Trump’s Health Is… ComplicatedHe isn’t as decrepit as Democrats pretend. But Republicans are slowly imagining a post-Trump world.
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The President of the United States falls asleep in cabinet meetings and basketball games. He mixes up Greenland with Iceland and Iran with Japan. He sometimes slurs his words and gets lost wandering across a stage during a state event. If our last president succumbed to age while in office, there’s some reason to believe that Donald Trump may not be fully with it all the way through his term. But don’t count on it. I watched several hours of Trump speaking at different points in his political career, focusing in particular on his gaffes. What I found is that he is older and slower, that his voice lacks the command it once had, that he does tend to ramble more than he did, but also that he is still basically himself. If, for long swathes of his term, Joe Biden made no public appearances at all, spoke only when reading from a teleprompter, and kept his appearances to short and scripted exchanges, Trump continues to interact with the press and to speak off the cuff. There’s some slender evidence that he might have suffered a neurological episode, but in his most recent speeches he is voluble and pugnacious and speaks without evident difficulty. That’s not to deny that Trump’s age—he just turned 80—may well be a significant factor in the remainder of his second term and that a succession battle could soon emerge in the Republican Party. But Democrats who have a persistent fantasy of an imminent decline in Trump’s ability to lead are, based on the videos I watched, likely to be disappointed. In 2015 and 2016, when first running for the presidency, Trump, more than anything else, hinged his candidacy on vitality—he was in his 70s but made over 300 rally appearances. He shouts and bellows in his 2015 speech announcing his run. The impression he gives is of barely being able to contain his energy and rage. In his 2016 and 2020 debates with Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, respectively, he is a snarling presence on stage, quick to interrupt both his rival candidates and the debate moderators—interrupting Clinton 106 times across three debates, according to a PBS breakdown, and interrupting Biden somewhere between 70 and 120 times during their first debate. To critics, he came across as a bully—CNN commentator Dana Bash called the Biden debate a “shitshow” immediately after it ended. But Trump’s demeanor in the debates was clearly calculated—as commentators acknowledged, he appeared “pugilistic” in contrast to the far more sedate Clinton and Biden.
In his period out of power, Trump was spotted sleeping in the courtroom during the Stormy Daniels trial. And in the 2024 presidential race, mental lapses and speaking slips became almost routine for him. He confused Nikki Haley for Nancy Pelosi, claimed he was running against Barack Obama, and his speech was characterized by more tangents and repetition than before. In a discussion during the election, Fred Trump, Donald’s nephew, described a family history of dementia and speculated that Donald might have signs of the same dementia that afflicted his father, Fred Sr. “He just can’t stick to a message. And he used to be able to stick to a message,” Fred Trump III said. The conservative pundit Megyn Kelly noted, “He goes on too long at his rallies … to where you get kind of bored, you lose the thread, you lose interest, which is not something you’re used to with Trump.” And Joe Rogan, in their famous podcast interview, complained to Trump at one point during the conversation that “your weave is getting wide.” The age question was a liability for Trump all through the election, and particularly when Kamala Harris replaced Biden on the Democratic ticket—an ABC News poll in July 2024 found that a full 60% of voters believed Trump was “too old for a second term.” The New York Times noted that Trump held only 61 rallies before November 2024, about five times fewer than in 2016. Watching Trump during the 2024 election it’s clear that he had slowed down but was still sharp. His voice was softer than in 2015/16. The tangents, as Kelly noted, often made him dull to listen to. But he engaged with interlocutors in a way that Biden seemed to struggle with and was able to stay focused for long interviews and events. Certainly, the contrast between the two candidates was on vivid display in the June 2024 debate. The most intriguing analysis of Trump’s health is that he suffered a serious decline somewhere towards the summer of 2025. In August, the release of an older photo of himself playing golf, initially passed off as being more recent, raised widespread speculation—alongside his largely empty public schedule—that something had gone seriously wrong with the president’s health. The Hill, a bellwether of Washington political opinion, ran a piece headlined “Trump’s mental decline is unavoidable—so what now?” And several of Trump’s public appearances into the winter of 2025/26 raised questions about his fitness. The video of his state visit to Japan in October, when he several times had to be guided by Japanese prime minister Sanae Takaichi, was reminiscent of moments when Biden wandered aimlessly across a stage and the clip was widely interpreted as Trump losing it in public. I find the video inconclusive. Trump does seem lost, but the sequence of bowing and saluting is actually pretty complicated and Trump’s errors may be more attributable to his not knowing his blocking and being bored out of his mind during a state ceremony than to cognitive decline. Meanwhile, videos of him apparently sleeping during cabinet meetings are more conclusive. It definitely looks like he’s sleeping—no matter that Secretary of State Marco Rubio found himself swearing under oath to Congress that “I’ve never seen him fall asleep, on the contrary the guy doesn’t sleep.” |
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