Americans are asking if the president is OK

Is the president OK?

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I asked that question on TV this week. Not as a throwaway line or a partisan jab, but as a serious question about the capacity of the person holding the most powerful office in the world.

Since Donald Trump announced his first campaign for the White House in 2015, critics have wondered about his frequent digressions, anecdotes that never happened and seemingly dwindling vocabulary.

But in his second term, especially over the past few weeks, Trump has seemed more erratic than ever, making bizarre claims and accusations about the Iran war on social media and ratcheting up his already inflammatory rhetoric.

Americans are noticing. Only about one-fourth of Americans said Trump was even-tempered in a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll. Fifty-eight percent said the words “mentally sharp” did not describe the president very well or at all, while roughly half said his mental sharpness has gotten worse over the past year.

This not a question about the president’s policies or even his character. It’s about his basic ability to do the job he holds.

The past few days were not an outlier. As I’ve noted, Trump has always been erratic. But what’s changed is the system around him.

For years, there was a quiet practice in Washington and in the press of “sanewashing” that helped normalize Trump’s words and actions that were often anything but normal. That is how a meandering speech at a political rally becomes “unconventional,” while unhinged threats at his perceived enemies become “hard-line negotiating tactics.”

Privately, even some Republicans will acknowledge that the president’s behavior is not right. But publicly, they either deny having seen it or explain it away, granting him a benefit of the doubt that stretches further and further.

But the behavior has become too blatant to ignore. Over the past month alone, the president threatened to destroy Iranian “civilization,” called on Iran to open the “f—in’ Strait” of Hormuz and mockingly wrote “Praise be to Allah” in a social media post, attacked the pope and posted an AI image of himself as Jesus, among other things.

The gap between the image that Republicans present of their leader and what the public can see for itself has grown too big. And once that trust collapses, voters start to wonder about everything else they’ve been told.