Is Trump losing it?
PLUS: Edith Wharton, toothaches, and the first installment of your Summer Bookies
Hello — This week in 1915, author and NYC native Edith Wharton wrote a dispatch for US newspapers from the front lines of World War I in France, where she had moved. She was upset that the US hadn’t entered the war (it wouldn’t do so until 1917, three years after fighting began). See more below.
The sun rose in Boston at 5:22 a.m. and will set at 7:59 p.m. for 14 hours and 37 minutes of sunlight. There’s a new moon Saturday.
Dread going to the dentist? Don’t. In fact, be grateful there are dentists. The Old Farmer’s Almanac says that in the really olden days, people used some pretty bizarre “remedies” to try to get relief from intense toothaches. They included eating grasshopper eggs, holding a live frog or fresh cow manure against your aching cheek, and picking your teeth with the nail of the middle toe of an owl, which is more difficult than you would think, given that an owl has four toes. Here’s more.
🤯 Is Trump losing it?
It’s a question that’s been asked for years, given that Trump’s megalomania was on display for decades during his career as a real estate developer. But concern accelerated when he was first elected president, because lots of people recognized that having a greedy, aging, self-centered moron in the highest political office in the land may not be the best idea.
Those worries about his mental health have never disappeared, but they are being voiced now perhaps louder than ever. Trump is writing increasingly bizarre, lengthy, incomprehensible social media posts. He attacked the pope. He has threatened to wipe Iran off the map because its leaders surprised him by doing very predictable things like launching attacks against US military bases in the Middle East and closing the Strait of Hormuz. His ramblings during meetings are painful to watch: Mispronounced words, wrong names, slurred speech.
The current warnings are reminiscent of the alarms raised by mental health professionals within a few months of his first inauguration in 2017. That spring, more than 30 psychiatrists warned at a conference at Yale University that Trump had a dangerous mental illness and that they had an ethical responsibility to warn the American public. They said he was a paranoid, delusional narcissist and liar who engages in grandiose thinking.
That same year, more than 41,000 mental health professionals signed a petition saying that Trump had a serious mental illness and was "psychologically incapable of competently discharging the duties" of the presidency. They said those mental issues included narcissism, paranoia, sociopathy, and sadism.
Still in 2017, a forensic psychiatrist published a book containing essays by 27 psychologists, psychiatrists, and mental health professionals arguing that Trump’s pathological traits put the nation at risk. Those traits included narcissistic personality disorder, extreme hedonism, and bullying. The book was called “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.”
(I’m sensing a pattern here.)
Were all of these mental health professionals simply a bunch of sore-loser Democrats? All I know is that retired Marine Corps General John Kelly, when he became Trump’s second chief of staff in 2017, secretly read the book to try to figure out how to handle Trump’s irrational behavior.
As Susan Glasser of the New Yorker and Peter Baker of The New York Times wrote in their book “The Divider:”
[Kelly] sought help to understand the president’s particular psychoses and consulted it while he was running the White House, which he was known to refer to as ‘Crazytown.’
Kelly told others that the book was a helpful guide to a president he came to consider a pathological liar whose inflated ego was in fact the sign of a deeply insecure person.
Fast forward to today. Baker, the Times’ chief White House correspondent, wrote on Wednesday that Trump’s erratic behavior and extreme comments are reviving the debate about his mental health (🎁).
A series of disjointed, hard-to-follow and sometimes-profane statements, his extreme threats, and his head-spinning attacks “have left many with the impression of a deranged autocrat mad with power,” Baker writes.
On April 30, three dozen neurologists, psychiatrists, and other physicians with extensive experience diagnosing cognitive disorders — and all with different backgrounds and political leanings, including two Nobel Prize recipients — issued a statement that Trump was too mentally unfit to have access to the country’s nuclear trigger. They wrote, in part:
It is our professional opinion that the behaviors of Donald Trump, tragically, are neither momentary lapses nor political theater. It is our professional opinion that they reflect a rapidly worsening, reality-untethered, increasingly dangerous decline [including] marked deterioration in cognitive functioning, evidenced by disorganized and tangential speech, rambling digressions, factual confusions, unexplained sudden changes of course in strategic matters, both national and international, episodes of apparent somnolence during critical public proceedings.
We are compelled to warn of a President of the United States who is increasingly a danger to the public. We do not take our statement, and the responsibility that comes with making it, lightly.
Earlier this week, Yahoo! News, the Daily Beast, and other outlets noted the dramatic increase in Trump’s middle-of-the-night unhinged posts on Truth Social. For example, this past Monday night, he posted or reposted 55 times between 10:15 p.m. and 1:13 a.m. — 55 posts in less than 3 hours. No wonder he’s falling asleep in meetings.
Those posts ranged from accusing former president Barack Obama of attempting a coup in 2016 to attacking The New York Times for reporting on the no-bid contract to repaint the concrete bottom of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool that Trump handed to an industrial coatings company that did work at Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Va. You can read them all here.
But what really caught my attention was when respected historian Heather Cox Richardson, writing in her Substack newsletter, Letters from an American, on Wednesday cited those Truth Social posts to conclude:
The biggest story in the country, today and always, is that the president of the United States is mentally unwell.
In addition to Trump’s posts, Richardson also cited his mess of a war with Iran, his self-enrichment schemes, the continuing Epstein files saga, and the yawning maw of partisanship that is tearing elections asunder.
None of which seem to penetrate that thick orange skull as things to be concerned about.
Of course, we all want to know what can be done. No Cabinet members are going to give up their cushy and profitable seats of power by daring to invoke Section 4 of the 25th Amendment. And Republicans in Congress are just as feckless.
We need sane people holding political power.
💣 Edith Wharton: “The sound of the cannon began”
The famed author of “The House of Mirth” and “The Age of Innocence” permanently moved to France in 1911 after selling The Mount, her Berkshires country home in Lenox, Mass. She was living in Paris when The Great War started, eventually pitting the Allied Powers of Russia, France, Great Britain, Italy, and Japan against the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire, which spanned southeastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.
Rather than return to the safety of the US, Wharton threw herself into the Allied war effort, “working with the French Red Cross and leading a committee that founded hostels and schools to serve refugees, including many children, from the German-occupied zones of northeastern France and Belgium. She was eventually awarded the French Légion d’honneur (Legion of Honor) for her work.” (History.com)
But she had another tool at her disposal: Her writing prowess. So when President Woodrow Wilson declared an official policy of neutrality — in part because he was worried about fomenting disunity in a nation of immigrants from countries on both sides of the war — she started writing dispatches from the front lines for US newspapers describing the war’s effects in an effort to change the US stance.
Here are two passages she wrote from the town of Nancy, in the Argonne region of France:
Since leaving Paris yesterday we have passed through streets and streets of such murdered houses, through town after town spread out in its last writhings. And before the black holes that were homes, along the edge of the chasms that were streets, everywhere we have seen flowers and vegetables springing up in freshly raked and watered gardens.
Now, at sunset, all life ceases in Nancy and veil after veil of silence comes down on the deserted Place and its empty perspectives. Last night by nine the few lingering lights in the streets had been put out, every window was blind, and the moonless night lay over the city like a canopy of velvet. The ordered masses of architecture became august, the spaces between them immense, and the black sky faintly strewn with stars seemed to overarch an enchanted city. Not a footstep sounded, not a leaf rustled, not a breath of air drew under the arches. And suddenly, through the dumb night, the sound of the cannon began.
After Germany started sinking American merchant ships, and Great Britain uncovered a German plot to help Mexico reclaim land from the US, Wilson declared war against Germany in April, 1917. That helped push the Allied Front to victory: Germany couldn’t match the seemingly endless supply of US soldiers that bolstered exhausted Allied troops, the billions in loans and credits that shored up our financially depleted allies, and the US manufacturing might that poured weapons and ammunition into the war effort.
On Nov. 11, 1918, Germany signed an armistice and fighting ceased at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, a day commemorated in the US as Veterans Day, in France as Armistice Day, and in the UK as Remembrance Day.
Edith Wharton remained in France, moving from Paris to a villa on the Riviera, where she hosted salons for writers and artists and wrote even more prolifically. In 1920, she published “The Age of Innocence,” a novel about New York City at the time of her youth. The following year it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making her the first woman to win the award in that category. She wrote nearly a book per year.
The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.
— From “The Age of Innocence”
She returned to the US just once more to accept an honorary degree from Yale in 1923. She had a stroke in 1935, and died soon after a second stroke in 1937. She is buried in Versailles.
📰 Some interesting stuff to read
The New York Times: Why So Few Babies? We Might Have Overlooked the Biggest Reason of All. (🎁)
Music Without Borders: 20 of the Greatest North American Songwriters
Starting Point (Boston Globe): This new game that’s fascinating high schoolers might look really familiar to you (🎁)
📚 Summer Bookies
I’m going to return to my former practice of publishing your book suggestions in installments so you don’t have to wait for the full list, which I’ll publish in a special Fast Forward the first week of June. See the first batch of recommendations below.
As you know, the theme for this summer’s reading list is books about a journey: Literal, figurative, metaphorical, mythical … and as usual, you haven’t disappointed. If you haven’t sent in your suggestion yet, please join in! Here are the rules:
Email your choice to thfastforward@gmail.com
One book recommendation per person, please!
Start out your email with the book title and the author’s full name.
Next list your name and city/town, state, country, etc.
Then tell us briefly what the book is about and why you liked it so you can help others decide whether to read it. Please don’t copy summaries from Goodreads or Amazon; while I appreciate that, I really want your own words.
The deadline for suggestions is midnight Sunday, May 31. Again, please email your choice to thfastforward@gmail.com
Here are some early entries:
“Trail of the Lost”
The Relentless Search to Bring Home the Missing Hikers of the Pacific Crest Trail
By Andrea Lankford
Teri Chace of Freeport, Nova Scotia: The author has worked as a ranger for the National Park Service, written trail guides, through-hiked the Appalachian Trail, and now works as a registered nurse — an excellent resume for this topic, and she is a good writer, storyteller, and researcher. She has put together an engrossing and frustrating book about the hunt for long-distance hikers who go missing.
She follows, mostly, three missing Pacific Crest Trail hikers, all young men, and as I turned the pages and got closer and closer to the end, I began to suspect, with dread and sorrow, that there would be no Hollywood ending. The book came out in 2023; Chris Sylvia vanished in 2015; David O’Sullivan in 2017; Kris “Sherpa” Fowler in 2016. When I finished, in early 2026, I googled each name, and no, no traces (as yet). If she had waited for the Hollywood ending, she would never have released the book. Also, and possibly more importantly, we readers get to feel how the families and friends of the missing feel.
There is a term for this, “ambiguous loss,” apparently coined by a family therapist named Dr. Pauline Boss to describe the “frozen grief” induced by “not knowing if a loved one is absent or present, dead or alive.” Boss worked with those whose loved ones presumably were pulverized to ash in the twin towers on 9/11, families of the “disappeared” in the Kosovo war … as well as those who care for someone with Alzheimer’s. But the concept also applies to those wondering where their hiker is or what happened to them. As Lankford writes:
Boss’s advice on dealing with ambiguous loss is as practical as it is profound. Some families, especially those of us from secular Western cultures, value mastery of fate over pre-destination. This causes us to suffer more when facing problems we can’t solve. But giving into helplessness isn’t healthy either. To live within this paradox, we must walk a tightrope between our desire to feel in control and our need to endure that which we cannot master. To cope within a chaotic and mysterious world, to truly ‘solve’ the unsolvable case, we may, on occasion, need to let go of our yearning to fix it.
“Migrations”
By Charlotte McConaghy
Eileen Simonson of Greenwich, Conn.: Many animals are gone from the world; a few Arctic terns will be making perhaps their last migration to Antarctica. Our character, imbued with love of these birds, professional training, and a complex troubled life, convinces a fishing boat captain to follow the route of the migration aided by three tagged birds and technology. This book is not standard fare, but was a compelling read.
“The River is Waiting”
By Wally Lamb
Amy Gates Stroud of Roswell, Ga.: I highly recommend this book. At first, I thought of it as a story about redemption, but it feels just as much like a journey toward forgiveness — of oneself and others. You could also argue it’s about a journey to acceptance — learning to live with who we are and the people around us. In truth, all of those themes are woven together.
What stands out most is Wally Lamb’s gift as a storyteller. He captures both the worst and the best of humanity with honesty and depth. This is not an easy read — it explores difficult topics like alcoholism, prison abuse, the loss of a child, marital breakdown, and the impact of COVID — but it’s undeniably powerful. The emotional weight is heavy at times, yet the story and the characters’ journeys make it well worth it.
“The High Tide Club”
By Mary Kay Andrews
Mary Helen Sprecher of Columbia, Md.: Many associate this writer with funny romances about women who have adventures and who are based in and around Georgia and various points in the Southeast. But in “The High Tide Club,” she has a much more serious take as she follows a group of friends (some who are high society, some who are more middle class, and one who works on the housekeeping staff) and their journey from being teenagers to being elderly. It has several good mysteries and plot twists. It’s the kind of book that, once you read it, you want to reread it to find the Easter eggs that Andrews has buried in the text, that somehow you missed in your race to get to the end of the story. You could ID it as a beach read, but that’s really selling it short.
“The Lincoln Highway”
By Amor Towles
Margaret S. Ross of Boston: This is one of the best books I have ever read, a crazy story of a journey, fueled by the hope of a young boy to find his mother, who left the family years before. He believes he has clues to where he will find her.
I loved this book, but I read it a long time ago, and definitely want to read it again. There is much American history, mid-20th century, nostalgia and innocence at times, but also descriptions of the evil and depravity.
There is magical realism running through the story of this journey, many characters that have complicated troubled past histories, and explorations of all.
Thinking about it now, I DEFINITELY will read again. Written by the same person who wrote “A Gentleman in Moscow,” the opposite in some ways of the literal journey of the Lincoln Highway, as the Gentleman is confined to one hotel.
“How to Dodge a Cannonball”
By Dennard Dayle
Mo Mehlsak of South Portland, Me.: Come along with Anders, a white teenager from Illinois whose Civil War journey begins as a Union flag-bearer, takes a twirl (for the better?) when he is captured and decides to embrace the Confederacy, and comes (sort of) full circle when he survives his Southern platoon’s slaughter at Gettysburg and switches sides again by stealing the uniform of a dead Union soldier — who happened to be Black. Dayle’s novel of historical fiction, and Anders’ survival as a self-declared octoroon in a “colored” Union regiment that travels from East to West across America, satirizes our national inability to come to grips with race, war, and identity.
“A Wizard of Earthsea”
By Ursula K. Le Guin
KarunDas Moss of Montague, Mass.: On one of the small islands in the archipelago of Earthsea, where every village has a resident witch — or, if they’re lucky, a wizard — who serves the community with spells for healing, weather working, and so on, a young boy discovers that he has an innate gift for working magic.
As we follow the journey of Ged (aka Sparrowhawk), we see the dire consequences when magic gets misused, and also the lengths one must go through in order to make amends, and heal that which has been torn asunder.
Along the way, Ged meets wise and powerful teachers, and powerful and subtle opponents, and grows in wisdom and power himself.
This is a small book, but deeply moving and engaging. I was fortunate to come across it in my early 20s, and it became an important guidepost for the rest of my life.
More to come. Get in on our Bookies summer reading list! Recommend a good book you’ve read that’s about a journey of any type. See the submission rules above. And thanks for participating.
Hang in there, my friends.
He's already lost it. And I'm a geriatric psychiatrist.
No. How can someone who never had it, lose it?