Author Jonathan V. Last, editor of the center-right news site The Bulwark, says President Donald Trump is exhibiting what he calls a “shocking” level of “noticeable mental decline,” citing the president’s remarks during his Monday speech to McDonald’s franchise owners and suppliers as his evidence.

Several times he quotes Trump at length, including here:

“But I want to thank, uh, as you know the famous Sundar and Sergey, Sergey Brin. These are two guys that own and run a place called Google. They called me the following day after I did that McDonald’s little um, skit, because it was it wasn’t a commercial. You got it for nothing. It was a skit and they told me that it and I didn’t know them. I just I said, ‘Who are they?’ They own Google. I said, ‘That’s pretty good. That’s not bad.'”

Trump appeared to be referring to his McDonald’s drive-through event last year, which was a photo-op, not a skit or a commercial. It was deemed “condescending” by an MS NOW opinion writer and “blue-collar drag” by “Late Show” host Stephen Colbert.

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“And uh that it received more hits than anything else in the history of Google and that records, it still stands,” Trump said.

Last asks, did the Google CEO and co-founder actually call Trump that day last year?

“Did they tell him that in just twenty-four hours he’d gotten more ‘hits’ than anything else in the history of Google? More than COVID? More than January 6th? More than Taylor Swift? What is a ‘hit’ on Google,” Last asked.

Last quoted Trump again:

“I’ll bet they use real sugar in your Coca-Cola. You know, they didn’t in the United States. I said to the head of Coca-Cola, you got to go to sugar. They do in other countries. And you know what? They went to sugar. Isn’t that nice? I said, ‘You got to go to sugar.’ Just like I said, why is the Gulf of Mexico called the Gulf of Mexico? I said, ‘We’re changing the name.’ And now it’s the Gulf of America. Has nothing to do with McDonald’s, but maybe it does because it’s very nice cycle.”

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Last noted that Coca-Cola “has not reverted to sugar in the flagship product it sells in the United States.”

And he called Trump’s remarks “nonsense.”

He continued into Trump’s comments about the time he served a few customers at a McDonald’s drive-thru, in what was a staged event.

Last quoted Trump telling the McDonald’s event attendees:

“I’ve been on that line many times. Actually, that line was incredible in the commercial. Right. It wasn’t a commercial. It was about, but, they have the line. The people had no idea. So I made the French fries. The guy was really good. He had a great wrist. He was, nyee, ‘Sir,’ he was going like, ‘Sir.'”

“Yeah. It was not that easy but I got it sort of finally. Not the greatest but I pouring it in asking him all sorts of stupid questions but it was very interesting. Amazing, a little thing is not, it’s a little complex, right?”

By the end, Last declared Trump has “a playlist of grievances and stories in his head,” and “what seems to be happening here is that Trump can’t tell his stories apart. He starts talking about flow restrictions on faucets, which brings him to water. But the word ‘water’ triggers another of his obsessions—water supply issues and deliveries to farms in the American West.”

“And,” Last concluded, Trump’s “brain now mushes these two stories together into a single, unintelligible blob.”

The title of Last’s piece is “Sundown.”

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Scuttling bipartisan efforts to extend the Affordable Care Act subsidies that are set to expire at the end of the year, President Donald Trump on Tuesday declared he will not support any legislation to do so. The withdrawal of the Obamacare subsidies has sent next year’s premiums soaring for millions of Americans, and millions are expected to lose coverage due to the high cost.

In an all-caps post on his Truth Social website, the president announced that the only health care he would support “is sending the money directly back to the people, with nothing going to the big, fat, rich insurance companies.”

“The people will be allowed to negotiate and buy their own, much better, insurance. Power to the people!” he added.

Insurance companies are not known for negotiating premiums, and individual policies historically are far more expensive than group policies, such as those obtained through an employer or via the Obamacare exchanges.

READ MORE: GOP Fractures Reveal Fierce Internal Fight Over Post-Trump Identity

Noting that “senators are preparing to tee up a vote on the issue,” Bloomberg News reported that Trump’s message is now “complicating his party’s efforts to address health care costs.”

During the federal government  shutdown, Democrats highlighted the issue of skyrocketing premiums and negotiated a deal with Senate Republican Majority Leader John Thune for a vote to extend the subsidies.

“With millions of Americans facing a potential hike in their premiums and with concerns about affordability front and center among the electorate, Democrats are seizing on the issue,” Bloomberg noted. “Republicans now face the challenging prospect of either bucking the president and extending subsidies or finding another solution to the issue of health-care costs, an issue that has long vexed lawmakers.”

House Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries responded, saying: “Republicans created this healthcare crisis, and they continue to try to rip affordable healthcare away from the American people,” according to Bloomberg News’ Erik Wasson. “They are who they are, and the American people know it, and they’re gonna pay the price.”

Politico reported on Tuesday that a “senior White House official said the Trump administration intends to put forward a health bill and left open the possibility of using the fast-track legislative process of reconciliation for passage of health or tariff legislation.”

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Critics blasted the president’s refusal to support extending subsidies.

“He’s for them, Not for you,” declared U.S. Senator Ruben Gallego (D-AZ).

“Trump’s priority isn’t your health or your costs, it’s his ego,” commented House Ways and Means Committee Democrats. “He’ll watch your health care costs triple just to erase the name Obamacare.”

“Between their trillion dollar cut to Medicaid and their elimination of boosted ACA tax credits, Donald Trump and the GOP will be responsible for millions of Americans losing health coverage and tens of millions more paying much higher costs,” wrote economic policy expert Michael Linden. “Crazy, totally crazy.”

“Senate Democrats who voted to end the shutdown got played. Shocking,” remarked political strategist Andrew Laureti.

“Trump’s made some curious decisions in the past few weeks, but nothing more consequential than deciding that instead of finding some middle ground on Ocare subsidies they’re gonna go in the entire opposite direction and try to jam through their own health care bill,” The Bulwark’s Sam Stein noted, responding to the Politico report. “Wild stuff.”

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Ten months into his second term, critics say President Donald Trump appears weakened, and Republicans who once moved in lockstep are now splintering into competing MAGA factions.

Trump currently sits on the worst polling averages of his presidency, according to data from The New York Times. The president’s “dramatic U-turn” on the release of the Epstein files — the result, critics say, of a wave of House Republicans prepared to defy his wishes — is being seen as a watershed moment. His once loyal foot soldier, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), has marched away, or ahead, of him on key issues, including affordability and the Epstein files.

Some, including Greene, say he lost his way by focusing too much on foreign policy and not enough on the promises that put him back in the White House, namely, lowering the cost of living.

“Trump is without question still the titular head of the Republican Party and leader of the America First and MAGA movement,” Republican strategist Dennis Lennox told The Washington Post. “But after a decade, there are new faces giving voice to the element that wants Trump to focus more on domestic issues.”

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“Lennox cited a ‘growing split’ among factions of the conservative movement ‘on a multitude of issues,'” added the Post, which noted that Trump is currently is a “weakened position.”

Meanwhile, The Hill sees current events as the “fight to define what the political right will stand for after President Trump leaves office.”

MAGA leaders like Greene are carving out a path, and are not afraid to criticize Trump, which comes at a cost. Trump has branded Greene a traitor, she said on Tuesday, before she lashed out.

“Let me tell you what a traitor is. A traitor is an American that serves foreign countries and themselves, a patriot is an American that serves the United States of America and Americans like the women standing behind me,” Greene said, according to BBC News.

Others, like U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), rumored to be considering another presidential run in 2028, are using the party’s battle with antisemitism as a tool to rebrand himself.

The weeks-old crisis at the Heritage Foundation — its president declared support for former Fox News host Tucker Carlson after he gave what some saw as a softball interview to far right extremist leader Nick Fuentes — has helped Republicans like Cruz take a stand against antisemitism. Fuentes is widely seen as promoting Christian nationalism, white supremacy, racism, antisemitism, misogyny, and Islamophobia.

On Sunday, President Trump took the opposing view, praising Carlson.

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“I found him to be good,” Trump said of Carlson. “I mean, he said good things about me over the years. And he’s, I think he’s good.”

The off-year elections earlier this month, where Democrats sharply beat Republicans by margins more than some expected, were “a wake-up call to Republicans that without Trump on the ballot to motivate voters, they may have to figure out a new political coalition,” The Hill noted.

“There was sort of a vibe shift on the right where it became completely apparent to everybody that Trump, who’s a dominating figure on the right, was not going to be here forever,” Tim Chapman, president of the Advancing American Freedom think tank founded by former Vice President Mike Pence, told The Hill. “A lot of the policy objectives that we’re pursuing right now, many of them come from Trump personally. And so there’s a question as to what animates the next political coalition.”

Vice President JD Vance is seen as a likely heir to the Trump MAGA movement. But as Chapman told The Hill, “a lot of conservatives, who have very much for very good reasons, wanted to give the Trump administration the benefit of the doubt are now 10 months in and are very concerned about what they’re seeing, especially on the economic policy.”

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