The Friday Brief: May 23, 2025

Inside:

• The President In His Labyrinth: Trump’s Ugly, Public Decline

• The Big, Bad Bill

• Bond Market Jitters

• Can You Feel The Freedumb?

• The Flynn Matter is Finally, Completely Over

• The War On Harvard

• Perfect Irony

• Elon, RIP

• World Goth Day

• What I’m Reading

• Scenes From the Home Front
  

  

The Big Picture

The President In His Labyrinth: Trump’s Ugly, Public Decline

Let’s just say it out loud, shall we?

Donald Trump is not well.

Not metaphorically, politically, spiritually, or otherwise. He is clinically, cognitively, and mentally quite unmistakably not well.

The media have danced around it for years. They’ve called it "erratic." They’ve called it "eccentric." Some bootlickers even tried to sell it as “strategic chaos.” But at this point, it’s not chaos. It’s not a strategy. It’s an overt, visible, evident decline. My friend George Conway was a first mover on this point, and he’s been flagging it since the start.

Trump’s brain is melting in real time. And the media, the Republican Party, and even his staff are all working overtime to paper over the obvious by quietly removing every single transcript of his public appearances from the White House website.

Wonder why? Because when Grandpa Adderall gets in front of a microphone now, what spills out isn’t policy or even propaganda. It’s a verbal gumbo of slurred nonsense, fractured timelines, and fever-dream dementia word salad.

Remember when Trump’s “crazy” was crazy like a fox?

When he’d mangle the language on purpose, just enough to make his base feel like they were in on the joke? “Covefve.” That ship sailed, crashed into a sandbar, exploded, and sank. These days, he’s confusing Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi, calling Joe Biden “Obama,” and raving about Biden having “Stage 9” cancer. He’s regurgitating stories from the Before Times like a janky cassette tape found under the passenger seat of a 1979 Chevy Nova.

This isn't showmanship. It’s cognitive deterioration.

He’s not sharp anymore. He’s not intimidating. Hell, he’s not even coherent. His famous venom—once a politically effective, if grotesque, weapon—is now increasingly a low-energy mumble that wanders off before it finds a target. Even the cruelty has brain fog.