Incompetency

I have written several times about the unprecedented level of incompetency in the Trump administration. In 2024 I wrote this and then in 2025 I wrote about it here and here. The point is that America is subject to the highest level of incompetence at the federal level in modern times. The phrase “best and brightest” could never be a description of what corporate media calls the “clown car cabinet”.

Incompetence usually means the inability to operate at the highest or acceptable level in the workplace. What this column is about is the legal term for incompetency. According to the TI bot Perplexity, a good legal definition of incompetence is:

“A person is legally incompetent when, because of a mental or similar impairment, they lack the ability to understand relevant information and to make or communicate reasonable decisions about their own affairs or legal matters”

All 50 states have statutes that address legal incompetence or what is often called “incapacity”. There is no part of the country that does not have the ability to impose limitations on individuals who have been ruled incompetent by the legal system. [Maybe some attorney general of a state can file claims that Trump is mentally incompetent?]

My observation is that President Trump is mentally incompetent. As someone in their 70’s, I tend to speak to a lot of friends that are loosely in my age group, so I know what aging can do to the best of us. None of my friends come across as loopy as Trump does on TV. None of my friends in their 70s and 80s exhibit the dementia that Trump often does.

One thing I have noticed – and this is of concern for America’s democracy – is that Trump seems to always read his comments. He has never mastered the teleprompter, so he clearly reads, word for word, what is on the teleprompter or what is printed on his papers on the podium [even to the point of looking only at what is printed and not looking at the camera for long stretches]. It is when he speaks off the cuff, looking up from what has been printed for him, that he shows the clear evidence that he is mentally incompetent.

The danger here is not only Trump’s mental incompetence, but also that the people around him are feeding him what to say. What to read. Is this a conscious effort to protect him from himself? Or his condition from the American Public? To make sure he stays on point. The problem of course is what I have been writing about in the columns on incompetence: Trump has surrounded himself with a clown car of direct reports, so the people on that car are the people writing his speeches. This means that Trump is passing along autocratic and alarming messaging. It also means that his staff knows that he is incompetent and give him scripts to read. Having been a professional speaker, I look at public figures through that lens and Trump is perhaps the worst speaker of all presidents in my lifetime. It is not about the audience or camera; it is about reading what has been written for him. Whenever he goes off script, his incompetence often comes through.

Trump is the oldest person to occupy the Oval Office. He clearly has some issues with his mental state. He just launched a war with Iran. It can and should be called Trump’s War as there seems to be no singular reason for the war disaster. What can America do when a clearly mentally incompetent President starts playing cowboy on the geopolitical stage? Greenland, Venezuela, Iran and currently, talks of “freeing” Cuba. Our country is violating international law. Even the Bush administration brought the Afghan and Iraq wars before Congress and the UN to gain support for those two invasions [yes, I know they lied, but they did the right thing according to both the Constitution and International Law].

Then of course there is the reality with the ‘Epstein Files’. Trump never learned the lessons of the Nixon Administration more than 50 years ago: the cover-up is always far worse than the crime. Trump is acting like he has something to hide. He is probably a pedophile. Now he has dementia or some mental deficit. America has a president who lies, has committed crimes and now has mental incompetency…. and is leading the country to geopolitical conflict of a major order. Not good.

The incompetent people surrounding President Trump will never allow him to openly take a serious neuropsychological exam, so what do we do? As we enter the year that is the 250^th of our great country, we are led by a man who is mentally incompetent who has surrounded himself with fawning, sycophantic incompetents.

I don’t have the answer, do you?

[Again, please hit the like button, and if you are a paying subscriber, post a comment. I truly look for some intelligence from all of you on this topic as I know we are going down a predictable yet potentially catastrophic path. Thank you!]