Donald Trump’s former lawyer has called for the President to be removed from office because he has turned into a “madman”.
Ty Cobb, who worked closely with Trump during his first administration, claimed that the President’s “mental condition has deteriorated substantially” to the point where he was now unfit to serve.
In an exclusive interview with The i Paper, Cobb said that Trump’s second term was “scary and dystopian” because the President was now surrounded by enablers who were unable and unwilling to control his impulses.
Cobb warned that the President, 79, the oldest person ever to be inaugurated into the role, appeared to growing “desperate” and more dangerous the longer his war on Iran went on. Despite a fragile ceasefire, both the US and Iran are blockading the global chokepoint of the Strait of Hormuz, fuelling a rise in energy prices worldwide and threatening spiralling disaster.
“We’re in a real crisis here in the US,” he said. The President had become a “dictator” who was “destroying our democracy”, he added.
The President has faced renewed questions about his mental health due to his conduct during the Iran war, which he started alongside Israel on 28 February. Trump’s critics have pointed in particular to a notorious post on social media in which he warned that a “whole civilisation will die tonight” if his first deadline for peace talks passed: with hours to go he delayed the threatened annihilation by two weeks. He has since extended it again, but reports suggest he is now being briefed on plans for renewed “short and powerful” strikes to try to break the deadlock in talks.
Trump’s other warning to Iran to “Open the F**kin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in hell” sparked a new round of anxiety about his mental capacity for the job.
Last month Congressman Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the powerful Judiciary Committee, wrote a letter to the White House demanding a comprehensive neurological examination of the President because of the “deep and growing alarm about the [his] mental fitness”. He cited in particular “signs consistent with dementia and cognitive decline” as well as Trump’s “increasingly incoherent, volatile, profane, deranged, and threatening” tantrums.
Cobb represented Trump during his first presidency for a year in 2017 during the inquiry by the Special Counsel Robert Mueller into his alleged dealings with Russia. Cobb is one of the few lawyers to emerge from his time in the White House unscathed.
However, more recently, he has turned on the President.
Cobb explained how during Trump’s first term, the two had “substantive” discussions and that they would see each other every day, often having lunch together.
Cobb’s office was a level beneath the Oval Office and he would frequently go upstairs to speak with the President.
According to Cobb, back then there were people around the President who would say no to him, telling him if something he wanted to do was illegal or not presidential.
He said that officials like Trump’s former chief of staff General John Kelly and Trump’s former UN ambassador Nikki Haley would guide the President and, given his lack of experience in the White House, he would follow their advice.
“That’s different from now because there’s nobody in the White House [who] is assisting the President with acting lawful or morally,” Cobb said.
He singled out people like the War Secretary, Pete Hegseth, and former attorney general Pam Bondi as being part of a “kakistocracy”, or a government made up of the least-qualified people.
Cobb said: “Trump created this because of the controls he faced the first time around. Now you have grifters and sycophants and that is not a minor deviation from norms: it’s unprecedented in American history.
“It’s made us vulnerable domestically and internationally and it’s fuelled the divide in the country”.
The other big change could be seen in Trump’s mental health, Cobb said. He agrees with the analysis of doctors like psychologist Dr John Gartner who say the President is exhibiting many signs of frontal lobe decline, and possibly dementia.
Coupled with his view that Trump suffers from “long-running malignant narcissism”, this makes a dangerous combination, Cobb said.
He said: “The narcissism has always been an issue for him but in an absence of the impulse control the frontal lobe provides it has unleashed furiously, which is why we see revenge, corruption, delusions of grandeur and [alleged] abuses of power.
“There has never been a President before who announced war crimes he would commit at 4am or danced on the grave of decorated public servants like Robert Mueller.
Cobb also pointed to the insults Trump directed at the Hollywood director Rob Reiner after he and his wife were brutally murdered. Trump claimed that Reiner, an outspoken Trump critic, had been killed “due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME”.
“This is a man who has demonstrated he’s way beyond any ability to lawfully carry out the duties of the office and has no business in the position.
Cobb added that it increasingly felt as though “we’re governed by a madman at this stage, there’s no other way to put it”.
According to Cobb, things could get even worse given Trump’s popularity was at an all-time low, with just 32 per cent of people approving of his presidency according to a poll last month, numbers seen by Jimmy Carter during his single term in the White House from 1977 to 1981.
Cobb cited Trump’s increasingly frequent late-night posts on social media which indicate that the President is barely sleeping: on one Thursday night last month Trump posted 18 times over three hours until around 3am.
Such behaviour was so erratic that it made even the former president Joe Biden look favourable in comparison, Cobb said.
Biden, 83, was forced to drop out of his re-election campaign in 2024 after a car-crash presidential debate where he appeared confused on stage. That performance made public concerns friends had privately held for years about his mental decline.
Cobb said: “Biden at the end of his presidency was not qualified to be president either and his deterioration was palpable.
“But that’s the difference for the ageing process for a normal person and a malignant narcissist
“When Biden’s controls faded he became a doddering old grandfather.” Trump, however, had become something far worse. He is “not Jesus as he thinks he is”, Cobb said.
In a statement to The i Paper, the White House spokesman Davis Ingle said: “Ty Cobb should immediately seek psychiatric help to treat his severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
In a reference to Cobb’s handlebar moustache, Ingle added: “And he should also shave that caterpillar off his face.”
Ingle added: “President Trump’s sharpness, unmatched energy, and historic accessibility stand in stark contrast to what we saw during the last administration when Democrats and other lunatics intentionally covered up Joe Biden’s serious mental and physical decline from the American people”.