The Serpent That Slipped Its Cage

Trump’s unraveling jungle hallucination reveals a mind losing the boundaries between performance and reality.

Donald Trump has always been a fabulist, but his remarks today at a White House Christmas reception carried him into new and unsettling terrain. For nearly an hour he careened between tragedies, tariffs, grandchildren, golf pros, and grievances, his usual mixtape of self-affirmation and imaginary math. The greatest hits landed with their usual thud: $18 trillion in investment, elections “too big to rig,” and factories materializing by the thousands because CEOs simply cannot bear to pay tariffs. We’ve seen this show before.

Then the speech veered off the cliff and into a strange, cinematic realm that bore none of the familiar hallmarks of political spin and all the fingerprints of memory breakdown. Trump launched into a sprawling jungle epic involving a White House doctor, the Obama daughters, a Peruvian viper, and a miracle recovery that allegedly took two years and three sets of last rites. And he delivered it with the earnestness of a man who believed every word he was saying.

Even by Trump’s standards, it was bizarre. The story sprawled across minutes of uninterrupted monologue, growing stranger with each beat. There was a trip to Peru, a deadly jungle viper that supposedly kills “28,000 a year,” a bite that knocked the doctor unconscious “immediately,” a frantic call to Ronny Jackson (because of course), the reading of last rites not once but three separate times, and a miraculous recovery that took “two years.” Trump added the flourish that the doctor wrote a book about the ordeal, one that “sold two copies” until Trump posted about it on Truth Social, instantly transforming it into “the number one bestselling book” with “100,000 copies sold in one day.” He repeated that number with the conviction of a man who believes he can manifest reality by insisting on it loudly enough.

Not a single element of this tale exists in the real world. The doctor is untraceable. The viper’s annual kill count would exceed many small wars. There is no record of Malia or Sasha Obama bushwhacking through a Peruvian jungle under Secret Service protection. And if a book about a near-fatal presidential medical incident had suddenly sold 100,000 copies in a day, the publishing industry would have noticed. Reddit threads have formed around fact-checking the story.

What makes this moment more than just another Trump exaggeration is how he told it, and why it felt so unnervingly familiar. Because we’ve heard this story before, just not as nonfiction. It is, beat for beat, the skeleton of the poem he used to recite at rallies: “The Snake.” In that fable, a trusting woman takes in a wounded serpent that ultimately bites her, prompting its sneering confession: “You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.” A simple parable, delivered with the sing-song cadence he slides into.

But this time, the parable wasn’t framed as a parable. It was reframed as autobiographical history.

He took the metaphor and recast it as an event. He inserted himself into the narrative as both witness and savior. He collapsed the distinction between performance and memory, turning an old stump-speech bit into something he now “remembers” as having happened within his administration. The boundaries dissolved. And it’s that dissolution, not the snake, not the jungle, that should alarm us.

This type of conflation, the collapse of metaphor into memory, is not a quirk. It is a recognizable cognitive pattern, one often documented in frontotemporal dementia, where patients begin blending stories they’ve told with events they’ve lived, losing the ability to separate performed narratives from personal experience. They draw on familiar scripts because the scripts are easier to retrieve than actual memories. And the more emotionally charged the script, the more likely it is to be repurposed as truth.

Trump has always lied, but he used to lie intentionally. He lied to dominate, to distract, to humiliate, to win. Dare I say, he lied with strategy. This was different because there was no political purpose to an imaginary viper in Peru. No strategic benefit to placing the Obama daughters in a National Geographic episode. No reason to spend precious podium time recounting fangs, venom, unconsciousness, resurrection, and book sales. This was the kind of story that emerges not because it’s useful, but because the storyteller’s internal filing system has lost its tabs.

He looked pale, unsteady, gripping the podium with both hands, drifting through a hallucinated adventure as though it were briefing-room fact. The people around him watched politely because what else can they do? They can’t tell him it didn’t happen, they have to wait for the moment to pass and hope the next improvised myth isn’t worse.

Trump’s snake poem once served as his warning about other people’s treachery. Now, in its mutated form, it reads like a warning about his own mind. The snake he should fear isn’t coiled in the jungles of Peru; it’s coiled somewhere much closer, winding through the spaces where memory, fantasy, grievance, and mythology have begun to fuse, quietly, steadily, and now, unmistakably, in public view. If he ever revisits that MRI he bragged about “acing,” he may find the serpent sitting right there on the scan, coiled up patiently, waiting for the next story he can no longer tell apart from reality.