The New Yorker:

How many polite ways are there to ask whether the President of the United States is losing it?

By Susan B. Glasser

Donald Trump is an editor’s nightmare and a psychiatrist’s dream. Amid all the coverage marking the first anniversary of his return to the White House, one story—which did not get the attention it deserved—stood out for me: a Times analysis of how much more the President has been talking and talking and talking. The findings? One million nine hundred and seventy-seven thousand six hundred and nine words in the Presidential appearances, as of January 20th—an increase of two hundred and forty-five per cent compared with the first year of Trump’s first term in office, back in 2017.

There are many conclusions to be drawn from this astonishing statistic, including the obvious one, that our leader loves the sound of his own voice, and the slightly less obvious corollary that he has no one around him willing or able to tell him to shut up. It’s also true that, in rambling on so much, Trump reveals just about everything one could ever want to know about him—his lack of discipline, his ignorance, his vanity, insecurity, and crudeness, and a mean streak that knows no limits. “It is remarkable how a man cannot summarize his thoughts in even the most general sort of way without betraying himself completely,” Thomas Mann wrote a century ago, in his novel “The Magic Mountain,” set in a sanitarium perched above the Swiss mountain town of Davos, where Trump spent the better part of this week proving to the stunned attendees of the annual World Economic Forum the continuing relevance of Mann’s observation.

“Sometimes, you need a dictator,” Trump soliloquized on Wednesday, during a reception for business leaders. A few hours earlier, in an address that lasted a full hour and a half, the President had announced that he would not invade Greenland, despite his recent threats; explained that “stupid people” buy windmills; and admitted that he had decided to raise tariffs on Switzerland, because its Prime Minister, “a woman,” had “rubbed me the wrong way.” The speech, during which Trump four times referred to Iceland when he meant Greenland, was more than twice the combined length of the addresses of the French President, Emmanuel Macron, and the German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz. On Tuesday, speaking to the White House press corps to mark the actual anniversary of his return to office, Trump had discoursed on everything from his mother telling him he could have been a Major League baseball player and explaining to him what a mental asylum was to his hatred for Somalia and its “very low-I.Q. people.” That one lasted a hundred and four minutes.

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