Iran cracked the code on Trump and is exploiting his 'rapidly decaying' cognition: expert

Iran appears to have identified and systematically exploited President Donald Trump's rapidly decaying cognitive abilities.

That's according to Atlantic staff writer and national security scholar Tom Nichols, who joined MS NOW's Nicolle Wallace on "Deadline: White House" on Monday. Wallace argued that Trump is operating inside an "artificial reality" constructed by aides who feed him selectively curated social media posts to shield him from negative information about the economy and the war. The arrangement, Wallace said, explains moments like Trump's repeated insistence that the country is "hot."

"I used to think he was lying. Now I think he's deluded," Wallace said, calling it a "threat to global stability."

Nichols agreed with the withering verdict.

"Delusion is the word I was going to use when you were asking about this, because he is self-deluded," Nichols echoed. "I have said many times on this show that I think his cognitive abilities are decaying rapidly."

Aides who once told Trump hard truths have stopped doing so, he said.

"He doesn't want to hear it. I mean, now we're just seeing a more extreme version of the problem that Donald Trump has always been uneducable and unbriefable. He doesn't listen. He's a narcissist. You can't tell a narcissist that they're wrong about something when they've decided that they're right," said Nichols.

Drawing on the upcoming new book "Regime Change" by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Nichols said the portrait that emerges is of a president who has turned previous positions completely upside down. A regime once called an existential evil is now a negotiating partner, he said, and nuclear material that sparked the Iran war may now remain in the country indefinitely.

Nichols argued that Iran had "figured something out" that Trump refuses to accept: that two months of high gas prices would damage him politically far more than depleting U.S. weapons stockpiles. That assessment tracks with earlier reports that Iranian negotiators were recruiting senior psychologists to tailor messages for what they described as Trump's "impaired mental state."

Analysts have warned that Trump's split-off-from-reality problem has cascaded from domestic politics onto the global stage, leaving adversaries better positioned.