Our Unwell President Pt. 529,046

President Trump is increasingly erratic and clueless about the actions of his administration ... and, seemingly, no one wants to talk about it.

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Last week, for MSNBC, I wrote about Donald Trump’s worsening cognitive decline.

During an energy and technology summit in Pittsburgh, Trump claimed that his uncle John Trump, a former professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, taught the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. “My uncle was at MIT, one of the great professors,” Trump said. “Fifty-one years, whatever. Longest-serving professor in the history of MIT. Three degrees in nuclear, chemical and math. That’s a smart man.”

Though Trump has claimed for years that his deceased uncle is the longest-serving professor at MIT, it’s not true, and it has been repeatedly debunked. But Trump was only getting started. Kaczynski was one of his uncle’s students, Trump said. He then asked the audience, “Do you know who Kaczynski was?” and cryptically noted, “There’s very little difference between a madman and a genius.”

According to the president, he once had a conversation with John Trump about Kaczynski: “What kind of a student was he, Uncle John?’ Dr. John Trump,” Trump asked. “He said, ‘What kind of a student? ‘Man,’ he said, ‘seriously good. ... He’d go around correcting everybody.’ But it didn’t work out too well for him.”

The thing about this story is that it’s not even remotely true.

• First, Kaczynski attended Harvard, not MIT, and while some students cross-enrolled on occasion, Kaczynski did not.

• Second, John Trump passed away in 1985. Kaczynski was arrested in 1996 and sentenced to life in prison in 1998. If both the president and his uncle knew that Kaczynski was the Unabomber more than a decade before his arrest ... now that would be a story!

The real scandal here, however, is how little attention this story has received. Back in the Spring, Axios reporter Alex Thompson received the Aldo Beckman Award for Overall Excellence at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in recognition of his “aggressive reporting on President Biden,” which “revealed the President’s cognitive decline was impacting his ability to do his job, information the White House tried to conceal.”

Where’s the aggressive reporting on Trump’s cognitive decline?

As I noted in the MSNBC piece, this month alone, Trump has:

• Denigrated and attacked Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and even told reporters, “I was surprised he was appointed.” Trump appointed Powell as Fed Chairman.

• For at least the fifth or sixth time in his presidency, Trump said national gas prices had fallen below $2. In fact, they’ve never been below $3 since Trump took office.

• The day before the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill, he told House Republicans that it shouldn’t cut Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. According to three sources at the meeting, one GOP member had to tell Trump, “But we’re touching Medicaid in this bill.”

• Trump was unaware that his administration had paused military aid shipments to Ukraine and even went so far as to ask a reporter if she knew who had ordered the pause.

When Thompson received his prestigious award in April, he told the assembled reporters, “President Biden’s decline and its cover-up by the people around him is a reminder that every White House, regardless of party, is capable of deception. But being truth-tellers also means telling the truth about ourselves. We, I included, missed a lot of this story, and some people trust us less because of it. We bear some responsibility for faith in the media being at such lows.”

I’m dubious that Biden was experiencing significant cognitive decline or that there was an orchestrated White House cover-up. Still, I never thought it was unreasonable for the media to cover the story (and as I’ve said many times, Biden’s age and the indications — both physical and mental — that he was struggling with age-related issues were more than fair game). But if Thompson is going to argue that the media dropped the ball by not giving the Biden story greater coverage … then how does one explain the lack of coverage regarding Trump’s worsening mental state?

Speaking of deception, which Thompson accused the Biden White House of engaging in regarding his “cognitive decline,” when a reporter recently asked White House Press Secretary Katherine Leavitt about Trump’s Unamomber story, she admonished him. “With so many issues going on in the world,” said Leavitt, “I’m a little bit surprised you would ask such a question.” Leavitt’s response may not be deception, but it’s certainly deflection, even possibly a cover-up. Seems worthy of further media inquiry.

Some reporters will tell you Trump always lies, so none of this is new. There is obviously some truth to that, but in the past, Trump’s lies usually had some tortured relationship to reality. His recent Unabomber story is entirely fabricated. In general, the “Trump always lies” mantra has become a convenient excuse for devoting far too little attention to his pathological dishonesty. But what about the increasing evidence that Trump is unable to carry out his responsibilities as president?

One line often heard from Thompson, his co-author Jake Tapper, and other Biden health truthers is that the reason they have spent so much time on this issue is because Biden’s alleged cognitive decline could have impacted presidential decision-making. Never mind that this was always the weak link in that story, since there was little hard evidence that Biden faltered in his ability to do the job of president. However, we now have a growing body of information suggesting that Trump is unaware of what’s happening in his administration. He doesn’t seem to know what’s in his big tax bill. He ran around claiming that the bill cut Social Security taxes, when in fact it did not. He was unaware that military aid to Ukraine was paused. And as I wrote a few months ago, he seemed completely unaware that the Supreme Court had unanimously ruled against him in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that Trump is disconnected from reality and may not be capable of doing his job as president.

So my question is, where are the truth-tellers now?