Quit “sane-washing” Donald Trump

Donald Trump lost it again Wednesday. Perhaps he never had it. He certainly can’t find it. But MAGA supporters shouldn’t worry. Trump losing his mind may be his best defense yet for the gathering political storm that is Hurricane Jeff. 

By Wednesday night, after congressional Democrats released some of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails, the world knew the president had “spent hours” with an Epstein victim at the convicted sex offender’s home. Presidential Pep Secretary Karoline Leavitt publicly identified the victim as the late Virginia Giuffre and accused Democrats of a politically motivated smear campaign. Giuffre, who died by suicide earlier this year at her home in Australia, was allegedly recruited by Epstein’s accomplice and convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell while employed as a spa attendant at the Mar-a-Lago Club in 2000.

In July, Trump said Epstein “stole people that worked for me,” and a day later he said Giuffre was one of the employees the financier “stole.” Maybe he did know the real Epstein.

Of course Epstein knew the real Trump too. In a 2017 email, Epstein said he knew some “very bad people…none as bad as Trump,” who didn’t have “one decent cell in his body.” Epstein called him “borderline insane.”

On Wednesday, Trump responded on Truth Social that Democrats were bringing up the “Jeffrey Epstein Hoax” again because — wait for it — they caved on the government shutdown. According to the president, it had nothing to do with his relationship to an alleged sex trafficker or any underage female victims. It was just another precision political hit conducted by the evil Democrats. 

“He promised to release the files. Now he’s upset someone is starting to leak the information,” a source close to Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., explained to me. Others said it’s what you’d expect from a man “no longer able to read the room.” Another indicated the president is mentally unaware of his surroundings.

It’s funny watching people come to the conclusion that Trump appears diminished. At the end of his first administration, I noticed him slipping and I thought I was late to the game. In July 2020 I wrote, “Evidence points to major concerns about Trump’s cognitive abilities, in addition to ongoing concerns about his ability to tell the truth, leading to the inevitable question: How screwed is this country if Trump is reelected?”

Along with others, I noticed his unsteady gait. The president’s hands were shaking at times. He often seemed listless, tired. Sometimes he babbled like a cicada. Now, five years later, it’s so bad even Trump’s fans are grasping the obvious: Trump II is not Trump I. 

Pep Secretary Leavitt addressed that fact Wednesday during her weekly appearance in the Brady Briefing Room. With the precision of a trained seal, she accused Democrats of victimizing the president before pivoting to praise Trump when asked about his recent trip to Washington’s Walter Reed Hospital for an MRI. Never fear, she said. The doctors, “all agreed that President Trump remains in exceptional physical health, which you will all see with your own eyes.”

She never mentioned a word about his mental health. She literally turned and left us hanging.

We have seen the president’s physical and mental decline with our own eyes, and it seems to be going from bad to worse at an increasing pace. Trump’s speeches often don’t make sense. He seems to nod off in public meetings, and afterward, his staff denies it happened. At a recent Oval Office event, he appeared to fall asleep intermittently for almost 20 minutes until a guest passed out and hit the floor. Sometimes it’s noon before we see the Marine Guard outside the Oval Office indicating he’s at work. In his remarks, he hangs on the word “uh” far too long and often. The American public deserves to know the state of the president’s health before we see Jake Tapper pushing his new book, “I Knew It Before Anyone Else!” — a tome outlining how everybody but Tapper missed the warning signs. 

Everything Trump does is seemingly the result of an extremely unhealthy combination of greed, fear and mental aging. Earlier this week, if you waded through the denture and chewing tobacco ads on Truth Social, you would have found this little gem from Trump about the “Miracle Mile” Shopping Center in Chicago — a place that doesn’t even exist. (He most likely meant the Magnificent Mile, and it’s a shopping district.) He claimed it “now has a more than 28% vacancy factor, and is ready to call it quits unless something is done about the murder and crime, which is prevalent throughout the City. CALL IN THE TROOPS, FAST, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE! ‘Just the News.’”

Yes, call in the military to attack a fictional shopping center. That sounds sane.

What kind of convincing do you need? How about the funniest example. Last Sunday on Truth Social, Trump posted an image with one word — “Wow!” — as a comment to a post that former President Barack Obama had been collecting millions in taxpayer dollars from “royalties linked to Obamacare.” The funny part? It was a satirical post attributed to the “Dunning-Kruger Times.” That’s a reference to the Dunning-Kruger effect — you know, the tendency of those willfully or unalterably ignorant to vastly overestimate their abilities and/or intelligence. 

If the president isn’t napping in the Oval Office during a public meeting — or if his guests aren’t passing out while he stands awkwardly nearby — then Trump is increasingly incoherent when he actually speaks. I’m tired of trying to guess what he is saying, and I know a few others in the White House press pool who feel the same way. 

Try to make sense of this gibberish from a recent appearance at the American Business Forum on Nov. 7. “For generations,” he said, “Miami has been a haven for those fleeing communist tyranny in South Africa.” Later he corrected himself to say South America, which isn’t a country but a continent. South Africa has never been a communist country — but there was apartheid and Elon Musk.

Then Trump insulted New York, but said the city was good when he came to Washington — and then someone got their hair done “very expensively” and is now teaching at Harvard. 

There was also this tangent during his speech to military leaders at Quantico on Sept. 30: “. . . That you couldn’t get people to join the armed forces, and by the way, the police also, fire department, and I always put the fire department because they’re great. They’re great. And I got 95% of their vote…and they’re great in our inner cities. It’s a big part of war now. It’s a big part of war. And the fire department goes up in ladders and, you know, people shooting at them…they’re up on these ladders. It goes way up to the sky.”

It’s all stream of consciousness. Whatever thought pops into Trump’s mind, he says it. I guess he believes people are shooting at firefighters while they’re “rescuing people” on ladders. Juliet Jeske is a political commentator and creator of the newsletter and podcast “Decoding Fox News.” In one popular segment on her show, she reads transcripts of Trump speeches backed by music. She said it was hard to figure out what the president was saying. After scouring records, Jeske found that shooting firefighters almost never happens: “The last time that happened was like 20 years ago, and it was like 25 years before that when the previous one happened.” Puff Donny Trump made it sound like there was a current epidemic. 

On Sept. 5 in the Oval Office, he went off the rails talking about grass, saying he’s planning to “re-grass all the parks” and that grass lives a life “you won’t even recognize because in a year that graffiti will be gone.” He said he knew a lot about grass and potholes will be gone and marble will be polished. And he’s going to do some “drawing circles and everything will be spit shined.”

More recently, in a Sunday interview on Fox News, the president observed that no one knows what magnets are.

As for his beloved tariffs, he defended them by claiming on the network that if he wasn’t implementing them, the entire world would be in a depression. 

Those close to Trump admit he doesn’t read much and relies on people to tell him what to think — “And no one wants to give him bad news,” a source said. That’s no secret. It’s also well known that Trump needs writers and treats his presidency like it’s an episode of “The Apprentice.” Either way, facts and his increasingly taxed mind never meet. “I have seen him decline very quickly recently,” Jeske noted. 

Others are seeing it too. “The Epstein issue maddens him,” one of his advisers told me. Perhaps that’s why one of his closest acolytes, Steve Bannon, recently told a group of Republicans that if the party didn’t win the 2026 midterms, a lot of people, including himself, were going to prison. He’s afraid Trump will crash and burn, and someone will be left holding the bag.

In a recent Substack post, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich trolled Trump’s comments about “affordability” after the Nov. 4 elections. The president, Reich wrote, “called it ‘a new word’ and said Republicans had not talked about it, then blasted it as a Democratic ‘con job’ and declared ‘I don’t want to hear about the affordability.’” The former secretary also pointed out that when Trump was recently asked about his mental acuity, “he confused a dementia screening test for an IQ test.”

Trump also claimed he had “solved” an imaginary conflict between Cambodia and Armenia — two nations that have never been at war and are 4,000 miles apart. Days before, he bragged about stopping a showdown between Azerbaijan and Albania, apparently meaning Armenia.

Then there were his eye-rolling comments to reporters the day after the president met with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., about the shutdown — when he forgot Jeffries’ name. “Chuck Schumer, who was here yesterday, along with…uh, the, a very nice gentleman who I didn’t really know. You know who I’m talking about,” he said.

The problem is that often nobody knows who or what Trump is talking about — and it’s becoming increasingly apparent that he might not either. The question isn’t if he’s fading, but how fast and how much more dangerous he will become. 

For the reporters covering this president, it has, in a word, been impossible to pull a cogent quote from him. “I have to pull partial quotes and try to make sense of the rest,” one reporter told me.

We should quit trying and instead give it to the American public raw. Let them see what Trump really sounds like. The White House should just send us transcripts of what he actually said and let us pass it along to everyone else. Or maybe we should just let Jeske read them on national television. She sounds pleasant enough and the music’s entertaining.

Jeske explained that while she was trying to understand what Trump actually said during his interview with “60 Minutes” versus what was seen on television, she realized that the broadcast story bore little semblance to the actual event. “They sane-washed it,” she said. “They cut out single words. They moved whole sections around. And this is the president who sued because of the edits made to the Kamala Harris interview.” 

“Sane-washing” Trump will ultimately fail. It is a stupid, futile gesture that only lends credence to the idea that the media is protecting him. At the same time, his desperation in trying to control the release of the Epstein information gives even Trump’s staunchest allies the idea that he’s pulling a Richard Nixon-style cover up. 

This heat continues to grow while his ability to handle it is dramatically decreasing. His Friday schedule includes no work. He’s leaving town — apparently unable to handle the political oven of Washington D.C.

As Harry Truman famously said, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.” Donald Trump, though, never could stand the heat, and he always wanted to burn down the kitchen. Now? He just doesn’t know why.

As questions continue to be raised about his association with Epstein, I would recommend Trump embrace his craziness. It may be his best defense.