“New York Times” chief White House correspondent talks about President Donald Trump’s mental fitness on “Washington Week.”

JEFFREY GOLDBERG, THE ATLANTIC, ‘WASHINGTON WEEK’ HOST: I know, you get the chance to comment on Peter. Peter wrote, Democrats who have long challenged Mr. Trump’s psychological fitness have issued a fresh chorus of calls to invoke the 20th Amendment to remove the president from power for disability. But it is not just a concerned voice by partisans on the left, late night comics, or mental health professionals making long-distant diagnoses. It can be heard now among retired generals, diplomats, and foreign officials. And most strikingly, it can be heard now on the political right among one-time allies of the president. That was Peter writing last month. You watch the- VIVIAN SALAMA, THE ATLANTIC: Peter is always right. GOLDBERG: hat’s not true. But well, that’ll be the subject of our next episode. But I want, talk about that particular episode. It’s the sense of appropriateness, of place, of being totally discordant, of talking about nuclear destruction with a group of eight-year-olds. What are we seeing these days? SALAMA: Most of us have been in the room with the president where we see that he tends to kind of drift into his own thoughts oftentimes, often out loud, regardless of who’s in the room. He goes on tangents. He has questioned the existence of Santa Claus in front of children visiting the White House. So this is not particularly surprising. But you could see it is definitely a good window into his thought process. Not only was he talking about the Iran War and potentially nuclear war as a result of the Iran War, he also went into a riff about how he made peace in eight different countries, and yet he was deprived of the Nobel Peace Prize all the while these children were looking around the room, completely distracted, A, by the grandeur of the Oval Office, the gold grandeur of the Oval Office, and also just the fact that they had no idea what he was talking about. And it’s just a frame of mind at this point. GOLDBERG: Right. He also asked- Are we seeing a difference in the quality of thinking or appropriateness? JONATHAN LEMIRE, THE ATLANTIC: He also asked one of the kids if he thought he could take him in a fight. I mean, that’s where this was. Whether it’s changed or not, I’m not sure. It may have. Certainly people do think it has, but at the very least, he’s even less burdened, not that he ever was burdened, to keep a thought to himself. Yeah. Wherever he is, he feels like I’m in charge, I can say what I want, I don’t care who’s here, and I also think he doesn’t suffer any sort of consequences. He doesn’t even have an aide afterwards telling him, sure, you shouldn’t have said that. Like, that just doesn’t happen. PETER BAKER, NEW YORK TIMES: Yeah, you can find episodes, obviously, in his first term. You can find plenty to raise questions about stability. But I think what is striking is it happening more and more, right? Every week seems to bring another example of people look at that and they scratch their head and say, my goodness, what happened to that? GOLDBERG: Is that because of decline or because there’s no John Kelly or Jim Mattis sitting there? BAKER: It could be both, right? But there’s clearly a lack of inhibition, right? You know, in fact, none of us is a medical professional, but there is a term called disinhibition, which increases with age. And you see other things that have increased in the second term. More use of profanity. He speaks longer, and obviously he is less inhibited from doing some of the things he talked about doing the first term but didn’t actually follow through on. Now he’s following through on them. Maybe because he doesn’t have a John Kelly or a Jim Mattis or an H.R. McMaster. Maybe because he’s looking at his legacy and thinking about what history will remember about him.

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