On social media, a video of the 78-year-old president seemingly startling awake a few seconds after someone spoke to him went viral.
One Daily Beast headline read, “Sleepy Trump Caught on Camera Nodding Off at Summit in Saudi,” a clever reference to the groggy nickname that was formerly applied to President Joe Biden. “Trump is having a hard time keeping his eyes open,” as journalist Aaron Rupar wrote on X.
Instead of using the president’s recent disembarkation from Air Force One after a 15-hour flight as an excuse for his apparent exhaustion, critics said it was part of a pattern.
Trump was seen sagging into his chair with his chin pulled to his chest in another widely shared photo taken during a meeting with Syrian ministers and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh on Wednesday. Furthermore, these observations aren’t simply being made by journalists and bystanders.
White House insiders told the Daily Mail last month that Trump may be increasingly leaning on Melania for not just emotional, but physical support. One source revealed: “There is a possibility that he is reaching for Melania for both emotional and physical stability… the president is getting older. His gait is not as steady.”
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However, in exclusive comments to the Daily Mail, Trump insiders are now retaliating against these “false smears.”
As the president ages, it would not be shocking to see some degree of physical weakness. In the last year of his second term, Trump will surpass Biden as the oldest sitting president in US history.
However, a number of people are going beyond the normal ageing process and asserting that Trump’s health is due to a significant deterioration in his mental and physical sharpness.
According to MSNBC primetime anchor Lawrence O’Donnell, Trump may be displaying “early-stage dementia” or “signs of mental illness.”
Timothy L. O’Brien, senior executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion, claimed the Commander-in-Chief Trump is slowing, telling MSNBC last week: “Watching how he answers questions now compared to Trump 1.0, he slurs his words a little, he looks weary, he is slouched.”
“He lives in fear of going down the path his father went down, which was dementia, followed by Alzheimer’s, into his 90s. And I think he’s carried that burden forever,” he added.
Trump’s father, Fred, passed away in 1999 at the age of 93 from both pneumonia and Alzheimer’s disease. Since Alzheimer’s is partially inherited, Trump may be at higher risk of developing the condition himself if his father did.
Trump’s nephew Fred Trump III told People last year that he fears Trump may be heading down the same path as his father: “Like anyone else, I’ve seen his decline. But I see it in parallel with the way my grandfather’s decline was. If anyone wants to believe that dementia did not run in the Trump family, it’s just not true.”
Others have unreasonably compared Trump to Biden, whose cognitive decline – and an alleged White House cover-up of it – is the focus of a bombshell new book from CNN host Jake Tapper and Axios correspondent Alex Thompson, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.”
The book describes a massive effort by authorities to prevent the public from seeing the full scope of Biden’s cognitive impairment, and it is based on interviews with senior Democrats.
According to their report, Biden was so impaired by the conclusion of his time that, even though George Clooney was one of his most well-known supporters, he failed to recognise Clooney at a June 2024 Democratic fundraiser in Los Angeles.
“It was obvious to many standing there that the president did not know who George Clooney was,” they write. Another Hollywood VIP guest reportedly said: “It was like watching someone who was not alive. It was so awful.”
According to the authors, Biden only participated in four public engagements before 10:00 am and just twelve public activities after 6:00 pm between January 1, 2023, and April 27, 2024, the majority of which were off-camera.
Biden’s physical decline was so bad around that time that his advisors allegedly talked about the likelihood that if he were elected again, he would have to use a wheelchair.
Lastly, ‘Original Sin’ discloses that White House staff used multiple cameras to record Biden’s video appearances, using ‘jump cuts’ (moving from one view to another) to hide his stuttering speech.
But this aggressive scrutiny of Trump’s every mistake is a far cry from the indifference that many pundits showed to Biden’s difficulties.
For example, the New York Times captured footage of Trump, during his first term, carefully descending a high ramp at the US Military Academy at West Point in June 2020.
The headline read, “Trump’s Halting Walk Down Ramp Raises New Health Questions.”
“How Misleading Videos Are Trailing Biden as He Battles Age Doubts” was one headline in the New York Times’ four-year-old report of Biden’s more pronounced physical limits.
Perhaps the commentators don’t see the irony of this seeming prejudice.
“Just like with Biden, questions about Trump’s mental acuity aren’t going away,” Democratic strategist Max Burns wrote in an opinion piece for The Hill last week. “If the scandal around Biden’s cognitive decline taught us anything, it’s that the American people deserve to know if their president is mentally up for the job,” he wrote. “Trump should spare our country years of doubt and speculation by agreeing to sit for a public cognitive exam.”
It’s unclear if Trump would accept that challenge, but some close to the president believe it’s a political ploy.
“President Trump is traveling the world securing trillions in investments. These false smears are a clear attempt to cover up for the revelation that Joe Biden’s aides were preparing to put him in a wheelchair,” one Trump insider told the Daily Mail.
Another insider, who speaks to the president every week and has known him his entire political career, agreed: “The only verifiable disease and obvious diagnosis that is plain to see is Trump Derangement Syndrome. President Trump exhausts staffers one-third his age. I speak with him often, and he is before the cameras daily. Trump is leading peace deals, trade deals, hostage deals, tax deals and investment deals. Walking and talking was seen as an accomplishment for Biden.”
Unquestionably, Trump’s packed schedule of cognitively and physically taxing engagements contrasts sharply with Biden’s infrequent public appearances.
Trump stood for over an hour on Tuesday to give a speech in Riyadh. He frequently meets with the media at random and answers questions on the spot. He arrived in Qatar on Wednesday, where he addressed American soldiers at Al Udeid Air Base. On Thursday, he touched down in the United Arab Emirates.
Trump described his workdays to the New York Post in February, stating that they begin at 6 a.m. and end near midnight.
“There’s no thoughts of leisure, no going to the beach like Sleepy Joe Biden did and falling asleep in front of the press,” he said.
Trump was in ‘great health’ and ‘no abnormalities’ in neurological and cognitive testing, according to a White House medical assessment published in April, which supports their claims.
Even detractors have to accept the truth.
“In 2020, his body mass index was just over the threshold for obesity… Then, last month, Trump’s latest physical showed that he had dropped 20 pounds, moving him from obese to overweight,” wrote Dr. David Kessler, former Biden science advisor, in the Atlantic this week. Trump’s “LDL (the ‘bad’ cholesterol) has dropped dramatically in recent years,” he concluded.
Shortly after, when reporters asked the president what his neurological test covered, he merely said, “It’s a pretty well known test.”
He didn’t seem concerned, adding: “Whatever it is. I got every one right.”
