It is a singular if highly dubious distinction of Donald Trump’s pungent contribution to the political discourse to have essentially bankrupted the English language’s capacity for outrage.

So unremitting and extreme have been the avalanche of affronts since Trump descended the golden escalator in Trump Tower in 2015 to declare his presidential candidacy that even his most ardent critics have become desensitized, leading to a level of shock fatigue.

Yet Trump’s highly racist and offensive late-night Truth Social post depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes broke through the numbness barrier to register on the political Richter scale at a level few of his many previous insults ever achieved.

That Trump succeeded in surpassing his own previous levels of debased standards was only emphasized by the decision, taken under fire, to delete the post hours after the White House had initially defended it.

That rare climbdown and the attempts to pin the blame on an anonymous White House staffer are unlikely to prevent the episode from illuminating a topic that much of the media has seemed reluctant to confront head on; that Trump’s behavior, online and in public, has been growing more reckless and raises serious questions about his mental acuity and his fitness for office.

On social media, whisperings that Trump is displaying signs of cognitive decline have increased in recent weeks.

Such chatter has been fed, rather than silenced, by the president’s frequent invocations of multiple cognitive examinations that he claims to have “aced” – boasts that have merely triggered questions as to why he is undergoing such tests in the first place.

Providing further grist have been the increasing volume of nocturnal social media posts from a president who appear frequently unrestrained and frantic, even if falling short of the racist toxicity of the Obama video.

On several nights in the past two months, Trump has fired off scores of social media posts in the night hours, including vitriolic attacks on his opponents. On one night in December, he fired off more than 150 posts in a few hours.

At the same time, the president has been observed apparently falling asleep in cabinet meetings and other public forums.

Against that backdrop, Friday’s initial rebuke from the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, to reporters to “stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public” missed the point by a wide margin – as the later reversal only confirmed.

Critics may feel entitled to respond that such advice might be better directed to Trump, as polls show rising disapproval over his administration’s performance on affordability issues and the violent actions of ICE agents in Minneapolis and elsewhere.

More sentient – and ominous for Trump – was the response of the South Carolina Republican senator, Tim Scott, who is Black, and usually one of the president’s most reliable allies. Calling the post “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House”, Scott wrote: “The president should remove it.”

Given Trump’s known trait for doubling down – a lesson absorbed from his pugilistic mentor, Roy Cohn – the fact that he did just that represents an unlikely display of weakness, if not exactly contrition.

Yet it is unlikely to be a template for future conduct.

More probable are further indiscretions that could lead to increased calls for invoking the 25th amendment, a constitutional device with provisions for removing a president from office if he is deemed unable to perform his duties.

Indeed, the Obama post may have already crossed that threshold, given the US’s painful history of racism and the human costs borne in trying to overcome them.

Invoking the amendment’s section 4 – needed to remove a president – would be complicated and seems a far-fetched possibility.

It would need the vice-president, JD Vance, and a majority of the cabinet to declare Trump unfit, a hard-to-imagine scenario considering the obsequious displays of fealty the president demands of cabinet members. Even if that hurdle were to be overcome, support from two-thirds of both the houses of Congress would be required if Trump were to contest an effort to remove him – as seems likely.

And to Democrats, comparisons with Joe Biden may be jarring.

Speculation about Biden’s supposed cognitive decline increased during the last year of his presidency, although evidence was limited as his White House handlers sought to cocoon him and restrict his public appearances.

It was only after the president’s disastrous televised debate with Trump in Atlanta in June 2024, when he seemed lost and unable to complete cogent thoughts, that doubts about his ability to serve as president for another four years reached boiling point – ultimately forcing him to withdraw his candidacy in favor of Kamala Harris.

But at no point did Biden issue racist or insulting social media posts, or appear to threaten Nato allies, as Trump has done over Greenland. Nor did he demonize entire ethnic groups, something Trump has done repeatedly in calling the Somali community in Minnesota “garbage”.

He did not assail female journalists in press briefings in nakedly vindictive and misogynistic tones, as Trump has done several times lately.

Racially abusing his Democratic predecessor on Truth Social may be an insufficient catalyst to trigger Republicans into immediate thoughts of removing a president they have bent over backwards to submit to and accommodate.

But some may be beginning to wonder how much longer they can trust what Lyndon Johnson called “the awesome duties” of being president to a man who spends his twilight hours posting memes that threaten to reopen wounds which the country spent generations and much treasure trying to heal.