Trump Brain is a series about what’s really going on in the president’s head, on his 80th birthday.
The president of the United States is about to turn 80. We’ve been here once before. It did not go particularly well.
The question of just how cognitively sharp Donald Trump is these days is more complicated, however, than it was for Joe Biden after his notorious 2024 debate, at 81, against the current president. (His performance was so bad that Jill Biden recently claimed she thought he’d been having a stroke.) There are signs of trouble with Trump, persistent and notable: He continues to fall asleep in meetings (and at Knicks games) while behaving in ways no one understands. Yet he still sounds like himself much of the time. And while it might not be totally clear what’s going on in Trump’s head, every day he seemingly gives us some clues.
It’s not for nothing that, even as his war with Iran persists, Trump spends his days posting about “taking out” late-night hosts like Bill Maher. When he talks naval strategy and lays out his bloodthirsty international agenda, he also tends to launch into repetitive, rambling tangents about Victory at Sea, the docuseries of the World War II battleship fleet that became one of TV’s first big hits—helping usher in the broadcast era that would, eventually, make the man himself a celebrity. After setting the Venezuela invasion in motion, Trump celebrated on Truth Social by posting a video montage of fighter planes bafflingly soundtracked by the classic anti-war anthem “Fortunate Son.” Just weeks afterward, he invited dignitaries like Waka Flocka Flame and Jordan Belfort to the Trump–Kennedy Center (whose renaming was recently struck down by a federal judge) for the release of Melania, the $40 million, Amazon-distributed documentary about our first lady that was helmed by Brett Ratner. The once disgraced filmmaker has remained a weirdly consistent presence throughout the year, even accompanying Trump in May on a state visit to China, where the People’s Liberation Army band greeted the motley crew at dinner by covering one of the president’s longtime favorites, “Y.M.C.A.”
