Fully occupying the cover of the January 15 New Yorker is a Barry Blitt cartoon of Donald Trump. With his foam-board red tie forever pointing down, this Trump is definitely bigger than Elvis, goose-stepping Mussolini-style into 2024. Despite his swollen presence that seems to have displaced all the world’s crises, Trump’s extended soliloquies at his endless rallies have people wondering whether he’s losing his grip on reality.

We know he had one of those grips when young, in the seventies and early eighties, and was able to rationalize his motives to the press to get press. But now he slurs vowels and mispronounces words in what the New Republic has called a “rambling, incoherent auctioneer style.” He mixes up Joe Biden and Barack Obama, Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi. Talking to a National Rifle Association gathering in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on February 9—a Friday night—he said: “I didn’t need this; I had a very nice life. Nice Saturday afternoon. I could tell you, if I weren’t doing this, where I would have been, I would have been in a very nice location.”

His solipsism and chronic laziness with any kind of fact have generated a script of sorts, a giant tinfoil ball of misinformation that he keeps rolling out and adding to. Observers suspect that his Hannibal Lecter spiel originates from his lack of understanding of what “asylum” means in the context of political asylum: he likely thinks it means an immigrant who comes from an insane asylum. His handlers insist that his distracted thinking and his wandering off onto tangents are intentional. They call it “the weave,” but it still doesn’t explain why he seems sedated at his rallies, with the result that he talks much slower and the events go on forever. And yet he still has his agitated fears. We know he is terrified of the celebrity of Taylor Swift being leveraged against him at the polls.

It’s strange to debate whether Donald Trump is a viable human being given that he wholly morphed into a concept while in the White House. When he spoke words and statements that were provably untrue, his defenders in Congress argued that he was establishing the new paradigm of Trumpism, where his way of seeing the world created a larger truth. I suppose they would argue that the “truth” lie in the performance, not the information. Trump has always had to be a performer because he needed to flip that switch in the audience’s mind: not a real estate developer but a real estate tycoon, not a hustler but a visionary, not a shakedown artist but a deal-maker. When asked for a response to Trump’s recent call for Russia to attack NATO countries that don’t pay their dues, Senator Lindsey Graham said, “Give me a break—I mean, it’s Trump.”

But his brain is still a human brain, right?

He seems disinhibited, unfiltered. Inhibitions are the self-control mechanisms we all have that stop us doing things that break the rules of our society. If someone close to you has dementia, you might notice that they stop following these social rules. OK, but Donald Trump has never followed social rules. In 2004, he told Howard Stern on his radio show that it was all right for Stern to call Trump’s daughter Ivanka “a piece of ass.”

He seems aggressive and angry. As a person’s dementia progresses, they may sometimes behave in ways that are physically or verbally aggressive. OK, but Donald Trump has always been aggressive. According to testimony from Cassidy Hutchison, when Attorney General Bill Barr said in December 2020 that there was no widespread voter fraud, Trump threw his plate of food at a wall in the White House dining room, smearing it with ketchup.

He seems to lose track of time. In dementia-related dyschronometria, there is increased damage to the cerebellum and the individual cannot accurately estimate the amount of time that has passed. OK, but Donald Trump always seemed to be living in a bygone era. Well into the 1990s, he behaved as if wealthy people in New York acted as they do in the 1961 movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s. He still rambles on at his rallies about Elvis Presley and a guitar.

What happens when someone who’s always pretending loses his grip? You want to think that the manic desire for deception would lose its autocracy, perhaps causing the scales to fall from the pretender’s eyes. But with someone like Trump, the lies and pretense are the content of his life and thus his only memories; he doesn’t seem to have the words to express reality. Still, when the mind starts to go, that toxic mojo has to get diverted somewhere. You wonder if there is a part of Trump’s pretender’s mind that is starting to turn against the relentlessness of the hate and anger that have driven his political career. You wonder if there is something subconscious that is mocking his physically exhausting compulsion to perform.

The same thing happened to Elvis at the end of his life. There’s always been a connection with The King that Trump himself likely planted. As the New York Times reported in 1984, “His smile is an impudent-looking curl of the lip that makes his portrait appear less like the head of a billion-dollar corporation in his office than Elvis Presley in Viva Las Vegas.” Ralph Wolfe Cowan, the same Palm Beach painter of movie stars and Imelda Marcos who created the sepia sunburnt Trump at Mar-a-Lago, also had a crack at The King—not in tennis whites, but in his white Vegas jumpsuit. The painting reportedly hangs at Graceland.

It is an injustice, I know, to compare Trump to Elvis. But the toxicity of celebrity has the same effect, regardless of where one’s fame falls along the food chain. Elvis was famous for taking all kinds of drugs, whereas Trump has staked his brand on nothing but Diet Coke and junk food. But both took on the weight of the world’s attention. When Elvis was running out of road with his substance abuse, he took to mocking himself on stage, mocking his celebrity. In 1977, you wouldn’t say “his brand,” but if we’d had that concept, Elvis would be the first one using it. In one of his last performances of “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”—the song where he ad libs speaking tenderly to a woman—he said this:

I wonder if you’re lonesome tonight. You know, someone said the world’s a stage and each of us play a part. Fate played me plahplahplahwahplahplah plplplplpl plplpl plus tax. You read your lines so lever cleverly eh ha ha and never missed a cue ha ha and came back too. You forgot the words. You seemed to change, you fool. Hhhh. You acted strange and why I’ll never know. Huh why I ever did it. Honey. Who am I talkin’ too? You lied when you said you loved me. You s . . . I had no cause to doubt you. But I wurr ruwruwruwruwruwrather go on hearing you lie ha ha ha, than to go on living without you. Now the stage is bare and I’m standing there without any hair uh naw. If you won’t come back to me huh huh aw to heck with it.

It’s hard to imagine Donald Trump ever having the same kind of biting self-awareness, even in a state of dementia. Since he was a young man, Elvis Presley the trusting innocent had been cruelly manipulated by the bloodsucking Colonel Tom Parker, a former carnival huckster. Trump in his late twenties was mentored by the bloodsucking Roy Cohn, the lawyer who taught him to countersue any time he was sued, to attack and never apologize. When Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, Trump blew a gasket and reportedly asked, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”

“Thirty years’ dead from AIDS” would be the answer. When in 1986 it became apparent that Cohn had AIDS and not the liver cancer that he claimed, Trump dropped him cold, after a close professional relationship of 13 years. According to Trump: The Deals and the Downfall, Wayne Barrett’s 1992 book, the dying Cohn conceded that “Donald pisses ice water.” So I suppose the morally glaring difference between Elvis and Trump is that Trump has always been his own Colonel Tom Parker, his own bloodsucking huckster for a fantasy Donald Trump, always punching up his fantasy self to punch others down. Elvis died at 42, the age at which Trump “threw himself a lavish party at his casino called Trump’s Castle, replete with dancers, a magician and a replica spaceship hovering above Trump and his wife on the stage amid lasers and smoke.” This was in 1988, the year Trump made one after another disastrous decision that led to a cascade of bankruptcies in 1991 and 1992. For Roy Cohn’s protégé, the “impudent-looking curl of the lip” had a long way to go. §