Donald Trump can no longer hide his cognitive decline

The president of the United States of America spent his entire day spiraling out of control for the entire world to see. From early this morning until late tonight, Donald Trump struggled to hold it together. As he moved through a packed schedule with a swearing-in ceremony, multiple flights, and a public appearance, he still found time to share a stream of increasingly disturbing social media posts, including a fake video of himself throwing Stephen Colbert into a dumpster where his body appeared lifeless, alongside yet another threat directed at Greenland. And in between those increasingly erratic posts, he spoke at a political rally where he seemed increasingly unable to stay on message, remain focused, or even complete a coherent train of thought for more than a few seconds at a time.

At one point, even declaring himself “the smartest guy you will ever meet,” before immediately bouncing from one intrusive thought to the next while rambling about a conversation he supposedly had with a physician. “Doctor, I don’t mind being called a brilliant, total tyrant dictator, but I don’t want to be called dumb. What do I do, doctor? Is there some kind of a test I can take?” The rest of the day was just as concerning.

He once again brought up the cognitive test. Standing in front of his most loyal supporters, he launched into a long, winding story about a conversation he says he had with his doctor. The whole thing started, in his telling, with the names people have called him. A genius. A brilliant, vicious dictator who wanted to take over the world. And then, he said, “they hit me with a bad one. He’s a dumb person.” He paused on the spelling, “Dum, not the B,” and then, as if it were a fact worth sharing, “Most people don’t know it has a B.” That was the one that got to him. Because here is the line he keeps returning to, the one that tells you exactly what wounds him: “I don’t mind being called a brilliant, total tyrant dictator, but I don’t want to be called dumb.”

This was the president of the United States of America publicly stating that being called a tyrant does not bother him. Being called a dictator does not bother him. Being called dumb does.

From there, it only got stranger. He explained that he asked his doctor for a test, and that the doctor warned him it would be public, because it would be done at Walter Reed, a military hospital, in front of five doctors, and that he could fail. “It’ll be an embarrassment,” he said, “but let’s do it.” He described the questions. The first one, he said, was this: “You have a bear, a snake, an elephant, and a horse. Name the horse. That’s the horse.” That was the question he was proud of. That he could pick out a horse. But something else that I keep coming back to is that this story continues to evolve every time he tells it. Because the real test uses the same three animals every time, a lion, a rhinoceros, and a camel, but every time he tells this story, the animals seem to change, and so do the circumstances around it.

And then he claimed the hard questions came later, and acted out a math problem for the crowd, “pick a number, sir, any number, okay, 203, multiply times 9, divide by two, add on 1324, subtract 1292, multiply it out one more time by 19, what’s the answer, sir,” and announced, “And I got it right.” He said one of the doctors told him he had been giving the test for twenty years and had never seen anyone ace it. He said he has now taken it three times and aced all of them.

Every single time he goes off the rails on how cognitively elite he is, we all see the severe deficiency he is facing. The more he attempts to cover it up with these sordid takes, the deeper he digs himself into one of the largest cover-ups of our lifetimes. We can leave the diagnosis to the medical profession, but these ups and downs, the paranoia, the lies, and the overcompensation we keep seeing with him are not normal. They are deeply troubling.

He continued to stand in front of the crowd and spent several more minutes insisting on his own sharpness, repeating the same lines, stories, propaganda, and lies over and over, like a recording that keeps catching on the same scratch.

And then there was the barrage of posts he unleashed on Truth Social throughout the day, flooding his profile with increasingly bizarre and unsettling images. And maybe the hardest part about seeing what he was sharing was accepting that the person posting such garbage holds such enormous power over the entire planet. He shared a fake video of himself shoving Stephen Colbert into a dumpster, leaving his body limp after the assault. He posted a photo of himself in a USA hat, looking exhausted and visibly unwell, awkwardly waving at no one. He posted an image of a glowing golden dome over the White House, casting himself as some kind of strongman ruler, sealing himself inside a fortress of light, leaving the rest of us, and the country to be attacked by circling drones.

Then came another post aimed at Greenland. “Hello, Greenland!” he wrote over an image of his own face looming above a Greenlandic town, still publicly fantasizing about taking an ally’s land by force after its people and leaders have repeatedly and unequivocally told him it is not for sale.

And then, in the early afternoon, came one of the strangest posts of all. Trump announced in a written statement that he would not be attending his own son’s wedding. “Circumstances pertaining to Government,” he wrote, explaining that he believed it was important to remain at the White House “during this important period of time.”

Donald Trump not attending his own son’s wedding is not as shocking as it would be for just about anyone else on the planet. He does not like being upstaged, and this is one of the rare moments in his life where the attention would not fully belong to him. But that may not be the real reason he decided to stay behind. Because Trump also canceled his weekend golf trip to New Jersey and will instead remain in Washington. Axios reported that he gathered his senior national security team on Friday morning and is seriously considering launching new strikes against Iran unless there is a last minute breakthrough in talks. CBS separately reported that military and national security officials canceled their Memorial Day weekend plans while awaiting further orders.

And when I hear that the president of the United States has skipped his own son’s wedding to remain inside the White House over a holiday weekend, while the people responsible for managing wars are quietly canceling their plans too, I do not assume anyone is preparing for a peaceful few days. It does not mean anything is going to happen. But we know how he operates. We know the way he reaches for force when he feels small and cornered, and that is exactly how he has been feeling.

And this is the part that should concern every single one of us, regardless of how we feel about any one threat he makes. This week, Reuters published an investigation into the unraveling of American diplomacy under this president. In it, a European diplomat described what happened in April, when Trump posted that “a whole civilization will die tonight.” His government needed an urgent answer to one terrifying question: was the President of the United States talking about using a nuclear weapon? They feared, the diplomat said, that Russia might seize the moment to make the same kind of threat over Ukraine, and that the world could end up facing a nuclear crisis on two fronts at once. So they did what allies have always done. They went to the State Department for reassurance. And according to that diplomat, the officials there told them they did not know what he meant, or what his words might lead to.

The people whose entire job is to stand between a reckless sentence and a catastrophe could not tell one of our oldest allies what their own president meant. That is what a hollowed-out government looks like. It is not only the cruelty we can see. It is the complete incompetence and dangerous impulsivity that comes when a government is no longer being run by serious people, but by loyalists, propagandists, and exhausted staff members constantly trying to interpret the moods and impulses of one unstable man.

And in the middle of all of this chaos, Tulsi Gabbard resigned today. She turned in her resignation as Director of National Intelligence, saying she needs to step away to care for her husband, who has been diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer. Her last day will be June 30. She is the fourth cabinet official to leave this administration, and all four have been women. As a human being, I hope her husband recovers. I hope his suffering eases and that he comes through this. Not because I think she or her family has stood on the right side of history, but because that is a line we can not cross. I want everyone around this president healthy, whole, and present, because there are depths we can never let ourselves go to to protect our own humanity, and also so that one day they can answer for what they have done to this country. So I wish him well, and I mean it.

I also wonder if maybe Tulsi saw what was coming. Maybe a painful, private moment arrived at the same time as a chance to step off a sinking ship, and she took it. We have to imagine that someone who sat where she sat and saw what she saw understood how this story is likely to end. People have been asking for months whether she would last. Now she is gone, and the timing speaks for itself.

Nothing that happened today is surprising anymore. Nothing shocks us now. Living in the United States with Donald Trump as president is a special kind of hell, a constant psychological exhaustion where every day feels like waking up inside another manufactured crisis, another spectacle that somehow manages to be both absurd and deeply dangerous at the same time. And regardless of the fact that we didn’t vote for him, this is still our reality to contend with.

But on days like this, especially when he is once again threatening allies like Greenland while openly behaving in ways that would alarm anyone if they were not desensitized by years of chaos, I keep thinking about the people watching all of this from outside our borders. I think about how harmful this is to the rest of the world. About how unstable America is. About what it feels like to wake up every morning in another country and realize that such a powerful nation is being led by a man publicly spiraling in front of the cameras while still controlling the machinery of war, intelligence, trade, and global security.

I think about those I met during my years of traveling, the people who taught me how to see beyond the bubble of American exceptionalism. And the truth is, you do not even have to leave this country to step outside of that bubble. Plenty of people do it simply by educating themselves, by reading historians, social scientists, economists, and people who understand the world beyond our own reflection. But traveling changed me because it forced me to confront the reality that the rest of the world lives with the consequences of American decisions, too, often without ever getting a vote in them.

I keep thinking about a conversation I had in London with a cab driver, who told me they were only just beginning to recover from the Great Recession, which started here and rippled outward until it reached their doorstep. They were finally getting back on their feet years after most of us had. That conversation has stayed with me because I know what happens here never really stays here. Economic collapse spreads the same way viruses do. It moves across borders, through markets, governments, supply chains, and households thousands of miles away from the people responsible for causing it. When America destabilizes itself, the consequences do not stop at our shores. The rest of the world ends up carrying the weight, too.

To everyone reading this from somewhere else in the world, we see you. We know what this is doing to you. We know about the rising fuel prices. We know about the destabilization, the way the ground feels less solid when our country is being run by a madman who posts threats in the afternoon and skips his own son’s wedding. We will always wonder whether we could have done more to stop this. I think that is a question all of us here will have to sit with for a long time. Please don’t wait for us to change, but please don’t give up on us either, because we will turn this around and spend the decades it takes to make it right.

Tonight I am working through frustration and anger. None of this should be happening, and there is no quick fix. So I’m surviving this moment by focusing locally. The warm months are upon us, and that matters more than it sounds. We can be outside more now. We can gather together. We can be there for each other. We can hold the door for a stranger, bring back the small, ordinary humanity that this moment keeps trying to steal from us, because that is the thing they can never take, and it is exactly what we are fighting to protect.

Then let’s get to work. Join a local organization. Find your local Democratic group, independent voter group, or grassroots coalition. Volunteer for the people you believe in, and if you can afford it, donate to them too. Once the primaries are over and we know who our candidates are, get behind them with your time, your energy, and your money.

The way you have shown up for independent media, for writers like me, through paid subscriptions, is that same spirit, and I cannot thank you enough for it. You are the reason I can write this every single night. That kind of support is its own act of resistance. It keeps voices alive that they would rather drown out. And right now, we need to focus that same energy and support close to home, too. These midterms will be decided district by district, state by state. This is about what is happening in our own communities and on our own streets. Once we get through this, we take the fight national again. We will have two years to build toward the next presidential election, and we are going to do it the right way this time. But right now, we must continue to protect the First Amendment and the people still willing to speak the truth. Protect free and fair elections. And support the candidates who will help lead us out of this corruption racket and begin rebuilding what they have tried so hard to break.

We already have all the tools we need to push back against this authoritarian regime. Most importantly, each other. We are not alone in our resistance. People around the country are doing their part to stop Trump’s corruption. Including the growing wave of legal challenges to Trump’s 1.776 billion dollar fund. More than one lawsuit has now been filed seeking to block the fund entirely, to stop a single dollar from going out the door, with plaintiffs arguing it is unconstitutional and was never authorized by anyone other than Trump and his administration. And there will likely be more suits, more plaintiffs, and more people stepping forward to take up this fight in the one place Trump cannot as easily bully, threaten, or post his way out of, the courts. There is no certainty that this corruption fund will be stopped, but more people are looking at what is happening and deciding not to let it pass quietly.

Evil regimes often end when enough people come together and refuse to surrender to them. Not usually through one dramatic knockout blow, but through ordinary people refusing to look away all at once, with courts holding the line, with communities taking care of one another, with journalists continuing to report the truth, with neighbors organizing, voting, protesting, and pushing back together until the collective weight of all of us becomes something the regime can no longer silence, outrun, or survive.

We are getting closer to that moment every single day. And for us, it may very well come through the largest midterm turnout this country has ever seen. Through millions of exhausted, angry, frightened, determined Americans deciding they have had enough of the chaos, the corruption, the cruelty, and the constant humiliation of watching our country be hollowed out. Authoritarian movements survive by convincing people that resistance is useless, that the outcome is already decided, that ordinary people are powerless against systems this large. History says otherwise. History says regimes begin to crack the moment enough people stop complying with the lie that they are unstoppable. And we are unstoppable. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather

PS. You can make a significant difference right now by subscribing to my Substack. Your support helps me cover more ground and keep telling the truth about the lies and destruction unfolding in this country.

This commentary represents my personal opinions and analysis of matters of public concern, informed by publicly available information. Any references to individuals constitute opinion and commentary protected under the First Amendment.

Picture of the day: As I was watching the ocean, I just kept thinking about the normalcy of life that Trump has stolen. The better days for everyone we were working towards before he dragged us back into darker times. I know we will get there again. Better than before. We just have to keep going.

Sources:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/05/22/trump-tulsi-gabbard-director-national-intelligence-iran/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/tulsi-gabbard-resigns-as-trumps-national-intelligence-director

https://abc7.com/post/tulsi-gabbard-is-resigning-director-national-intelligence/19151118/

https://www.reuters.com/investigations/inside-unraveling-us-diplomacy-under-trump-2026-05-21/

https://www.durangoherald.com/articles/trump-heads-to-a-competitive-new-york-district-to-sell-his-tax-law-as-voters-sour-on-the-economy/

https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-reveals-the-one-insult-he-hates-most/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dismissals_and_resignations_in_the_second_Trump_administration