The country has been on this journey before with one Ronald Reagan, who was 69 years old when he was sworn in—before Trump, the oldest person to do so. His mental capacity was long the subject of innuendo among his political foils, but it wasn't until years later that researchers examining his presidential speeches identified early warning signs of dementia, which include, coincidentally, things like repeated words, rambling answers, and a dwindling vocabulary. As the Times noted, this does not prove that he was suffering from dementia while serving as commander-in-chief—much less Alzheimer's disease, with which he was diagnosed in 1994. But it does function as a reminder that the idea of an elderly president being afflicted by conditions that often affect human beings at his age should not be considered inherently absurd.

We're getting closer to having this debate in the open. This week, The Atlantic, a prestigious publication unlikely to throw such accusations out there willy-nilly, published a lengthy feature from senior editor James Hamblin examining whether this president might be in a state of cognitive decline. It is a sober, evidence-based analysis, not a political attack, and it is careful not to offer any sort of diagnosis. It is also, as the author notes, largely an academic question, since even if that were the case, no mechanism exists to compel the president to undergo a formal evaluation. Yes, the Twenty-fifth Amendment is nestled there in the Bill of Rights, but removing him altogether would be a drastic and unprecedented step. This merry band of political castoffs who constitute Trump's cabinet do not seem eager to kneecap their benefactor anytime soon.

I happen to think that Donald Trump is a bad president, but a bad president is not necessarily an unwell one. However, while Hamblin acknowledges that "bias will color any assessment to some degree," it "needn’t render science useless in assessing presidential capacity." When a mountain of evidence exists that the most powerful person in the world might be, at the very least, impaired in some manner or another, I want to know more about it. If the White House really finds frank discussions of the president's fitness for office to be as outrageous and offensive as it claims, there is a very easy way it could put those questions to rest. But when Trump's public appearances these days consist of Sarah Huckabee Sanders broadcasting clips from the podium and then angrily insisting that there is nothing to worry about, it's okay for us to keep asking.