Is Donald Trump mentally fit to be president?

The hashtag #TrumpMeltdown is trending on Twitter this week following extraordinary public outbursts from the US president.

Standing alongside Finnish President Sauli Niinisto at two White House press conferences on Wednesday, Trump’s tone was “frantic, frenzied and apocalyptic”, says The Guardian’s David Smith.

In a series of confusing and seemingly confused remarks, Trump insisted that he didn’t ask for a moat for his Mexico border wall - as reported by The New York Times - because he didn’t know what a moat was.

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“It’s written by Washington Post [sic] people, so you know it’s inaccurate,” the president told reporters. “You know it’s probably a fraud…OK, ready? That I wanted a wall, but I wanted a moat. A moat – whatever that is. It’s not a word I used, but they used it. A moat.”

He also brought up the Mueller report, saying: “We had the Mueller collusion delusion, OK? That went on for years. And that’s finally done. No collusion, no obstruction, no nothing.” In fact, the report identified ten possible instances of Trump attempting to obstruct justice.

In another bizarre move, the president attacked Adam Schiff, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, who has given testimony about Trump at a congressional hearing. “We don’t call him ‘Shifty Schiff’ for nothing. He’s a shifty, dishonest guy,” the US leader said.

Schiff must have had a “mental breakdown”, he added.

Not only was Trump’s performance alarming, writes The Guardian’s Smith, “it was also just downright strange, even avant-garde. It was Samuel Beckett. It was Marcel Duchamp. It was John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s bed-in. Trump invited Niinisto to take a front row seat in his theatre of the absurd.”

And while Trump insists there are “those that think I’m a very stable genius”, some commentators have suggested that the opposite could be the case - that the president is mentally unfit.

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Could Trump have dementia?

“If Donald Trump were your father, you would run, not walk, to a neurologist for an evaluation of his cognitive health,” says John Gartner in USA Today.

The 73-year-old president has repeatedly displayed memory lapses and misstatements during public appearances, including recently referring to Apple CEO Tim Cook as “Tim Apple” and to the wildfire-ravaged California town of Paradise as “Pleasure”.

Earlier this year, Trump said his father was “born in a very wonderful place in Germany”. His father was actually born in New York, while his grandfather was from Germany.

In his book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Michael Wolff recounts an incident in 2017 at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort when Trump failed to recognise “a succession of old friends”.

That same year, Former congressman Joe Scarborough said that the president’s mental state reminded him of his mother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s. “It’s getting worse, and not a single person who works for him doesn’t know he has early signs of dementia,” Scarborough claimed.

However, as the Alzheimer’s Society points out, dementia is diagnosed through testing by medical professionals, rather than by examining TV blunders. “Regardless of how you feel about the president, mixing the medical with the political is a bad idea. In fact, nobody – public figure or not – should have their mental health diagnosed from a distance,” says the London-based charity.

Does he have a personality disorder?

“You don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, and you don’t need to be a mental-health professional to see that something’s very seriously off with Trump,” writes attorney George Conway, husband of senior White House aide Kellyanne Conway, in an article for The Atlantic.

Conway suggests that the pressures of an upcoming re-election campaign and the newly launched impeachment inquiry have prompted a “recent escalation in Trump’s bizarre behaviour”.

In an article for The New York Times last year, an anonymous White House insider wrote that “given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment” - the clause of the US Constitution saying that a president can be removed for “inability to discharge the powers and duties” of the office.

Another Trump aide told Business Insider last month: “No one knows what to expect from him anymore… his mood changes from one minute to the next based on some headline or tweet, and the next thing you know his entire schedule gets tossed out the window. He’s losing his shit.”

Putting such claims aside, Alex Green of Boston-based news station WBUR argues that “instead of evaluating Trump’s mindset, we should look at where his actions definitively violate our laws. Thankfully, that is where the current impeachment proceedings will begin.”

And “dismissing President Trump as mad or ill is a major mistake”, adds The Washington Post, noting that some of the most revered past US leaders, including Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, are now thought to have suffered from mental disorders.

To casually ascribe poor behaviour or character flaws to mental illness involves “reproducing ugly tropes that have long been used to discount the contributions of people with disabilities”, the newspaper warns.