Trump s Emotional Incontinence

Donald Trump’s Emotional Incontinence Is Increasing with Time
Urinary incontinence
Uncontrolled leakage of urine

Pseudobulbar affect (PBA), or emotional incontinence, is a type of affect disorder connected to neurological conditions. It is characterized by brief, intense, uncontrollable episodes of crying or laughing. The affect is triggered by emotionally trivial or neutral stimuli that are not necessarily related to the emotional state.[1]

PBA is a consequence of another neurologic disorder or brain injury. Patients may find themselves crying uncontrollably at something that is only slightly sad, being unable to stop themselves for several minutes. Episodes may also be mood-incongruent: a patient may laugh uncontrollably when angry or frustrated, for example.[2] Sometimes, the episodes may switch between emotional states, resulting in the patient crying uncontrollably before dissolving into fits of laughter.

PBA is a severe disruption of momentary emotional expression rather than the persistent, excessive, and pervasive disturbances characteristic of mood disorders.[1] Thus, it is to be distinguished from emotional lability as it occurs with depression.[3] PBA, emotional lability, and irritability are subsumed under the term emotional dyscontrol.[3]


***

Plaques put up by the Trump administration’s Presidential Walk of Fame are seen at the White House, December 17, 2025.

Plaques installed as part of the Trump administration’s Presidential Walk of Fame are seen along the White House Colonnade, December 17, 2025. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)


By Jeffrey Blehar
December 18, 2025 11:47 AM

In late September Donald Trump added a so-called “Presidential Walk of Fame” to the exterior hallway of the White House, an area of the building used almost exclusively by staffers and visiting foreign dignitaries. It seemed like a curious addition to suddenly make — keep in mind, this was before he surprise-demolished the East Wing and threw up resort-style gold-plated labels outside every room in the building.


Top Stories
The Lesson of Judge Dugan’s Obstruction Case
Andrew C. McCarthy
Instead of Draining the Swamp, Trump Starts Renaming It After Himself
Jeffrey Blehar
The Bernie Sanders Plan to Sabotage the Future
Rich Lowry
But Trump soon enough revealed why he had created the installation: so that he could use it to insult his political enemies. Trump pointedly replaced Joe Biden’s portrait with a picture of an autopen machine — get it? It was the sort of juvenile gag that might have made an 18-year-old snicker (“LOL, what a dank troll!”) but would have been immediately recognized as beneath the dignity of any other occupant of the Oval Office. Instead, the stunt was dismissed with eye-rolls by most commentators as yet another juvenile example of “Trump being Trump.” The autopen scandal was in the news, Trump was feeling punchy — what, you expected dignity from him? At this late date?

Now, as the year comes to an end, Trump faces immense pressure from Democrats and endangered swing-district Republicans alike to extend Biden’s spendthrift Covid-era Obamacare subsidies — government rebates which had the effect of artificially propping up the failing exchanges, which would otherwise be far more expensive under normal market conditions. And naturally, he’s doing what he’s always done in this type of situation: lashing out fruitlessly at the men he believes to be responsible.

Yes, Trump’s brand new Hall of Presidents just got updated this week with a brand new set of explanatory plaques! White House Spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt helpfully clarifies: “The plaques are eloquently written descriptions of each President and the legacy they left behind. As a student of history, many were written directly by the President himself.”


More on
Donald Trump
 
Instead of Draining the Swamp, Trump Starts Renaming It After Himself

Trump Has No Authority to Categorize Fentanyl as a Weapon of Mass Destruction
Trump’s Appalling Reiner Reaction Is a Sign of Something Deeply Wrong
That much is certainly obvious. Have you ever wondered what the correct view of Lyndon Johnson’s presidential legacy was? Or JFK’s? Trump has now had his personal takes on them all — complete with engraved typos — helpfully memorialized on the White House wall for posterity (and visitors) to assess. And naturally, Trump has far more to say about his two recent rivals than any other president; their plaques are the transparent reason for the entire exercise.


Needless to say, they read as unmediated rants. (Biden’s plaque opens with this neutral description: “Sleepy Joe Biden was, by far, the worst President in American History.”) I think my point can be illustrated simply by reproducing the plaque underneath Barack Obama’s portrait. I want to stress that this represents the exact wording and punctuation of the two (!) plaques. President Trump just used taxpayer money to have this engraved:

Barack Hussein Obama was the first Black President, a community organizer, one term Senator from Illinois, and one of the most divisive political figures in American History. As President, he passed the highly ineffective “Unaffordable” Care Act, resulting in his party losing control of both Houses of Congress, and the Election of the largest House Republican majority since 1946. He presided over a stagnant Economy, approved the terrible Iran Nuclear Deal, and signed the one-sided Paris Climate Accords, both of which were later terminated by President Donald J. Trump.


Under Obama, the ISIS Caliphate spread across the Middle East, Libya collapsed into chaos, and Russia invaded the Crimea, in Ukraine. He crippled small businesses with crushing regulation and environmental red tape, devastated American coal miners, and weaponized the IRS and Federal bureaucracies against his political opponents. Obama also spied on the 2016 Presidential Campaign of Donald J. Trump, and presided over the creation of the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, the worst political scandal in American History. His handpicked successor, Hillary Rodham Clinton, would then lose the Presidency to Donald J. Trump.

My first observation is that maybe plaques should have a 240 character limit, like most X accounts. My second observation is that this is probably the first time since the Roman Empire that a leader’s text message to a staffer has been engraved verbatim on the wall of a public building. What is there to say about Trump’s unmistakable grammar and adventurously pseudo-German penchant for capitalizing nouns, other than that man is in desperate need of an editor?


Who does Trump think this trolling pleases? What voters currently wavering from their support for Trump, or the Republican Party in the midterms, will see this news story and think “What a zinger! I’m back on the bandwagon”?

Putting the best possible spin on things, I would imagine that Trump wants MAGA to see this little spectacle as a “sick burn.” Instead, it looks like the pettiest sort of score-settling and an alarming waste of time in a nation with a troubled economic outlook and less than a year until the midterm elections. I return to my old thesis about Trump, that in a weird way he is the most strangely emotionally transparent president we have ever had, his every move easily understood as a reflection of his anxieties that aren’t even that deeply cloaked.


Trump sees his own ruination coming — and sees the upcoming battle over the extension of Obamacare subsidies as perhaps the final fracture point. He is frustrated, pinned, and doing the same thing he always does when he finds himself without any good options: He’s lashing out in a meaninglessly petty tantrum, designed to do nothing except satisfy his own ego. As he sees his vaunted second term founder on the rocks, it probably comforts him to think that he was the hero that “undid” Obama’s presidency, just as he claims he is “undoing” Biden’s.

But he has done no such thing. He has mitigated their damage, to be sure, but not cured it. And more to the point, he has proven utterly incapable of creating as president, incapable of putting in the hard work to build anything of his own — except a ballroom. For a man who thinks of himself as a builder — who is in fact physically altering the White House as much as possible to his own fleeting tastes, as an expression of his deep-seated need to exercise personal dominion over the office of the presidency — that must sting on some level. And no matter how lengthy the plaque Trump places under Barack Obama’s portrait, Obama will be able to riposte to him, in all accuracy: “I built something that you are about to be forced to sustain. You will never be able to say the same to any of your successors. Which of us has an actual legacy that won’t be undone?”


Next Post
A Secret That the DNC Must Never Reveal: Why They Lost the 2024 Elections
Back to The Corner

Jeffrey Blehar
Jeffrey Blehar is a National Review staff writer living in Chicago. He is also the co-host of National Review’s Political Beats podcast, which explores the great music of the modern era with guests from the political world happy to find something non-political to talk about. @EsotericCD