Just Saying | The madness of King Donald: is Trump really losing his mind?

“Taking crazy things seriously is a serious waste of time,” Haruki Murakami wrote in Kafka on the Shore.

Is that going to be the philosophy of American voters when they elect US President Donald Trump to a second term in the White House next year?

The latest Rasmussen survey puts his approval rating at a robust 51 per cent, reflecting how all the escalating clarion calls for some sort of intervention and professional assessment of Trump’s mental health mean nothing to his fanatical support base.

And yet, it’s easy to give his detractors the benefit of the doubt when they raise the alarm over signs of cognitive disorder, pre-dementia and even sheer delirium, whether the president is sending out incoherent tweets, ranting and raging at media briefings, or taking off on unintelligible tangents in his rambling speeches at public rallies.

It can be inane sometimes, such as when he substituted Apple CEO Tim Cook’s surname with the name of his company. He first tried to walk it back with a cringeworthy explanation that he had actually said “Tim Cook, Apple” with the “Cook” part being pronounced quietly, then tweeted an even more fatuous clarification that he had “quickly referred to Tim+Apple as Tim/Apple as an easy way to save time & words”.

There’s no similar algebraic explanation for his struggle to say the word “origin” during a media session at the Oval Office this week when he questioned the Russia-collusion investigation.

“I hope they now go and take a look at the oranges, the oranges of the investigation,” he said. The official White House transcript later identified the word as “oringes”, whatever that might mean.

At the same session, while sitting next to Nato’s secretary general, Trump declared: “My father is German, was German. Born in a very wonderful place in Germany.”