'Melting brain or melted soul?' Eyebrows raised over 'objectively insane' Trump post

One of President Donald Trump's latest social media posts alarmed a veteran journalist, who described the outburst as possible signs of mental infirmity.

The president bizarrely claimed over the weekend that Joe Biden might have been involved in placing 274 FBI agents into the crowd at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, which he called a "scam" that required action – "do something!" he implored in all-caps – and The Bulwark's White House correspondent Andrew Egger examined his statements.

"I regret glossing over it," Egger wrote. "Not only because it was an objectively insane thing to tweet — given it was Trump, not Biden, who was pretty famously president on January 6th — but because the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me to be a keystone text of Trump’s second term."

He tried to imagine the reaction if Biden had mixed up who was president less than five years ago.

"Imagine that last year, during the perennial (and understandable!) news cycles around Joe Biden’s age and fitness for office, Biden himself had claimed in passing to have been president during the January 6th attack," Egger wrote. "It would have been a field day for the opposition and a multi-day story for the press."

Biden famously ended his re-election campaign after his June 2024 debate performance brought concerns about his age and fitness to the foreground of his candidacy, and Trump is not quite four years younger, at 79.

"He, too, plainly seems less sharp, less aware of his surroundings than he did in the past," Egger wrote. "And yet he has set the bar so low for his own conduct and speech that drilling into individual loony pronouncements like this starts to feel like an exercise in futility, a waste of everybody’s time."

"He could be misremembering — but he could also just be lying for political benefit, throwing the usual low-vitamin, high-calorie chum to his base," Egger added. "He is perversely helped by the fact that you can’t tell whether you should attribute a specific Trump claim to his melting brain or his melted soul."

The post reveals something else just as alarming as concerns about his fitness for office, he wrote.

"The post is the core of how Trump sees the world: Trump people and Biden people, heroes and villains, patriots and terrorists, angels and demons," Egger wrote. "All political actors are sorted into two great camps, and what matters aren’t any of the actual relevant facts about their behavior, or their motivations, or their leadership. All that matters is whether Trump perceives them as loyal allies or outside agitators."

"He may have been president on January 6th," he added. "But an FBI that wasn’t jumping to do his will at that given moment was a Biden FBI, in his brain."

Trump runs the entire government through that narrow, binary worldview, the correspondent added.

"During the Biden days, questions about the president’s awareness and fitness for office tended to boil down to whether it was actually him calling the shots," Egger wrote.

"Nobody’s asking that question today," the correspondent added. "At any given moment, Trump may be lying or he may be hallucinating. But he’s clearly calling the shots. The task for the rest of the apparatus of government is to get to work turning that lie or hallucination into reality. When he type-shouts “DO SOMETHING!!!” there’s no question: They do."