President Trump meets with his Cabinet at the White House. Chip Somodevilla/Getty

In case you missed it, President Donald Trump fell asleep on television this week. There he was, in the middle of a meeting with the members of his Cabinet, completely set adrift on memory bliss as the pool cameras rolled, locked on his dozy face. Before you worry too much, rest assured that this wasn’t a meeting in which matters of national importance were discussed, but rather one of those now-regular occasions in which the president’s underlings gather to see who can offer him the most flamboyant praise. Still, it is rather worrying that not even these regular sessions of compliment bukkake can sustain the president’s waking interest.

Or, at least it should be worrying? I really hate to play the "age card," folks, but back in my day (2023 and 2024), I distinctly recall that a president with apparent mental infirmities was nigh unto scandalous. Biden’s famous struggles were a national catastrophe that led many journalists to come a-ridin’ atop their high horses to bother their readers about how they got caught flat-footed by the fact that President Joe Biden, nominated at the age of 77, somehow continued to age. Why had no one warned them? (Probably because the same media, back when this all didn’t seem to matter, ritually executed the one guy at the Democratic debates who did.)

For a press so dedicated to sanewashing the Trump administration’s open sewer of corruption, the kid gloves treatment still seems the order of the day. This week, The Atlantic’s Jonathan Lemire published a lengthy exegesis of the "President Trump is increasingly isolated" variety, titled "The Bubble-Wrapped President." In the piece, Lemire reports that Trump has "dramatically scaled back speeches, public events, and domestic travel compared with the first year of his initial term." He is described therein as "distracted," "out of touch," focused on matters not "high on voters’ minds," and showing "little willingness to acknowledge" problems gripping the country.   

The piece treats this mostly as some kind of inscrutable mystery, a story told by the thinking-face emoji. The real story is moving between the lines: The president is fully checked out because he’s old, enfeebled, and his brain is slowly turning into pasta e fagioli. The president moldering in a narcoleptic haze as Marco Rubio yammers away at his side is the same guy who doesn’t seem to remember why he pardoned former Honduran president and celebrated drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernández, or what part of his body was recently subjected to an MRI. 

There is plenty of room for the discourse to shift, however—and some evidence that it might. The New York Times treats the matter with somewhat less puzzlement than The Atlantic, noting Trump’s advanced age and planting a few red flags about his health; its piece garnered an outraged Truth Social post from Trump after publication. In one of the few articles to actually take on the matter of Trump’s obvious infirmity frontally, The Guardian’s Adam Gabbatt seems exasperated that a president who has obvious trouble "completing a thought" has "largely been saved the same examination" so regularly foisted on Biden.

If The Atlantic limits that examination to a single aside, in which Trump’s lack of acuity is likened to "the same low energy move for which [he] used to mock Joe Biden," the latter half of the piece does at least present a compelling reason why more attention to a fully noped-out chief executive might be a matter of some alarm: The vacuum Trump is leaving in the White House needs to be filled, and it’s being filled by "enablers" rather than people who might "[moderate] some of his more extreme impulses." Or, as someone less committed to euphemism euthanasia might put it, it’s being filled by utter ghouls: a Pentagon head who’s in over his head and spiraling out as he commits war crimes, a Health and Human Services secretary who’s bringing Lysenkoism back, an FBI director crashing out because no one brought him a cool jacket to wear—and all the rest hopped up on völkisch nationalism, pulling Black people out of their cars in Minneapolis and warring with Sabrina Carpenter.

In the days leading up to the 2024 presidential election, TNR’s Matt Ford tuned in to watch Trump’s campaign event at Madison Square Garden—a gritty reboot of the 1939 German-American Bund rally for fascism—and sounded an alarm about what the next Trump White House was going to look like. "The Madison Square Garden rally," Ford wrote, "showed how much of Trumpism is about satisfying the basest, crudest, and most hateful impulses in American life—and how much his acolytes can’t wait to wield the federal government to do it." The issue at hand is no longer one in which we worry there aren’t enough moderating figures in Trump’s life—it’s that all of the monsters Trump brought into his administration now have a free hand to run the country.

Those who served in Biden’s inner circle aren’t going to be remembered fondly, but no matter how enfeebled the president was, the country did not have the same problem we do now. The Biden White House wasn’t packed stem to stern with people dedicated to looting the country, terrorizing children, turning masked goons out onto the streets of American cities, or using the Department of Homeland Security’s social media presence to—as administration sources told Zeteo—"intentionally use popular music from vocally anti-Trump performing artists in order to trigger a negative response from a famous liberal and provide further amplification of neo-Confederate memes."

Y’all, it really seems like the president sliding sideways into the mud puddle of his few remaining faculties as his frantic acolytes rain down pain and duplicity on everyone is something of a big story. Or at least it used to be. Perhaps one day soon, it will be a matter worthy of attention again. Because the way things are going, I’m expecting him to either fall asleep or wander off during his next State of the Union address.

—Jason Linkins, deputy editor

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This week, Melissa Gira Grant dives down into Trump’s new asylum policy and finds that it’s at least honest in its bigotry. Grace Segers follows on with a report on the dire straits that Afghan refugees are in now that the Trump administration has announced a crackdown. Matt Ford explains how Costco wants a tariff refund—and why they’re suing to get it. Should we arrest Mark Zuckerberg? Why not, says Aaron Regunberg. Abdullah Shihipar and Brandon Marshall explore the way a populist approach might ameliorate the opioid crisis. And Matt Seligman looks back on the Georgia election interference case as Trump’s latest and greatest legal escape.

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