, hands
down, no doubt about it. There will be nonprofit groups and individuals that
are just protesters that are deemed domestic terrorists.”
And
there will be outbursts, and Truth Social posts, and accusations, and God knows
what else. Two years ago, a nervous nation watched a president who was no
longer up to performing the job. That president just couldn’t adequately fill
the office. Today, that nation is watching a president who may well destroy it.
Molly Jong-Fast is the author of How to Lose Your
Mother.
Michael Tomasky is the editor of The New Republic and
author of five nonfiction books. His new novel, Killing Baby Hitler, will
be published in June by O/R Books. With extensive experience as an
editor, columnist, progressive commentator, and special correspondent for
renowned publications such as The Guardian, The Washington Post, The
New York Times, the Daily Beast, and many others, Tomasky has been a
trusted voice in political journalism for more than three decades.
