President Donald Trump has long shown signs that his brain has devolved into “mush,” according to one New York Times columnist, but despite the evidence, there is a reason voters have been able to ignore the “clear reality” of his decline.
In the latest video from his “Takes” series on YouTube, prominent liberal NYT commentator Jamelle Bouie argued that Trump’s recent interview with Time Magazine was the latest glaring proof that his mind is on the decline, given his tendency to give rambling and “incoherent” answers to simple softball questions. Bouie further noted that he has been making the case about Trump’s decline since he was on the campaign trail in 2024, but voters were, by and large, able to ignore the truth because of the particular way in which Trump projects himself in public.
“I wrote back in 2024 that the president’s brain was mush, that his brains were leaking out of his ears, that the man is very clearly not well, to put it lightly,” Bouie explained. “Quite possibly totally deranged. The American public didn’t seem to notice, much in the same way as we discussed in the previous video that the president’s open bigotry reads as authenticity to many people, the fact that the president yells and rants and seems vigorous somehow works to counteract the clear reality that what he is often saying bears no resemblance to reality and doesn’t even really constitute a coherent thought.
He continued: “He doesn’t seem frail, and that counts for a lot, as we saw with the previous president, Joe Biden. Nonetheless, it seems quite concerning to me that the president of the United States might be losing his grip on reality, entirely unable to really comprehend the consequences of his choices and indifferent to those consequences when they happen.”
To prove his point, Bouie highlighted a specific answer Trump gave to a fairly standard question in the Time Magazine interview, in which he was pressed about what he planned to do about Hamas remaining armed despite his administration’s recent ceasefire deal.
“I think I’ll probably sit in the situation room and make an appropriate decision,” Trump said. “My decisions are correct ones I mean look at our country. I was moving. The country is booming during a conflagration. You know, during — some people would say it’s a war, some people would say it’s not really a war. When we get a war this year, you know, nothing’s happened for the last two weeks, right, and somebody drops a bomb, and nothing happens, and they drop a bomb. No I think you’ll find out what I’m doing.”
“What?” Bouie said after reading out the quote. “That’s not an answer to the question. And that’s generally how the interview progresses. There will be points where he says genuinely insane things, saying that he thinks if he annihilates Iran, this would still make him a peace president, because he will have created peace in the world by annihilating the country.”