Trump Outrage Watch: Incontinent Incoherence Edition

There are now so many examples of Donald Trump’s apparent cognitive impairment that the issue can’t be avoided.

His rambling, often-incoherent speech to leaders of the McDonald’s restaurant firm on Nov. 17 is a vivid example, but far from the only one.

He was speaking about economics (claiming that the US was experiencing a “golden age” of falling prices, which 62% of voters reject), but suddenly shifted to a complaint about shower pressures: “[The Biden administration] had restrictions on water. It comes down from heaven, right? So you want to wash your hands. Or, like me, you want to wash your hair. I lather up and there’s no water. I won’t mention the third item in the bathroom because I always get criticized. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then you shouldn’t own a McDonald’s franchise.”

There were other non-sequitur riffs about renaming the Gulf of Mexico because, he said, the US has more gulf coastline than Mexico (actually, Mexico has about 100 miles more). He’s also repeatedly mixed up the names of people he ought to know: Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley, Viktor Orban as the leader of Turkey, Joe Biden and Barack Obama, Tim Cook as “Tim Apple.”

Journalists increasingly point out that Trump rambles, gets confused, sounds incoherent and goes wildly off script. Psychiatrists and neurologists say that while they haven’t examined Trump and can’t make definitive diagnoses, some of his behavior and speech patterns are “consistent” with dementia.

I was prepared to give Trump the benefit of the doubt as to his cognitive fitness—until last Wednesday, when a Marist poll came out showing that Democrats had a 14-point lead in voter preference for the 2026 elections. And Trump’s average job approval is 40% (vs. 57 disapproving), close to the worst showing of his second term, according to The Economist/YouGov survey.

But Trump claimed that, preparing for the midterm elections, two pollsters had told him that if George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were running for president and vice president against him on the same ticket, “I’d win by 25 points.”   If he believes that, he is demented. If he doesn’t believe it, then he thinks the public is.

That said, somebody in his administration is covering for him following the pasting Republicans took in off-year elections this month, advising public course-corrections on the Epstein files and other issues. Trump was adamantly against legislation ordering the files release until it was clear he’d lose in both the House and Senate. This after strong-arming one Republican congresswoman in the situation room in the basement of the White House. Then, saying he had nothing to hide, he urged Republicans to vote “yes. After Congress approved the bill all but unanimously, Trump claimed members were only following his lead.

But it remains to be seen whether Attorney Gen. Pam Bondi will actually release all the files. And whether Trump really wants her to. She has only said she will “follow the law.” The law that passed Congress stipulates that releases that “would jeopardize an active federal investigation” should not be disclosed.

Trump has ordered her to begin investigations on Epstein’s relations with prominent Democrats including Bill Clinton, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and mega donor Reid Hoffman, which might provide her with the out she needs. She claimed incoherently on TV this week that the DOJ investigation she had closed last summer had been reopened because “information, new information” had come to light. Uh-huh.         

Trump fought against the release so furiously—splitting with MAGA enthusiasts like Marjorie Taylor Green in the process—that Democrats expect he’ll torpedo the release process. The Justice Department likely has already scrubbed any compromising material on Trump (if it existed), but he may be trying to block any scandals involving prominent Republicans.

Course Corrections?

Trump course-corrected on tariffs this week, as realities of higher prices bite American consumers. He reduced tariffs on some food imports and proposed to give voters $2,000 “tariff dividends”—both steps constituting an admission that, as economists and Democrats have long maintained, tariffs raise prices for US consumers. The $2000 tariff rebate, though, is likely a non-starter with conservative Republicans alarmed by the country’s $38,000,000,000,000 (that’s “trillion) national debt.

In more fiscal jujitsu, he adopted the Democrats’ focus on “affordability,” promising once more to come up with a plan to lower health costs, echoing his repeated promises in his first term that the GOP’s “repeal and replace” healthcare plan would solve it forever. That plan was always “two weeks” away from unveiling, and never saw the light of day. Speaker Mike Johnson repeatedly said during the recent government shutdown that the Republicans’ health care plan was all ready for when the shutdown was over, but so far details have been… lacking?

In another backtrack, Trump changed his stance on talented-person immigration, asserting that the US “doesn’t have certain talents” and needs to admit more foreign experts, especially in semiconductor manufacturing. All good to say. However, he did not raise the limit on H1B visas issued annually (65,000 in total or 25,000 for holders of advanced degrees) and did not cancel or lower the $100,000 fee he imposed earlier this year for such visas (it had been $2,000 or $5,000 depending on the profession.) The new fee has discouraged foreign workers (especially Indians) from seeking jobs here while other countries are mounting major recruitment drives.

Trump’s flop angered some MAGA activists. And Vice President JD Vance said that the US should train up more US workers instead of importing foreign experts.

Impervious to Sinking Polls?

Trump did not heed polls showing that the public (by 52-39%) opposes ICE’s and Border Patrol’s aggressive dragnets. With 90% of ICE arrests targeting Latinos, Hispanic voters’ approval of Trump’s immigration policy is now net -38%, a 36% drop since 2024. His overall approval has dropped to -34%. It was -5 in March. Trump won 48% of the Latino vote in 2024, but in 2025, two-thirds of Latinos supported Democrats. Trump clearly is headed in the wrong direction, supporting continued brutal ICE and Border Patrol methods.

Trump canceled federal funding for public broadcasting, so he’s unlikely to be watching Ken Burns’s current program on the American Revolution, which quotes Thomas Paine as saying that “the strength of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resisting it.” Polls, election results and protest demonstrations all show that the Trump administration is being strongly resisted by American voters.

Then there’s the Comey Fiasco

Trump’s effort to punish his adversaries has flopped in its first major test, with the prosecution of former FBI director James Comey facing likely rejection by the courts. His designated prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, his former legal advisor on civil matters with no experience in criminal law, failed to show her final indictment of Comey to grand jurors for sign off, likely violating procedure. Trump’s prosecution of Comey is widely seen as a vindictive and personally motivated act — as largely documented by Trump’s very public commands that Bondi and DOJ pursue him.

And more…

• Trump is boasting about giving disaster aid to Red states while denying it to Blue states (like Washington). After last year’s November bomb-cyclone storm hit Western Washington, six counties applied to FEMA for $34 million in disaster relief. The requests have twice been denied, forcing public utilities across the region to hike rates to taxpayers to cover the costs.
• Redistricting Backfire: Trump has been trying to get GOP state legislatures to conduct mid-decade revisions of their Congressional district maps to increase the number of Republican House seats and preserve or enlarge the party’s slim majority. Texas promptly saluted, shifting five seats, which inspired California Gov. Gavin Newsom to sponsor an amendment to match Texas. But a federal district court has struck down the Texas map on grounds it was a “racial gerrymander” (though Samuel Alito stayed the district court decision Friday).
  
  The Trump Justice Department and California Republicans are challenging the CA map on the same grounds, but that case is unresolved. Meantime, GOP legislatures in Missouri and North Carolina passed new maps gaining one seat each. But GOP legislatures in Indiana, Kansas, Nebraska, South Carolina and Arkansas refused to adopt new maps. Democrats in Virginia and Maryland are planning new remaps that would pick up two seats, so if California’s map passes court muster, the Trump-launched redistricting strategy would have the reverse effect he had intended, shifting as many as 5 to 7 seats against his party.
• I [HEART] Dictators: Trump has continued to show an affinity for authoritarian rulers, the latest this week in an astonishing Oval Office comment in absolving Saudi leader Muhammad Bin Salman of responsibility for the butchering of US journalist Jamal Khashoggi (“things happen,” he said). Trump, whose family has extensive business dealings in Saudi Arabia, differed with US intelligence agencies on the point, much as he did in the case of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.
• But I Really Want You to have Ukraine: Trump has expressed “disappointment” that Putin refused to sign on to Trump’s various plans for ending Russia’s war with Ukraine and has accelerated drone and missile attacks on civilian targets in Kviv and other Ukrainian cities. But never say never. Trump has just proposed another plan highly favorable to Russia. It bars stationing of any foreign troops in Ukraine as a post-peace security guarantee, allows Russia to retain control of land it has captured in Eastern Ukraine and gives Russia sovereignty over Crimea. It cuts Ukraine’s armed forces by about half, to 600,000 troops, and Ukraine would have to amend its constitution to state that it would never join NATO. All sanctions imposed on Russia would be lifted.
  
  Ukraine opposes all these provisions but has agreed to hold talks with Russia and the US. In another sign of Trump’s pro-Russian stance, he’s cancelled the US program to track kidnapping of Ukrainian children into Russia. Still, Trump has agreed to allow Ukraine to fire missiles (Army Tactical Missile Systems) with a range of 186 miles, which Ukraine has used to attack Russian military and energy targets. But after hinting he might supply long-range Tomahawk missiles capable of hitting deep in Russia to push Russia toward talks, Trump has not delivered.
• War on the Caribbean Trump has been waging war on alleged “narco terrorists,” staging air strikes on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific that have killed more than 80 people. Trump has offered no proof that the boats are carrying drugs and is bypassing normal US procedures calling for suspect ships to be boarded and inspected by the Coast Guard. The Caribbean attacks are part of a broader Trump policy to depose Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, whom Trump has accused of being leader of a “foreign terrorist organization.” The US has deployed the US’s most-advanced and newest aircraft carrier Gerald Ford to the region, along with 15,000 troops and F-35 stealth aircraft. And Trump has confirmed he’s ordered the CIA to conduct covert operations in Venezuela. He refuses to rule out US military ground attacks on Venezuela. Public support for Trump’s airstrikes is below 30% and support for a US invasion is 21%
• And some Unhinged Death Threats: Finally, to bolster suspicions that Trump is cognitively impaired, he just declared that six Democratic members of Congress, including Sens. Mark Kelly and Elissa Slotkin (a former CIA analyst and National Security Council Official) were guilty of “seditious behavior” for shooting a video reminding US troop of their legal obligation to refuse to obey unlawful orders, evidently referring to National Guard deployment to US Cities and attacks in the Caribbean. On Truth Social, Trump erupted: “Each one of these traitors to our country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL…An example MUST BE SET. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR—punishable by DEATH!”