NYT "Confabulation" Comment Rejected
On the Record - Rejected "Confabulation" Comment 09/23/2025
The comment I submitted, further below, is a copy of my rejected comment to an article in the NYTimes titled “Your Countries Are Going to Hell” by Luke Broadwater. That opinion piece discussed in detail the latest speech given to the UN by Trump. It did not directly address lying or misrepresenting with those explicit words. Hedging would be a “nice” way of describing the piece. The Comments section was huge and writers there repeatedly discussed the “illness” “rambling” “weaving” nature of Trump’s speechifying. One example of those comments is:
“Does he actually believe the stuff he says? Does he really think that most people love him or that “Trump” is always right? He just can’t shut up when he is front of a crowd or a microphone. He goes on and on, rambling or “weaving” as he calls it making little to no sense. What on earth did the members of that audience think of this performance? They only humor him because they are afraid of someone so unstable with so much power. This man is mentally ill and it’s becoming more and more difficult for him to conceal it. What an embarrassment he is for this country. What a disaster he is for the world.”
I noted not a single use of the word “confabulation.” Apparently, the last time “confabulation” was a word used to describe Trump’s “story-telling” by the Times was in the final paragraph of a discussion dated 07/24/2024 by Frank Bruni:
“Actually, at his rate of confabulation and deterioration, he’ll probably claim in a stump speech sometime soon that he has an Olympic gold for golf.”
The term also appeared in the Washington Post on 01/19/2024 — ”A Whale of a Tale. “
Recently?
The Guardian 08/03/2025 — “Trouble Completing a Thought”
The Hill 08/01/2025 — “Trump’s Mental Decline is Undeniable”
A search for confabulation in substack yesterday produced several results that I would recommend. Additionally, the search results at Google, when expanded, do a really good job of educating about “confabulation.”
To me, this is a “learning moment” about a common and significant manifestation of dementia processes. It may show up in TBIs and strokes or bleeds, but clearly very frequently, in the dementia-process populations, which means it is very prevalent.
Here is What I Wrote that NYT Rejected
“Confabulation is a term that should be on everyone’s lips these days. It is a well-known significant sign of dementia-related processes.
A classic example of what often happens in older adult living situations might be: “My mom at her nursing home is often accusing someone of stealing her wallet, or purse, or jewelry. It was clear that she was forgetful and had lost track of items. She tried to explain, I should say, her brain tried to explain it by accusing people of stealing. She even called the police a couple of times. When her purse was found under a towel, she still accused a caretaker of putting it there to cover up the theft. She could not believe that she had become forgetful.”
The brain, when unable to access actual memories, still tries to fill in the gaps with something, anything. Third party observers often conclude it is intentional lying. The gap is created by the actual death of neurons, not unlike a bridge collapsing and leaving a gap that disrupts the flow of traffic. It is a detour that quickly becomes an unrepairable dead end.
Some folks even call it “honest lying.” Confabulators are convinced that what they are saying is true, and will argue that new truth as if they had believed it their whole life. Try to count the number of times that has happened with T, and you may get dizzy....
A Few More Thoughts on Confabulation
I am not the official doc of the Trump and, thus, cannot “make an official, informed diagnosis.” Trump can refuse to be evaluated for these signs. So, we are left with using whatever evidence is clearly available and making our own diagnoses. I encourage you to help people understand confabulation and how it is inherently difficult to deal with someone who makes outrageously inaccurate statements but doesn’t actually know what they are doing or the dissonance embedded therein.
I can only assume that the NYT avoids the term confabulation for describing what we are all witnessing due to an ethical consideration related to a guideline passed by the American Psychiatric Association back in the 1970s. It was erroneously called The Goldwater Law when, in fact, it was an ethical guideline, not a law. However, even 50 years later, it still feels uncomfortable to bring up mental state and functionality issues of elected officials due to its influence and a further broadening of the guideline in 2017. In that regard, I quote from the Guardian’s article and declare that this is not my diagnosing a confabulation condition. It is me bringing up the subject so that folks can learn about confabulation and how complex it can be.
The Guardian article quotes Harry Segal, a senior lecturer in the psychology department at Cornell University and in the psychiatry department at Weill Cornell Medicine:
“Another characteristic of Trump’s questionable mental acuity is confabulation. It’s where he takes an idea or something that’s happened and he adds to it things that have not happened.”
The Guardian article uses the term “confabulation” twice and quotes other professional sources who assist the Guardian’s journalist in characterizing and understanding what is taking place. In other words, like me, come to your own conclusions. I will not state my conclusions, but I will report and help folks to understand the term “confabulation.”
Confabulation is the best term for so-called AI hallucinations -- filling in the blanks with whatever it can find (sensible or not). With AI it may be ad-libbing stuff out of the blue. In dementia the brain is missing the old data, which is no longer available, and fills in the blanks created by neuron degeneration with whatever shows up:
AI confabulation is more like filling in the blanks for yet-to-be-acquired data. AI may get better at filling in the blanks with verified credible data as it gains knowledge.
With dementia, there is no way yet to recreate the lost data from dead and dying neurons and fix the blanks with replicated back-up data so the confabulation would disappear.
No backup disks.
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Some background
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I hope to continue posting these “On The Record: NYT Comments” accepted or rejected by the NYT related to mind and brain discussions. As I do that, I will also occasionally repost older comments that were rejected or accepted related to ADHD, ASD, and other dopamine functions. Why? Because, the NYT still has not gotten it right. I have a long history of comments to NYT regarding these subjects.
The history of NYT’s not getting it right about ADHD/ASD is important in the context of how little attention has been paid to the largest public health problem in the United States and, for that matter, the whole Western Hemisphere. Rather than identifying the major vulnerabilities of the West NYT, among others, ignores how toxic capitalism has knowingly and unknowingly (ignorantly?) taken huge advantage of those vulnerabilities (see tobacco, gambling, violence, gun use, etc.) to exploit for profit.