Last week, after Donald Trump issued genocidal threats toward Iran and made strange comments at the White House Easter Egg Roll, Rep. Jamie Raskin decided to contact the president’s physician, seeking a “comprehensive cognitive and neurological evaluation.”

This week, the Maryland Democrat, who serves as the ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee, took another step down the same path, unveiling a proposal to establish a Commission on Presidential Capacity to Discharge the Powers and Duties of Office. The measure, which was unveiled with 50 Democratic co-sponsors, would be responsible for determining whether the president is incapacitated “either mentally or physically” and unable to discharge the powers and duties of office, as called for in the 25th Amendment.

The effort comes just days after the president used his social media platform to promote an image in which he appeared to present himself as some kind of American Jesus and then said the AI-generated portrait showed him “as a doctor, making people better.”

Few would argue Raskin’s effort stands a realistic chance of success. But arguably that’s not the point: A great many Trump critics hope to generate attention and public conversation about the president’s mental stability (or lack thereof), and proposals like these help advance that discussion.

Indeed, the day before Raskin unveiled his proposal, The New York Times published a striking report with an unsubtle headline: “Trump’s Erratic Behavior and Extreme Comments Revive Mental Health Debate.” From the article:

President Trump’s erratic behavior and extreme comments in recent days and weeks have turbocharged the crazy-like-a-fox-or-just-plain-crazy debate that has followed him on the national political stage for a decade.

A series of disjointed, hard-to-follow and sometimes-profane statements capped by his ‘a whole civilization will die tonight’ threat to wipe Iran off the map last week and his head-spinning attack on the ‘WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy’ pope on Sunday night have left many with the impression of a deranged autocrat mad with power.

The Times highlighted a lawyer who used to work with Trump, who described the president as “a man who is clearly insane.” It also noted a recent comment from Stephanie Grisham, a former White House press secretary who worked for Trump in his first term, who wrote online last week that her former boss is “clearly not well.”

The day after the Times’ report ran, The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols wrote a related piece, arguing, “The American people must not look away, as they have done so often in the past. They must pay attention to the president’s deterioration.”

I am mindful of the debate about whether Trump has been unhinged for years and his latest signs of mental incapacity are simply more of the same, or whether his condition is actually getting worse.

Indeed, I remember the Times publishing a front-page report in October 2024, about a month before Election Day, that highlighted a variety of situations in which the Republican “seemed confused, forgetful, incoherent or disconnected from reality.” The same article added, “He rambles, he repeats himself, he roams from thought to thought — some of them hard to understand, some of them unfinished, some of them factually fantastical. He voices outlandish claims that seem to be made up out of whole cloth. He digresses into bizarre tangents about golf, about sharks, about his own ‘beautiful’ body.”

A year and a half later, is Trump worse? It’s hard to say with confidence.

What’s easier to say with certainty, however, is that this entire line of inquiry is a disaster for the White House. Trump is woefully unpopular; he has no idea what to do with a struggling economy; and the destabilizing war he started in Iran for reasons he’s unable to explain clearly isn’t going according to plan — to the extent that the president even had a rudimentary plan at all.

It’s against this backdrop that the conversation about his mental fitness is getting louder.

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