Trump Has a Toddler Brain

A Developmental Assessment of the 47th President of the United States, Conducted Against the Standard Milestones for Children Aged Two to Four, With Findings

Let us begin with the ketchup.

In December 2020, in the small dining room off the Oval Office, the President of the United States was informed by his attorney general that the Justice Department had found no fraud sufficient to change the election, and he responded, according to the sworn testimony of a White House aide who was asked to help clean it up, by throwing his lunch at the wall. The plate broke. The ketchup ran down the wall, and the aide took a towel to it, and the president of the United States went on being president, and nobody in the room said what every parent in America said when they heard the story, which is that this is what a two-year-old does when the cup is the wrong color.

Pediatricians have a checklist for this. It is called a developmental milestone schedule, it is handed to parents at well visits, and it describes, age by age, what a child should be doing by now and what should have stopped. We have applied it to the subject. The findings follow, in the order the schedule presents them, with the standard note that regression is normal during periods of stress, such as the arrival of a new sibling or the loss of both houses of Congress, and with the reminder throughout that the subject is eighty years old, weighs what he says he weighs, and has the nuclear codes.

The attention span. A toddler attends to a thing for roughly as long as it is moving, bright, or about him. In 2017 the National Security Council learned to keep briefings to a single page, to put as many pictures as the page would hold, and, by the account of a Reuters report that nobody in the building disputed, to put his name in as many paragraphs as possible so he would keep reading, which is the editorial formula for a board book in which the protagonist is a duck, except the duck was the commander in chief and the pages were about Syria. His daily schedule, when it leaked in 2019, showed roughly sixty percent of the working day blocked out as “Executive Time,” which the White House described as unstructured and which the leaked documents showed to be television. Executive Time is the phrase a four-year-old would come up with for the hours between lunch and dinner if a four-year-old had a communications director. He has fallen asleep at his own criminal trial, at a Pentagon memorial, and in the Oval Office during a cabinet meeting with the cameras rolling. He did not fall asleep during Sunday’s 60 Minutes interview, because it was about him, which is the one subject on which his attention has never once been observed to lapse.

The language. The checklist asks whether the child uses two-word sentences at two, three-word sentences at three, and tells a simple story at four. Independent analyses of his speeches have placed his vocabulary and sentence structure at a fourth-grade reading level, the lowest of any president measured, and that was 2016. The structure since then has moved toward what the schedule would call parallel narration: a story begun, abandoned for a second story about the first story’s audience, abandoned for a third about a shark and a battery, returned to the first with the subject changed. He calls this “the weave.” A speech pathologist would call it something else, and this publication does not diagnose, so we will say only that the Gettysburg speech, the one about the Civil War being “so horrible, but so beautiful,” ran for a very long time and arrived nowhere, with the specific confidence of a child who has learned that an adult will keep listening if he keeps talking.

The checklist’s language entry also asks whether the child repeats words he has heard. He has told the story of the cognitive test, the one with the lion and the camel and the five words, at rallies, at press conferences, on Fox, and in a conversation with a reporter who had not asked, with mounting pride each time, apparently unaware that the test exists to screen for the thing he is proving he does not have by being proud of it. “Person, woman, man, camera, TV,” he said, and then he said it again, in order, and looked around for the sticker, and the room, as the room always does, let him.

Object permanence. By two, a child understands that a thing still exists when it leaves his sight. By three he understands that the thing had a history before he saw it. The subject arrived at a healthcare system that had been debated for a century and announced, “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.” He arrived at a pandemic and asked whether the virus might be treated with light brought inside the body, or disinfectant by injection, at a podium, on television, in front of the doctors, with the specific brightness of a child who has just had an idea and cannot imagine that anyone has had it before and ruled it out. He asked, in a 2019 briefing, whether hurricanes could be stopped with nuclear weapons, a question that required the United States government to hold a meeting in order to answer no, and when this was reported he said he had never asked it. Two weeks later the Sharpie came out and extended a hurricane into Alabama, in a line drawn by hand on a federal forecast map, because the map had disagreed with him and the map was within reach, and for several days the state of Alabama was under threat from a storm by executive order of a marker. The National Weather Service office in Birmingham had to issue a statement reassuring Alabamians that the hurricane did not know who the president was.

The possessions. The checklist describes, at two, the stage in which every object in the room is the child’s. The classified documents went to the bathroom at Mar-a-Lago because they were his. The silverware goes in the trash because it was his to finish with. On Thursday, two days after accepting the results of the midterm election, he posted that the votes cast for the other Dan Sullivan in Alaska “should be immediately given to the REAL Dan Sullivan,” which is a sentence about votes that can only be written by a mind for which votes are objects, objects are possessions, and possessions go to whoever wants them most loudly. Alaska law has no procedure for this. The toddler schedule does. It is called sharing, and the page says it should be emerging by three.

The trucks. In May 2017 a group of truck drivers visited the White House and the president climbed into the cab of an eighteen-wheeler parked on the South Lawn, gripped the wheel, and honked the horn, twice, and the photograph of his face in that moment, the mouth open, the eyes elsewhere, the hands at ten and two on a vehicle that was not moving, is the single most honest picture ever taken of him: a man who has at last found the one lever of government that does exactly what it says. In October 2024 he put on a safety vest and climbed into a garbage truck. In March 2025 he sat in a Tesla on the driveway and read the price off a card. He wanted a military parade after he saw one in Paris in 2017, was told no, and got it on his seventy-ninth birthday, with tanks, and for his eightieth he had a cage fight on the South Lawn. He also likes the big red button on the Resolute desk, which summons a Diet Coke, and he demonstrates it for guests, and it is the only button in the building whose consequences he has ever fully understood, which is why it is the only one he presses with joy.

The fairness. At three the checklist expects a child to begin to grasp that a rule applies to him as well as to others. He has lost an election and declared it stolen, lost a civil case and called the jury a hoax, lost a fraud trial and called the judge corrupt, lost thirty-four criminal counts and called the law unconstitutional, lost a midterm and said “Yes, sure I’ll accept them,” and then, forty-eight hours later, demanded that the one race he cared about be handed over because “the Election is over.” When he loses, the game was rigged. When he wins, the game was fair, and also he won by more than they are saying. Every parent has refereed this match. Most of them ended it by taking the board away. He solved that one in his second term by taking the referee.

The tantrums. The ketchup has company. Staff have described thrown papers, thrown phones, a thrown lunch, and a Twitter account whose output between midnight and five a.m. was, for four years, the national equivalent of the sound through the wall of a child who will not go down, if the child had eighty-eight million followers and the child’s crib were wired to the Pentagon. He fired his FBI director by television, his secretary of state by tweet, and his defense secretary by tweet, in each case without telling the man first, because telling him first would require the face-to-face encounter the checklist files under handling another person’s disappointment, which it expects by five and which the subject has not reached by eighty. Last week, asked whether he was considering firing his defense secretary, he said no and then spent two days letting the reports run that he was, which is the toddler’s other tantrum, the silent one, where the plate stays on the table but everyone can see it being considered.

The make-believe. Pretend play is a milestone, and the checklist is explicit that it is healthy at three and four. He invented a publicist named John Barron to call reporters and praise him, an imaginary friend who was also him, and then named a son Barron so the imaginary friend would have somewhere to live. He put a fake Time magazine cover on the walls of his golf clubs, which is the adult version of taping your own drawing to the refrigerator and telling guests the refrigerator put it there. He told a crowd that the crowd was the biggest ever, in front of photographs that it was not. He said he’d “have to do it again” on a war his own vice president, that same day, said had just cost them the Congress. He is, right now, the first president in American history to have offered a cabinet-adjacent job by social media post to a cage-fight promoter who had not been asked, in a message that ended “Dana, please take the job!”, which is how a four-year-old addresses a stuffed animal he has just appointed to the cabinet.

The audience. The schedule says a child of two plays beside other children and a child of four plays with them. He has never done either. He performs for them. The rallies are the clearest evidence, two hours of a man telling a room what the room thinks of him, but the small version is better: an aide, documented by this publication in July, follows him with a portable printer and hands him favorable articles on paper, in gold clips, throughout the day, like a bedtime story in which the baby is the author, the subject, and the publisher. He needs to be read to. He needs it to be about him. He needs it on paper because the screen is for the other thing, which is television, which is the other way of being read to, and which, unlike the aide, cannot be fired for printing the wrong page.

The finding. Against the standard schedule, the subject presents the attention span of a two-year-old, the language of a four-year-old on a good day, the concept of ownership of a two-year-old, the concept of fairness of a three-year-old who has not yet had it explained, the emotional regulation of a child in the stage pediatricians euphemistically call “big feelings,” the make-believe of a four-year-old, and the need for an audience of a child who has just learned that the adults laugh when he does the thing. No diagnosis is offered here, only a checklist, available at any pediatrician’s office, written for a person roughly one-fortieth his age, which he fails, and on which the pediatrician would, at this point, gently ask to speak to the parents, who in this case are two hundred and fifty million registered voters and a Senate.

The one place the comparison fails is the one that matters. A toddler grows out of it. The checklist exists because the behaviors on it are supposed to end, and they end because a parent, or a teacher, or a room full of other children, says no and means it, and the child learns that the no is real. He is eighty. He has never once heard it from anyone with the power to make it stick. The ketchup is still on the wall, and the aide is still holding the towel, and everyone in the building is still waiting for someone else to be the adult.