When even governors say Trump has dementia

This is not normal, and it's not common

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It’s one thing when political commentators or late-night hosts speculate that Donald Trump’s mind isn’t what it used to be. It’s another thing entirely when sitting governors start saying it out loud.

California Governor Gavin Newsom recently dropped what you could fairly call a dementia bomb on Trump.

Coming from one of the most visible Democratic governors in the country, that’s not just a jab, it’s an acknowledgment of what’s been painfully obvious for years.

And now, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker is going even further. Pritzker isn’t just commenting on Trump’s condition, he’s calling for his removal under the 25th Amendment. For those who need a refresher, the 25th Amendment allows for the removal of a president who is incapacitated or otherwise unfit to carry out the duties of the office.

That’s not a symbolic idea. It’s a constitutional mechanism for moments exactly like this. And it’s hard to imagine a president more clearly meeting that definition than Donald Trump does right now.

Pritzker’s comments, reported by NBC News and amplified across social media, go beyond the usual political rhetoric. He didn’t mince words. He said Trump has dementia. That’s a line that, up until now, most public figures, especially elected ones, have been hesitant to cross. But Pritzker crossed it willingly.

And good for him.

Priztker later said, in an interview with the Chicago Tribune, “this is a man who’s suffering dementia. This is a man who has something stuck in his head. He can’t get it out of his head. He doesn’t read. He doesn’t know anything that’s up to date. It’s just something in the recesses of his brain that is effectuating to have him call out these cities. And then, unfortunately, he has the power of the military, the power of the federal government to do his bidding, and that’s what he’s doing.”

There’s been a quiet consensus among millions of Americans for a while now, whispered in private conversations and late-night text threads: Trump’s cognitive state is deteriorating before our eyes. Watching him speak in 2025 compared to even a decade ago is like watching a tape degrade in real time.

This isn’t partisan hyperbole. It’s observation. His words slur together, he loses his train of thought mid-sentence, he repeats the same half-formed story fragments over and over again. Entire speeches unravel into verbal spirals that lead nowhere.

Trump used to ramble, sure. But even in his 2015 campaign days, there was still a thread, some underlying coherence to the chaos. Now it’s just gone. His speeches don’t build to anything; they collapse into themselves. His Truth Social posts read like AI-generated noise, looping back on old grievances, misremembered enemies, and word salad so dense you need a machete to get through it.

And yet this man has been reelected President of the United States.

That’s what makes Newsom’s and Pritzker’s comments so remarkable and so necessary. They’re saying what most Democratic leaders, and even some Republican ones, are afraid to: this is not normal cognitive aging. This is decline. This is a problem.

Senator Chris Murphy said recently that the case for impeaching Trump is stronger than ever. He’s already been impeached twice, of course, but the argument now isn’t just about criminality or corruption. It’s about capacity. The 25th Amendment exists precisely for a moment like this, when a president becomes physically or mentally unable to fulfill the role.

Pritzker is doing more than making a political statement. He’s voicing a moral one: that allowing an unfit man to wield power over nuclear codes, the economy, and the justice system isn’t just irresponsible, it’s dangerous.

Let’s put it in simple human terms. If someone in your family started acting like this, forgetting names, losing track of sentences, obsessing over decades-old slights, you wouldn’t shrug it off. You’d get them evaluated. You’d take them to a neurologist. You wouldn’t say, “Ah, that’s just Uncle Don being Uncle Don.”

You’d recognize that something’s wrong.

Trump exhibits two classic signs of dementia: fixation on the past and repetitive verbal loops detached from reality. He’s obsessed with old battles, the 2020 election, Hillary Clinton, the Mueller probe, as if he’s stuck in a feedback loop that never ends. Every grievance is reheated, every imagined betrayal relived.

But here’s the thing. It’s not just mental. It’s moral, too. Trump’s fitness problem isn’t limited to his brain, it extends to his character. He is unfit mentally, physically, and morally. He can’t lead his own party, much less the country. Republicans control the White House, Congress, and the courts, yet the government still lurches toward crisis after crisis.

A leader in control of his faculties could at least project stability. Trump projects chaos. He thrives on it. And yet, paradoxically, he’s now so cognitively diminished that even his chaos feels like it’s running on autopilot, a once-effective demagogue reduced to a broken record.

The scary part is that no one around him seems willing to intervene. Cabinet officials, family members, aides, they’ve all either been purged, silenced, or are too invested in the illusion to admit what’s happening.

That’s why governors like Pritzker and Newsom speaking up matters. These aren’t pundits. They’re sitting executives, responsible for tens of millions of people. When they call out a president’s unfitness, they’re doing it from a place of duty, not spectacle.

And let’s be honest, this conversation was inevitable. You can only ignore the slurred speech, the wandering monologues, the vacant stare for so long before reality intrudes. Even conservative commentators have begun quietly wondering what’s going on.

The irony is that Trump himself spent years accusing Joe Biden of having dementia. He mocked Biden’s speech patterns, his gait, his age. Now, Trump is the one showing the symptoms he weaponized against others. It’s Shakespearean in its projection, except the stakes aren’t theatrical; they’re national.

At this point, the debate shouldn’t be whether Trump is in decline. The debate should be how much longer the country can pretend he isn’t.

Because every day we act like this is fine, every time the media treats another incoherent rant as just “Trump being Trump,” we normalize the unthinkable: a president visibly losing touch with reality, presiding over the most powerful nation on Earth.

Gavin Newsom said it. J.B. Pritzker said it. And millions of Americans see it too.

Donald Trump is not well.

And the longer we wait to admit that, the more damage he’ll do, not just to his party, not just to his followers, but to the entire country.

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