At 4:15 p.m. Jan. 18, President Donald Trump sent a text to Prime Minister Jonas Støre of Norway. This private communication has since been made public, giving the world a rare glimpse into how politicians speak behind closed doors and an inside look at the mental state of our president.
What we saw was not reassuring. The text revealed not an embittered world leader fighting for his country’s interests, but a senile man of declining faculties lashing out against a world he doesn’t understand.
Despite the main text of the message being only five sentences long, there are nine commas. Sentences run-on ad nauseam and basic grammatical rules like capitalization are ignored in ways that feel inexplicable. This ignorance of language conventions would be unacceptable in any fourth grade classroom. Consider the message this lack of respect for the English language conveys to the recipient — that either our president doesn’t consider communicating with another world leader as worthy of a proofread, or he is simply unable to form coherent sentences.
In the first case, it is hard to see what America’s bargaining position gains from broadcasting such blatant disrespect. Even if we take it on faith that Trump didn’t proofread this, it still reveals sentences and grammatical constructions of such poor quality that his cognitive capacities are called into question.
Moving on to the text message’s actual content, we once again see behavior that would not be out of place in an elementary school. The beginning of the text shows Trump demanding retribution from the prime minister of Norway for a perceived slight: not giving Trump the Nobel Peace Prize.
Even looking past the irony of Trump’s demand for a peace prize, given his recent actions in Venezuela, there is a more obvious flaw: The prime minister of Norway has no jurisdiction over giving out the peace prize. That is done by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, an independent body appointed by the parliament. Accusing the whole country, and particularly the prime minister, of being responsible is like another country’s leader complaining to Trump that their favorite movie didn’t win an Oscar. One has to wonder about the cognitive capacity of someone making such an obvious factual error in such a high-stakes situation.
The second argument in Trump’s text demonstrates another egregious lack of understanding: He questions Denmark’s claim of ownership over Greenland, saying, “There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also.”
I hope that the irony here is apparent to most. How does Trump think America came into existence? Did we magically receive some written document establishing our claim to the land? Of course not. Once again, Trump’s fuzzy understanding of both international law and world history is shocking. It’s hard to look at this from any angle as informed argumentation.
The last argument in the text further underlines his childlike worldview and the cognitive decline it indicates. He explicitly says that because the U.S. has been good to NATO, NATO should hand Greenland over to the U.S. Ignoring the fact that involvement with NATO has strategic benefits for the U.S. and that our support for NATO is not altruistic, look at the core of the argument: Trump is saying, “I was nice, so you should give me what I want.” This is not the informed negotiation of a savvy businessman turned world leader. It is tit-for-tat in the purest sense. There is no longer any underlying strategy or philosophy.
In the past, Trump’s blunders were more self-serving. Saying that Mexico would pay for the border wall, that he didn’t lose the election or even that some democratic states allow abortions after birth all in some way benefit him. This example is different. Trump has nothing to gain from misunderstanding the Nobel process — he’s simply lost the plot. He is too senescent, too spiteful, too caught in his own victim narrative to care about anything outside of himself. He has completely subordinated American interests to his own.
Taken together, the clear image of Trump in 2026 arises. In his private communications, Trump communicates with the grammatical errors of a child, displays the historical knowledge of a child and negotiates with the perspective of a child.
In three years, he will be 82. At the rate he’s deteriorating, he might be a toddler.
Arvind Chettiar is a third-year business administration and political science combined major. He can be reached at [email protected].
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