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After reading multiple reports about Donald Trump's latest binge posting spree on Truth Social, which apparently was extraordinary even by his lofty standards, I decided to conduct a research study, funded by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), which is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), based in Bethesda, Maryland. (Researcher's Note 1: I made up the part about my study being funded by a grant from NIMH. I added that because I thought it might be fun, should Trump and Elon Musk come across this post, to imagine they might think -- if even for a nanosecond -- that I received federal dollars for research on Trump's declining mental health. After all, NIMH and its parent institute (NIH) were prime targets of the attack by Trump and Musk (via DOGE) on scientific research -- along with similar entities, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
My research consisted of randomized trials centered on three Google searches of phrases connected to Donald Trump's mental health: (1) "Donald Trump and rants"; (2) "Donald Trump and meltdowns"; (3) "Donald Trump and melt downs." Item No. 3 was needed because our preliminary investigation determined that some people use the spelling "meltdowns" (one word), while many more people use the spelling "melt downs" (two words) (who knew?)
I used advanced computational methods -- also known as the calculator app on my laptop -- to produce final results that are ready for presentation to an external review committee. The results are as follows:
* Search No. 1 ("Donald Trump and rants") produced 42,400,000 results;
* Search No. 2 ("Donald Trump and meltdowns") produced 9,680,000 results;
* Search No. 3 ("Donald Trump and melt downs") produced 62,700,000 results
When Search Nos. 2 and 3 are combined, the total is 72,380,000 results. When Search No. 1 is added the total becomes 114,780,000.
Research Summary: This study supports our hypothesis that massive numbers of people on "this particular planet" are freaking out about the shaky status of Donald Trump's mental health. I further hypothesize that longitudinal studies will reveal particularly high numbers of freak-outs in the following countries: Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, Greenland, Denmark, Mexico, Canada, Cuba, Nigeria, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Panama, Iraq, and the Gaza Strip -- all countries that Trump has attacked or threatened during his second term. The United States is expected to be the No. 1 producer of Trump-related freak-outs -- especially in Maine, where some Democrats and Independents seem convinced, as if by magical thinking, that an oyster shucker with a Nazi tattoo can function effectively as a U.S. senator.
Researcher's Note 2: I'm heartened to know that I'm not the only academician concerned about Donald Trump's mental health. Heather Cox Richardson, a professor of history at Boston College, seems to be thinking along the same lines. Thanks to her wildly popular "Letters from an American" Substack page, which has 2.5 to 3 million subscribers (making her the No. 1 creator on Substack), Cox Richardson might be the most influential and widely read historian in . . . well, American history. Heck, I know people who couldn't stay awake in high school history class and now read Cox Richardson religiously. In a country that is going backwards on many fronts, I would call that progress.
In a post dated May 12, 2023, and published yesterday, Cox Richardson writes on her concerns about Trump's mental health. If she and I are thinking along the same lines, I will consider myself in fine company indeed. It turns out that Cox's concerns for our country go beyond Trump's mental health, and we will examine those in a moment. But let's start at the top, where Cox Richardson writes:
The biggest story in the country, today and always, is that the president of the United States is mentally unwell.
Over the course of three hours last night, he posted on social media 55 times. Those posts accused a number of those Trump considers his personal enemies, including former president Barack Obama, of treason; claimed that investigations of the ties between his 2016 campaign and Russian operatives were an attempt to damage Trump; insisted the 2020 presidential election was stolen; reposted a fake quotation from Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) accusing Obama of making a personal fortune of $120 million from the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare; labeled Obama and others “traitors” and called for their arrest; and demanded to know why acting attorney general Todd Blanche hadn’t indicted any of those people yet.
This morning, he started in again with a long screed attacking the New York Times for its coverage of his alterations to the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., and insisting that Democratic presidents Obama and Joe Biden had “botched” renovations that he was now fixing for “a ‘tiny’ fraction of the cost!” He posted an AI image of Obama, Biden, and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) apparently swimming in a filthy version of the reflecting pool with the caption: “Dumacrats Love Sewage.” Then he posted an image of himself on the $100 bill. And then he was back to calling House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) “Low IQ.”
After posting a number of AI images showing the U.S. military destroying the Iranian military, Trump posted: “When the Fake News says that the Iranian enemy is doing well, Militarily, against us, it’s virtual TREASON in that it is such a false, and even preposterous, statement. They are aiding and abetting the enemy!”
Then he posted an image of a map with Venezuela overlaid with the U.S. flag. The caption read: “51st State.”
Trump seems to be comforting himself by lashing out at his perceived enemies and insisting he is competent and popular. Before he left for China today, he claimed: “We have Iran very much under control. We’re either going to make a deal or they’re going to be decimated. One way or the other, we win.”
Mosheh Gains, Courtney Kube, and Monica Alba of NBC News reported today that if Trump decides to restart major combat operations against Iran, military leaders are considering renaming the operations with a new name, like “Operation Sledgehammer,” to suggest those operations would be different than the current “Epic Fury.” They argue that renaming the military operation would restart the clock of the 1973 War Powers Act that requires congressional authorization to continue it after sixty days, a deadline that ran out on May 1.
War Powers Act expert Brian Finucane, who was a lawyer for the State Department, commented: “Nope. Changing the name of the authorized war with Iran does not alter the application of the War Powers Resolution’s 60-day clock.”
In the meantime, there is no apparent movement toward opening the Strait of Hormuz, even as numbers released today by the Department of Labor show that inflation in April hit its highest level since 2023. Trump’s own intelligence agencies assessed earlier this year that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon and that Iran’s leader had not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003. An assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency said that Iran would not be able to reach the U.S. with an intercontinental ballistic missile until 2035.
Nonetheless, the administration and its supporters appear to have settled on the idea that the cost of the war has been worthwhile because the U.S. was under imminent threat of nuclear attack by Iran. When a reporter asked Trump today, before he left for China, to what extent Americans’ financial situation is motivating him to make a deal with Iran, he answered:
“Not even a little bit. The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran—they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing—we cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all.”
A CNN/SSRS poll released today shows that 70% of Americans disapprove of the way Trump is handling the economy.
Trump is, however, thinking about his own financial situation. Tonight Andrew Duehren and Alan Feuer of the New York Times reported that the Department of Justice is in talks to settle Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service for damages after a contractor during Trump’s first term leaked tax information, including his, to the media.
The judge in the case has ordered Trump’s lawyers and the Department of Justice to file briefs by May 20 explaining why this is a true case in which the two sides are opposed when Trump both is the plaintiff and runs the agency that is the defendant. If they settle before then, the judge will not be able to say much about whether the case was valid in the first place.
Duehren and Feuer note that the Department of Justice has fought similar cases brought because of the leak, arguing that the government can’t be held liable for something a contractor does. The government settled a case with hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin in 2024 by making a public apology.
The New York Times journalists report that one of the options for settling with Trump would be for the IRS to drop any audits of Trump, his family members, or his businesses. Since 1977, IRS policy has been to conduct a mandatory audit of the sitting president every year, although it failed to audit Trump’s taxes for his first two years in office during his first term. Clearly, he would like for it to fail to audit his taxes this time around as well.
Let's turn to Cox Richardson's concerns that go beyond Trump's mental health. I will highlight in yellow the first sentence or two of the new sections:
The special treatment certain people enjoy in the U.S. that enables them to get around accountability was in the news earlier today, too, as the victims of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein testified before a panel made up of the Democrats on the House Oversight and Reform Committee. The top Democrat on the committee, Robert Garcia of California, began the day by introducing a new report called “The Price of Non-Prosecution.” It explained that the sweetheart deal U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Alexander Acosta—later Trump’s secretary of labor—negotiated with Epstein to protect him from federal prosecution left him able to continue his sex-trafficking operation and to expand it.
The survivors recounted their anger and frustration when they discovered the federal government had made a secret deal with Epstein. One survivor, who identified herself as Roza, detailed how Epstein sexually assaulted her over three years when he was supposed to be serving a jail sentence. She broke down as she recounted how the Department of Justice under then–attorney general Pam Bondi continued that favoritism, exposing her name publicly while leaving the names of the perpetrators’ names redacted.
“I stepped forward along other survivors hoping those who allowed this to happen will be held accountable. I kept my identity protected as ‘Jane Doe.’ I woke up one day with my name mentioned over 500 times. While the rich and powerful remain protected by redaction, my name was exposed to the world. Now reporters from across the globe contact me. I cannot live without looking over my shoulder. I can only imagine the long-term impact this ‘mistake’ will have on my life.”
In Tennessee today, Tennessee House speaker Cameron Sexton removed all the House Democrats from standing committees, saying they had behaved in a way “aimed at disrupting the democratic and legislative processes” as they protested the mid-decade redistricting that broke up Tennessee’s only majority-Black, Democratic district. As Tennessee state representative Justin J. Pearson notes, this decree removed “every Black elected official in the state legislature from any committee we served on” and stripped “nearly 2 million Tennesseans from the representation they deserve” in the Tennessee state legislature.
“We will not stop fighting,” state representative Justin Jones posted. “We will not stop getting in good trouble. We will not go back!”
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