#incompetency

Jack Ohman, Tribune Content Agency @jackohman

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

December 1, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Dec 02, 2025

President Donald J. Trump’s behavior over the holiday weekend has increased concern about his mental acuity. A rant on his social media account at midnight on Thanksgiving itself threatened to strip citizenship from naturalized immigrants, called Minnesota governor Tim Walz a profoundly offensive slur, and ended: “HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL, except those that hate, steal, murder, and destroy everything that America stands for—You won’t be here for long!”

On NBC’s Meet the Press yesterday, Walz responded by calling for Trump to release the results of an MRI he told reporters he underwent in October, later saying: “I have no idea what they analyze, but whatever they analyze, they analyzed it well and they said that I had as good a result as they’ve ever seen.” Although Trump told reporters the MRI was part of his routine physical, medical experts say such tests are not routine.

Walz said to Kristen Welker: “Here we got a guy on Thanksgiving, where we spent time with our families, we ate, we played Yahtzee, we cheered for football or whatever. This guy is apparently in a room, ranting about everything else. This is not normal behavior. It is not healthy. And presidents throughout time have released a couple things. They’ve released their tax returns—not Donald Trump—and they’ve released their medical records—not Donald Trump. And look, the MRI is one thing, but I think what’s most concerning about this is, as your viewers out there are listening, has anyone in the history of the world ever had an MRI assigned to them and have no idea what it was for, as he says? So look, it’s clear the President’s fading physically. I think the mental capacity, again, ranting, you know, crazily at midnight on Thanksgiving about everything else. There’s reasons for us to be concerned. This is a guy that randomly says the airspace over Venezuela’s closed. He’s ruminating on if you could win a nuclear war. Look, this is a serious position. It’s the most powerful position in the world, and we have someone at midnight throwing around slurs that demonize our children, at the same time he’s not solving any of the problems. So I’m deeply concerned that he is incapable of doing the job.”

Last night, on Air Force One, Trump responded oddly to a reporter’s question about Walz’s call for Trump to release the MRI results: “[I]f they want to release it, it’s okay with me to release it,” Trump said. “It’s perfect. It’s like my phone call where I got impeached. It’s absolutely perfect…. [I]f you want to have it released, I’ll release it.” When a reporter asked “What part of your body was the MRI looking at?” Trump answered: “I have no idea. It was just an MRI. What part of the body? It wasn’t the brain because I took a cognitive test and I aced it. I got a perfect mark, which you would be incapable of doing,” he said, pointing at the female reporter. He then pointed at another female reporter and said: “You, too.”

Today White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt released a memo from the president’s physician, Sean P. Barbabella, saying that “advanced imaging” was performed on the president as a preventative measure. The memo said this imaging “was performed because men in his age group benefit from a thorough evaluation of cardiovascular and abdominal health.” It said Trump’s cardiovascular and abdominal imaging is “perfectly normal.”

Conspicuously absent from the memo was any reference to the president’s brain.

In the press conference, Leavitt also addressed Friday’s Washington Post story by Alex Horton and Ellen Nakashima claiming that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered Special Operations commander Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley to “kill everyone” in a small boat off the coast of Venezuela on September 2. After a first strike left two survivors clinging to burning wreckage, Bradley ordered a second strike that killed the survivors.

This so-called double tap has been widely condemned as unlawful and a war crime, although Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth yesterday appeared to make fun of those concerns. He posted an AI-faked cover of a children’s book featuring Franklin the Turtle with the title “Franklin Targets Narco Terrorists.” It showed the fake Franklin in a military vest and helmet at the open door of a helicopter, firing what appears to be a rocket launcher at a burning small boat with a person and bundles in it while two other boats with armed men and bundles converge nearby. Above the image, the post read: “For your Christmas wish list…”

Hegseth might think targeting survivors is funny, but he’s about the only one who does. A strike on survivors who pose no threat is outside the bounds even of the administration’s own assertion that it can kill civilians it claims are “narco terrorists” who threaten the United States. That assertion itself has met significant disagreement from legal experts. But as Talking Points Memo’s David Kurtz wrote today, the September 2 double tap that killed the two men “would be a violation of the laws of war even under the administration’s own self-justifying description of its campaign as an armed conflict with ‘narcoterrorists.’”

The development is so alarming that there has been bipartisan outcry among lawmakers. Democrats have spoken out forcefully, while the Republican chairs of the House and Senate Armed Services committees, Representative Mike Rogers (R-MI) and Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS), have also publicly vowed to conduct oversight not just of the September 2 strike but of the entire operation. Representative Mike Turner (R-OH) explained: “There are very serious concerns in Congress about the attacks on the so-called drug boats down in the Caribbean and the Pacific, and the legal justification that’s been provided. But this is completely outside of anything that’s been discussed with Congress, and there is an ongoing investigation.”

Senator Angus King (I-ME), a lawyer who sits on both the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee, told CNN’s Kate Bolduan that “the law is clear. If the facts are as have been alleged, that there was a second strike specifically to kill the survivors in the water, that’s a stone cold war crime. It’s also murder. So the real question is who gave which orders, when were they given, and that’s what we’re going to get to the bottom of in the Congress…. It’s really a factual question. The law is totally clear.”

Today, Leavitt told reporters the administration believes the strike was lawful because it “was conducted in self defense to protect Americans and vital United States interests.” This justification would permit the president, or those acting in his name, to be judge, jury, and executioner without regard to the law.

But Leavitt was careful to distance both the president and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth from the order. When asked by a reporter, “Does the administration deny that that second strike happened, or did it happen and the administration denies that Secretary Hegseth gave the order?” she said: “The latter is true.” She attributed the orders of September 2 to Admiral Bradley, appearing to be setting him up for underbussing.

This evening, Hegseth pushed Bradley under, posting: “Admiral Mitch Bradley is an American hero, a true professional, and has my 100% support. I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made—on the September 2 mission and all others since.” Commentator Brandon Friedman promptly posted: “Hegseth is very transparently blaming a Navy admiral for his own decision. Let this be a lesson for every other military officer: The Trump administration will issue unlawful orders, then blame you for following them.”

Hegseth’s Franklin post to dismiss what is shaping up to look like a war crime is an excellent illustration of this administration’s focus on their fantasy of what strength looks like. In The Atlantic today, national security scholar Tom Nichols called out Hegseth, the secretary of defense of the United States of America, for acting like “a sneering, spoiled punk who has been caught doing wrong and is now daring the local fuzz to take him in and risk the anger of his rich dad—a role fulfilled by Donald Trump, in this case.”

Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ), whom the administration recently threatened to court martial and execute for recording a video to remind service members they must not follow an illegal order, called Hegseth “unqualified” for his job. “He runs around on a stage talking about lethality and warrior ethos and killing people.” But, Kelly said, “the most competent, capable military this planet has ever seen” needs direction about “mission and accountability and the rule of law and training,” as well as being “equipped to do really hard jobs.”

“[I]nstead,” Kelly said, “he runs around on a stage like he’s a 12-year-old playing army. And it is ridiculous, it is embarrassing, and I can’t imagine what our allies think of looking at that guy in this job, one of the most important jobs in our country…. He is in the national command authority for nuclear weapons. And last night, he’s putting out on the internet turtles with rocket-propelled grenades…. This is the secretary of defense. This is not a serious person. He should have been fired after Signalgate. And then every single day after that.”

Hegseth is not the only Trump appointee unqualified for their job. Today a federal appeals court upheld a lower court ruling that Alina Habba, whom Trump placed in the position of acting U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey, was appointed unlawfully. Trump appointed her to a 120-day acting appointment, after which the district court judges control the spot until the Senate confirms a new U.S. attorney. The judges rejected Habba, who has no experience as a prosecutor, and instead selected Desiree Leigh Grace, an experienced prosecutor, to lead the office. Attorney General Pam Bondi then fired Grace and maneuvered Habba back into control of the office.

“It is apparent that the current administration has been frustrated by some of the legal and political barriers to getting its appointees in place,” wrote Judge D. Michael Fisher in the opinion. But the judges say Trump cannot just get his way by ignoring the law.

Last week a federal judge found that Trump’s appointment of Lindsey Halligan to the post of U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia was illegal and threw out the cases she had brought against former FBI director James Comey and New York attorney general Letitia James. Erica Orden of Politico noted today that federal judges have also found illegal Trump’s appointments of U.S. attorneys for the Central District of California and the District of Nevada.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN