The State of the President

What I'm watching for tonight: Is Donald Trump ok?

Photo by Harold Mendoza on Unsplash

Tonight, Donald Trump will give the first major address to Congress (functionally if not technically a State of the Union address) of his second term. We’re just six weeks in, and this would be a very very very long newsletter if I rattled off every disastrous decision from this administration. But the list includes the gutting of the federal workforce, including firing people who do things like control our nuclear arsenal, maintain our national parks, alert the public about volcanic eruptions, and track the spread of deadly disease. It includes shuttering USAID, which is almost surely going to result in vast immiseration and death, especially of children (a very “pro-life” president we have here). It includes siding with Russia and its imperial ambitions, and abandoning not just Ukraine, and not even just Europe, but the broader post-World-War-II rules-based world order in favor of autocracy and a politics of domination. It includes economically devastating tariffs that have so far succeeded primarily in raising prices and lengthening America’s list of enemies. It includes getting rid of basic rules against corruption and bribery.

I imagine we’re going to hear about all of this, except refashioned into victories. The federal workforce cuts that are only making life worse in the US? Those will be remodeled as cost-cutting and fat-trimming. The tariffs? That’s standing up for the American worker. The abandoning of Ukraine and the kids we’re killing around the world? That’s putting America first.

We know what we’re going to hear. We know it’s going to be a lot of lies. And so the biggest thing I’m looking for at the kinda-sorta State of the Union: Is Trump still with it?

Donald Trump is 78 years old. Trump’s campaign speeches were rambling, angry, and often incoherent; he picked up a habit of playing DJ and dancing awkwardly around stage as even his die-hard fans filtered out. Now that he’s in power, it seems that his White House is being run by Elon Musk, who has gone from richest man in the world to most powerful and richest man in the world. Trump may be sitting behind the desk, but it’s the unelected and unaccountable Musk who seems to be pulling the levers.

There hasn’t been much coverage of Trump’s faculties because the political press has simply been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of insanity from this presidency. If the mantra of the Obama White House was “don’t do stupid shit,” the Trump White House abides by the war cry of “constantly do crazy shit.” This strategy — Stephen Miller’s “flood the zone” — lets this administration get away with a lot. It also covers up a lot. Like: How is the president doing, mentally and physically?

I am of the personal opinion that Donald Trump has a serious personality disorder that has nothing to do with his age. But during the campaign it has also seemed that age might be taking its toll on him: That he was slowing down mentally and physically; that he was often confused.

The end of Joe Biden’s presidency was marred by speculation about his cognitive health, and his legacy will carry the stain of the apparent cover-up of his decline. Trump, by contrast, seemed practically vivacious on the debate stage and on the campaign trail. But let’s be real: Trump is also a man showing his age. And if it mattered that Biden was a president in decline (and I believe it did), then it matters if Trump is, too.

One curse of the Biden administration’s basic functionality is that Biden’s age became the big story, because there simply wasn’t anything bigger to cover. Of course there were big stories and devastating decisions from the administration (ahem, Gaza), but no one was blowing up the government or chucking out the basics of democratic governance; there weren’t potentially democracy-ending or world-order-ending changes. And so the focus was on Biden’s acuity.

With Trump, it’s different, because the question of his cognition is far less urgent than the question of whether the United States government still exists, whether an unelected billionaire has access to vast reams of private data belonging to American citizens, or whether the US is going to push the remaining Palestinians out of what little homeland they have left and turn Gaza into a land of Kushner-owned casinos. I can see why “Trump seems cognitively impaired” is not, by comparison, front-page news.

But in a speech where he’s going to lay out a series of falsities about his administration’s acts, style matters as much as substance. He’ll be reading from a teleprompter. He’s had ample time to prepare. This should be an easy performance.

But this is also a man who seems to have Elon Musk and a team from the Heritage Foundation running his White House for him, and who sits back while JD Vance (who?) plays Capo with an actual leader. Sure, those around him are still trying to impress Trump and remain in his favor. But is he actually still in charge? Does he still have the capacity to lead? Those questions might not be answered by a single pre-prepared speech. But his performance tonight will be a window into his abilities, and those deserve a hard look.

xx Jill