Beltway insider John Heilemann had a grim assessment of President Donald Trump's current mental state as his Great American State Fair flops for all to see, and yet he continues to insist everything's going great.
MS NOW's Nicolle Wallace turned to him in a panel discussion on Monday to discuss how absurd she found Trump's latest ranting about the issue.
"It doesn't read as real. I read this, and I'm like, is this AI? Is this really what they're doing?" she asked. She noted that Trump's aide, Natalie Harp, is creating an "altered reality" for Trump by curating only the positive news for him. "What is the issue here where like he actually thinks that it's his job to make up lies about the Reflecting Pool, put on, at taxpayer expense, sparsely attended celebrations that are so politically poisoned no normal people want to be a part of them, and build things in his own honor when he couldn't even line a freaking pond?"
Heilemann replied that he is thinking about how, in contrast to Trump's spectacle on the National Mall, former President Barack Obama "brought out Bruce Springsteen and all these people to play, Stevie Wonder, to play in Chicago last week and you can't really blame Trump for not knowing about that, right? I mean, you can't blame him because, I just don't think he knows about it ... Natalie Harp, the human fax machine, the human printer, is not printing out stories to please the boss about, hey, look at Barack Obama's lineup, right?"
Trump, he continued, is in a "bubble of delusion" and his "mental acuity is declining pretty precipitously."
"He has various kinds of syndromes and pathologies that, in combination with the information bubble that a lot of presidents do get into, right, where they lose touch with what's really going on out there," said Heilemann. "And I think that that combination is part of what explains the other things you're talking about that are more serious things, right?"
As an example, Heilemann continued, Trump invited reporters in to look at drawings of his grand White House ballroom project, boasting about it "as if he didn't understand that it was politically toxic." By contrast, Trump a decade ago "wouldn't have been like that, right? I mean, Donald Trump knew his base, knew what working-class voters wanted, he had a fingertip feel for what voters wanted. That's why he won in 2016. And he still even had it to some extent in 2024."
"The Golden Ballroom, boasting about these pictures as if somehow this was the thing that was going to heal him politically, is another sign that again he's in a profound bubble," said Heilemann. "Somewhat self-created, somewhat the, I think, the product of his own mind, somewhat the product of ... the velvet prison that he's built around himself and people like Natalie Harp, who knows if she actually ever gave him a representative bunch of what the news coverage was, she would be fired if not imprisoned, right?"
It's gotten so bad, Heilemann added, that when it comes to the White House, "our presumption is they're lying until proven otherwise," and that when you see Trump doing something so absurd it looks like an AI-generated fabrication of something he'd do, "the more ludicrous it is, the more likely it's true."