I’ve been writing about Donald Trump since 2015 and during this time the number of stories I’ve done on him probably number well into the hundreds if not thousands. All of this has led me to wonder why this man does anything that he does — other than for greed or for attention, which he almost craves more than money.

But he’s taken up a new habit, perhaps still feeling the sting of that massive lawsuit filed against him and his family by New York Attorney General Letitia James, Insider reports. He’s recently lashed out, calling her “Letitia Peekaboo James.”

Which is well…weird. But this is Trump, after all.

For months he’s been saying that James is “racist,” even before the lawsuit, in a not very veiled reference to James being African-American. But folks on social media can’t figure out what the former president means by this new nickname which he used repeatedly on his Truth Social platform Thursday.

“Racist A.G. Letitia ‘Peekaboo’ James, the failed Gubernatorial candidate,” Trump called her at one point on Truth Social.

Michael Cohen, Trump’s former attorney, doesn’t put much stock in either of the current peekaboo nickname origin theories, one of which is x-rated, while the other is seriously racist.

Cohen believes the reason for Trump’s name-calling is simpler: Trump is losing it, mentally (I’m not sure he ever had it).

“My opinion? He has dementia,” Cohen told Insider on Thursday. “Especially with the additional stress that is now on top of him.”

But when Insider contacted him Thursday, Trump’s “peekaboo” nickname for James was news to him.

“Isn’t that a toy?” he asked. “Isn’t that — oh no, that’s Pikachu.”

Cohen dissed the idea of the X-rated theory, which has been kicked around in A.G. circles. The nickname conjures up some x-rated references from the Urban Dictionary, but Cohen says Trump wouldn’t know about the Urban Dictionary, to begin with.

“There’s no way in the world that Donald Trump knows the Urban Dictionary,” Cohen explained. “Considering that he doesn’t even know the English Dictionary.”

He also doesn’t think that the other theory, which is popular on Reddit and Twitter is one that Trump meant to be racist. That theory claims Trump was hinting at a racist term that sounds like “Peekaboo,” but starts with a “J.”

Cohen said, “the J-word” is “not an option,” and doesn’t believe Trump would ever use a derogatory slur like this in a public statement.

Nevertheless, Trump’s former fixer described him as “a racist” in his testimony before Congress in 2019, when he remembered his former boss saying “only the Blacks could live like this,” as he was being chauffered through a poor neighborhood in Chicago. But, he added, “there’s no chance” Trump would racially slur James in public, and that includes his “Truth Social” posts, Cohen maintained.

Cohen said Trump may have thought James was toying with him as they haggled over the money it would take to make the lawsuit disappear before being filed.

“Let me put it to you this way,” Cohen said. “As you sit and listen to Trump speak, you realize at best he has a 10-year-old’s vocabulary. He’s using ‘peekaboo’ as a hide-and-seek term.”

Trump was clearly upset by the failed settlement talks, especially as James unveiled her lawsuit, which alleges the former president falsely inflated his worth by billions of dollars, and it seeks $250 million in penalties as well as the crippling of his business in New York. According to former prosecutors with the A.G.’s office, the lawsuit will be fought for years.

And Trump was in full complaint mode over the failed segment on Fox News, telling Sean Hannity during an interview two things that can’t be simultaneously true, Insider reports. He began by telling Hannity he believed the case would be settled. Then he said he actually would not have settled because “even if I paid a very small amount, you’re sort of admitting guilt.”

“His rambling about ‘we were settling’ and then questioning why anyone would settle when they’re not guilty is indicative of some cognitive impairment,” Cohen said.

When he served as Trump’s right-hand man, Cohen said he knew this was Trump at his savviest. Now he sees a man who’s “coming undone,” even to the point of appearing stooped over and clearly rambling on Hannity’s show.

Insider asked an attorney for Trump what the new nickname meant but never received an answer.

“There’s no way he’ll explain it,” Cohen said. “He never explained ‘Covfefe.”

“I really don’t know what Trump was thinking,” he noted. “Actually, neither does he.”

I remember Trump’s words sounding like they were loosely strung together — sometimes even like he just tossed them all up into the air and just picked up whatever landed at his feet.

“Hamberders.”

“Covfefe.”

“Person, Woman, Man, Camera.TV.”

The last was part of a test of Trump’s cognitive abilities, wherein he said he found that part of the test to be easy, but others found it difficult. But the words are kind of emblematic of the way Trump talks because sometimes he sounds like he can barely get beyond this.

All of which is to say that none of us will likely ever know why Trump is calling Letitia James “peekaboo.” The word merely highlights how disordered his mind really is.