Donald Trump Is too Old to Be President, Yet Every Day, Live on Camera, We Get the Daily Farce of Pretending This Is in Some Way Normal
We have pretended our way into a constitutional crisis. When your president can't explain the Declaration of Independence, you don’t have a presidency. & the silence of the Republican elite is complicity, not prudence. For we get multiples of this every day. Every. Single. Day. EVERY SINGLE DAY…
What happens when a president cannot follow a basic question, let alone a policy debate? We are watching it unfold, daily. And yet the machinery of media and politics continues pretending everything is fine. Donald Trump’s understanding of American governance is now as foggy as his syntax. That would be comic if it weren’t also lethal to democracy. This isn’t politics—it’s eldercare with nuclear codes.
Trump, three and a half months into his second term, is not leading. He is muttering vague absurdities—usually about bloodbaths and taking your medicine and all his enemies, yet occasionally about unity and love. And the people whose job it is to invoke the 25th Amendment... pretend not to notice. Instead, they commit, daily, the absurdity of pretending Trump is capable of and is actually exercising the office of President of the United States.
Every single day. Every single day. Every single day, we see new evidence—always humiliating, always alarming—that Donald Trump is not mentally capable of discharging the duties of the presidency. Yet the dominant political and media culture insists on maintaining the fiction that everything is still within the bounds of normal democratic governance.
When Trump, on national television, points to the Declaration of Independence and mutters about it being a “declaration of unity and love and respect,” we are not just witnessing confusion—we are witnessing profound cognitive decline. The Declaration is not about love. It is not about unity. It is not about respect. Jefferson and company had zero respect for King George III Hanover and his ministers. It is about revolt. It is about the severing of political bonds. It is about the violation of inalienable rights by those who control but do not love us.
The idea that Trump sees it as a feel-good sentiment is not an alternative interpretation—it’s a symptom. Yet his party rallies behind him. The press parses his word salad with straight faces, afraid or unwilling to confront the implications.
But let’s be brutally honest: Trump doesn’t know what he’s saying.
And he doesn’t care that he doesn’t know.
Nor does he trust anyone enough to delegate power.
What fills the vacuum is a swarm of advisors, staffers, and opportunists who act in his name without his input—“chaos monkeys” launching random policies and edicts that disrupt lives, markets, alliances.
And the Republican leaders? They watch in silence. John Thune and Mike Johnson have taken the path of least resistance—fearing the wrath of Trump’s base more than the collapse of coherent governance. It is, in effect, a collective political dereliction.
The truth is this: the emperor not only has no clothes—he is asleep at the wheel, mumbling to himself, while the car careens off the road. Every day this is normalized, we move further from democracy and closer to a regime of unaccountable power, steered not by policy, but by delusion and opportunism. The real president is the void at the center. The people who surround him—some loyalists, some grifters, some actual ideologues—wield power in his name. They contradict each other. They contradict reality. The result is a cacophony of dangerous randomness: financial markets react to rumors; foreign governments roll the dice on stability; and domestically, Americans are left without functioning leadership.
Maybe you could argue in his first term that the clownishness was strategic. That was never really true. But now it is totally false.
The clownishness is cognitive.
The president does not have the grade-school understanding of founding documents that we expect of anyone seeking citizenship.
Meanwhile, governance happens in his name—by people not elected, not vetted, and not even properly authorized. The results are predictably catastrophic: impulsive tariffs, foreign policy U-turns, regulatory whiplash, and deliberate cruelty disguised as policy.
This is the very scenario the 25th Amendment exists to address. But nobody invokes it. Because everyone is pretending. 3.5 months into the second Trump administration, and reduced to parsing his word salad for coherence like medieval theologians torturing and tormenting scripture.
Everything is broken.
Yet so many people pretend that this is not happening, for what I can only see as short-run highly-cynical careerist reasons:
John Gruber: Trump Has No Idea What the Declaration of Independence Means <https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/05/04/trump-declaration>: ‘Trump, showing off to ABC News’s Terry Moran the historical copy of the Declaration of Independence now hanging in the Oval Office:
Trump: “Of course, you have the Declaration of Independence.”
Moran: “What does it mean to you?”
Trump: “Well, it means exactly what it says. It’s a declaration. It’s a declaration of unity and love and respect. And it means a lot. And it’s something very special to our country.”
Watch the clip. A transcript doesn’t do justice to just how clear it is he has no idea what it means. I keep mentioning that Democrats should hammer, every day, the argument that Trump is way too old and now suffering from dementia. It’s just good politics. But I think it’s actually true, too. Mark my words, by the time he gets toward the end of this second term they’re going to have to somehow try to keep him away from microphones. You can’t get out of the fourth grade without being able to describe what the Declaration of Independence means…
The Declaration of Independence is not a declaration of love. It’s not really a declaration of unity. It’s…
Why go on?
We all know how somebody acts who is out of it—whose hearing aids are not turned on, or who is simply not following the conversation at all, and how they then filibuster in the way that Trump is doing here. They talk about what they want to talk about, and focus on their own hobbyhorses.
And yet sooooo many people continue to attempt to pretend that this is in some sense “normal”—as in Trump having any idea at all of what, say, Stephen Miran means with his (largely wrong) arguments that the U.S. would be better off on balance if the rest of the world were not to love but rather shy away from wanting to hold U.S. Treasury bonds.
And it is not as though the fact that he knows that he is not following the thread of the conversation has induced him to give anybody else the policy baton. Because to do that he would have to trust them. And he trusts nobody.
I mean, while it is true that “the emperor has no clothes” is a boring thing to say day after day, it is true and it does need to be said, every day. Does it not?