Is the president OK?
I asked that question on TV this week. Not as a throwaway line or a partisan jab, but as a serious question about the capacity of the person holding the most powerful office in the world.
Since Donald Trump announced his first campaign for the White House in 2015, critics have wondered about his frequent digressions, anecdotes that never happened and seemingly dwindling vocabulary.
But in his second term, especially over the past few weeks, Trump has seemed more erratic than ever, making bizarre claims and accusations about the Iran war on social media and ratcheting up his already inflammatory rhetoric.
Americans are noticing. Only about one-fourth of Americans said Trump was even-tempered in a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll. Fifty-eight percent said the words “mentally sharp” did not describe the president very well or at all, while roughly half said his mental sharpness has gotten worse over the past year.
This not a question about the president’s policies or even his character. It’s about his basic ability to do the job he holds.
The past few days were not an outlier. As I’ve noted, Trump has always been erratic. But what’s changed is the system around him.
For years,“sanewashing” has helped normalize Trump’s words and actions.
For years, there was a quiet practice in Washington and in the press of “sanewashing” that helped normalize Trump’s words and actions that were often anything but normal. That is how a meandering speech at a political rally becomes “unconventional,” while unhinged threats at his perceived enemies become “hard-line negotiating tactics.”
Privately, even some Republicans will acknowledge that the president’s behavior is not right. But publicly, they either deny having seen it or explain it away, granting him a benefit of the doubt that stretches further and further.
But the behavior has become too blatant to ignore. Over the past month alone, the president threatened to destroy Iranian “civilization,” called on Iran to open the “f—in’ Strait” of Hormuz and mockingly wrote “Praise be to Allah” in a social media post, attacked the pope and posted an AI image of himself as Jesus, among other things.
The gap between the image that Republicans present of their leader and what the public can see for itself has grown too big. And once that trust collapses, voters start to wonder about everything else they’ve been told.
Even more appalling is that the party defending this spent four years questioning President Joe Biden’s fitness. There’s a clear double standard here. Had Biden done a fraction of this, the reaction would have been swift and unforgiving.
Republicans said Biden was tired and old. They questioned his stamina as entire news cycles were built around whether he had the energy for the job. But nobody argued that he was going to take the country to war on an impulse.
That is the difference. What we are seeing now is not about age — it’s about instability.
When I asked former Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill if she believed the president was OK, her answer was unequivocal: “Hell no.” That’s not just hyperbole. It’s a serious concern about whether the person at the center of American power is exercising it with consistency and discipline.
So if what we are seeing is a president who has lost a step, whose erratic behavior is worsening, whose judgment appears inconsistent, then the question is unavoidable. Is he making these decisions himself? Is he fully aware of the consequences? Or is someone else stepping in, shaping outcomes and exercising power in his place?
Either way, the American people deserve an answer.
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Symone D. Sanders Townsend is an author and a co-host of "The Weeknight."