The “Elephant in the Room” Just Hit 59 Percent
The polite phase is over. Almost six in ten of us now say the president doesn’t have the mental sharpness to do his job. Read that again. We are not whispering it on cable panels or burying it in opinion sections anymore. We are saying it on the record, into a phone, to a pollster.
The fresh numbers come from a Washington Post survey conducted with ABC News and Ipsos, and they aren’t subtle. Fifty-nine percent of us say Donald Trump does not have the mental sharpness it takes to lead the country. Fifty-five percent say he is not in good enough physical health to serve. Fifty-four percent say he is not a strong leader. And maybe the sharpest finding of the bunch: 67 percent say Trump does not carefully consider important decisions before making them. That last one cuts deep because it isn’t really about age. It’s about how he governs.
The shape of these numbers should feel familiar. They look a lot like the polling that ended Joe Biden’s reelection campaign before it really started. In February 2022, around the same stretch of his term, 54 percent of voters doubted Biden’s mental sharpness. Trump is already past that mark, and he turns eighty in June. We were sold a steadier hand. The product hasn’t matched the packaging.
What’s putting people on edge isn’t just the slips, though there are plenty of those. It’s the late night Truth Social posts threatening Iran. It’s the public demand for “complete and total control of Greenland” in a letter so strange that even members of Congress on the foreign affairs committee called it the ramblings of a man who has lost touch with reality. It’s calling current press secretary Karoline Leavitt by the name of Kellyanne Conway, an adviser who left his orbit years ago. It’s mixing up Iceland and Greenland during an actual international standoff. Any one of these on its own is forgivable. Stacked up, they read like a pattern.
And the cost of that pattern isn’t theoretical. The Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint where about a fifth of the world’s oil normally passes, sits closed to commercial traffic. Half of us in the survey expect gas prices to climb further over the next year. Sixty-one percent say the Iran war has increased the threat of terrorism against us at home. These are not decisions that tolerate impulse posts at 2 a.m. They require someone who can sit through a security briefing without nodding off, which Trump openly admits doing during cabinet meetings because, in his words, they are boring as hell.
There’s a temptation to treat all of this as another round of partisan ping pong. When Biden was the one struggling, Republicans cataloged every stumble. When Trump’s poll numbers slip, they call the pollster biased. Democrats run the same play in reverse. But fitness for the job is not actually a partisan question. The job involves a nuclear arsenal, an economy threaded together by tariffs and threats, and a war that keeps widening. We need the person in that chair to be operating at full strength. Most of us no longer believe that’s true.
So what do we do with that information? The 25th Amendment exists, but Congress is not riding in to save anyone. The cabinet is not going to vote against the man who hired them. The next time we collectively get a say is November of next year, and that’s a long road to walk while losing confidence in the driver.
What we can do is stop pretending. Stop normalizing the late night posts. Stop translating word salads into policy positions. Demand fuller medical disclosures and more public appearances. We picked this presidency. The least we can do now is watch it with our eyes wide open. Go beyond the headlines…
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