President Donald Trump's mental fitness has become a growing concern, but a former staffer warned the problem is even worse than the public realizes.
Miles Taylor, a former chief of staff for the Department of Homeland Security, published a column for The i Paper recounting an alarming anecdote from 2018, when Trump and his staffers were discussing the impending Category 5 hurricane, and the president veered wildly off topic into a tangent about helicopters breaking down because they had "too many parts."
"Let me be direct about something the political press keeps dancing around: the debate about Trump’s mental fitness has always been somewhat misdirected," Taylor wrote. "The question was never simply, is he sharp? It was always, can the system around him absorb his worst impulses? In his first term, it just barely could. In his second, it cannot. That’s the real story, and it’s far more alarming than any cognitive decline narrative."
The 79-year-old president's cognitive decline is obvious, Taylor wrote, and he said the contrast between Trump five years ago and now is striking, but the former DHS staffer argued that his diminished abilities cannot be propped up by anyone around him.
"I’m not arguing that Trump has dementia, or that any specific diagnosis applies," Taylor wrote. "The question of whether a president is fit is partly medical but also partly structural. Can the office of the presidency support the person holding it when that person errs, missteps, or fumbles on serious matters of war and peace? Are there people around willing to correct him to his face? Or, in the case of something like the Iran war, are aides prepared to explain to him the deadly consequences of a failure to prepare?"
Trump's worst impulses could be reined in during his first term, Taylor wrote, but he cited recent reporting from The New York Times that officials around the president in his second term are afraid to challenge his belief that the military operation against Iran is a "complete success."
"Aides to the President of the United States are being 'careful' not to speak truth to power," Taylor wrote, quoting from the report. "They are being 'careful' not to challenge the president’s disconnection with reality and cognitive obsession with believing he has achieved total success when, in fact, his actions have caused oil prices to skyrocket, U.S. allies to fear uncontrolled catastrophe, and the West’s enemies to seize the advantage against us. They’re too scared to tell him."
Taylor revealed more about that Oval Office discussion about a hurricane barreling toward North and South Carolina, and how aides managed to steer Trump back on topic, which he used as a jumping-off point to recount a TV interview he saw with a man wearing a MAGA hat who insisted he was going to "ride it out" instead of evacuating.
"Isn’t that something?" Trump mused, according to Taylor. "That’s what Trump supporters do. They’re tough. They ride it out. I think that’s what I’ll tell them to do.”
Taylor said aides were "gobsmacked" that Trump would consider telling residents to ignore evacuation warnings ahead of the Category 5 storm, but he said a "clever aide" managed to persuade him that would be a bad idea by appealing to his own self-interest.
“Mr. President, I wouldn’t take that chance," the aide said, according to Taylor. "This is going to be a pretty bad storm, and you don’t want to lose supporters in the Carolinas before the 2020 election.”
Trump considered the suggestion and conceded that was a good point, and he told aides to go ahead and urge evacuations.
"Today, I suspect that conversation would have gone differently," he wrote. "Trump now has a team willing to magnify his initial instincts. And in the face of storms on the global horizon, they won’t help the president avoid catastrophe. They’re fine with him telling us: just ride it out."