President Trump was kicking off a crucial meeting with oil and gas industry bosses in the White House earlier this month when his attention abruptly wandered.
‘In fact, if you look, come to think of it… I’ve gotta look at this myself,’ he said, rising from his chair.
He ambled to the French windows, peering out at a construction site where diggers and excavators were beginning work on his grandiose White House ballroom project.
‘Wow! What a view,’ he proclaimed – prompting nearly two dozen captains of industry to dutifully stand to see what their host was talking about. Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, meanwhile, exchanged smiles of bemused resignation.
Trump’s minions have had ample cause for that reaction in recent days, as their boss’s increasingly bizarre behaviour – on matters ranging from Venezuela and Nato allies to Greenland (or ‘Iceland’, as Trump repeatedly called it in his jaw-dropping speech at Davos last week) – has grown ever more unsettling.
And yesterday it was reported the Slovakian prime minister Robert Fico, fresh from meeting his ally Trump at Mar-a-Lago, found the President’s ‘psychological state’ to be ‘dangerous’ and came away ‘traumatised’ by the encounter – an allegation hotly denied by the White House.
‘This is absolutely total fake news from anonymous European diplomats who are trying to be relevant,’ said a spokesman.
From the moment Trump first entered the Oval Office in January 2017, Democrats have sought to stoke anxiety over the mental and physical fitness of a man who takes little exercise, eats poorly, gets very little sleep and has a notoriously short attention span.
Last week, Trump cut into a White House press briefing about his first year in office, pictured, to ramble on about his childhood baseball exploits
The moment Trump stared out of a White House window during a crucial meeting earlier this month. It is not hard to see why critics are surveying the President’s conduct, writes Tom Leonard
A photo last year shows bruising on the President’s right hand as he attends a meeting
Yet even allowing for the fact that many of those now fretting about his mental faculties are political opponents, it is not hard to see why critics are surveying Trump’s conduct in recent weeks and months, and asking whether he is finally ‘losing it’.
With the President just five months away from turning 80, age appears to be taking its toll on a politician who once defined himself by his boundless energy compared with the addled predecessor he sneered at as ‘Sleepy Joe’ Biden.
Now it is Trump who is increasingly caught apparently nodding off in front of the cameras and exhibiting other ‘senior moments’: losing the thread of conversations; veering off on wild digressions; and muddling up names. His chief of staff has reportedly advised cabinet members to keep their briefings short.
Some critics have gone further, noting that memory lapses, language problems, poor judgment and rising aggression – such as becoming less inhibited about insulting people – are classic warning signs of dementia.
Speculation has also gathered that the increasingly garrulous President is suffering from logorrhoea, a speech disorder characterised by uncontrollable and often incoherent talkativeness, which has been linked to underlying neurological or psychiatric conditions.
According to a prominent psychologist, Dr John Gartner, Trump is exhibiting a ‘massive increase’ in ‘clinical signs of dementia’.
Trump’s niece, Mary, has claimed she sees in him the same symptoms suffered by his father, Fred Trump, who was diagnosed with dementia late in life.
These doomsayers are, it must be said, often people who bear the President little goodwill. Others who encounter him – including the Daily Mail’s own Robert Hardman, who sat next to Trump at breakfast earlier this month – insist he remains sharp and engaged when he wants to be.
He once defined himself by his boundless energy compared to ‘Sleepy Joe’ Biden. Now it is Trump, pictured last week, who is caught apparently nodding off in front of the cameras
Former President Biden trips and falls before giving a speech in Philadelphia in 2023
The President certainly looks a lot older. Arriving in Switzerland for the World Economic Forum at Davos, muffled up in a thick coat following a long journey, he looked – as one observer put it – ‘like a bear dragged from hibernation’.
He descended the steps of Air Force One slowly and veered oddly as he made his way along the red carpet.
He later delivered one of his most concerning interviews in months during an appearance on Fox News, in which he said of Nato troops: ‘We’ve never needed them. We have never really asked anything of them.
‘They’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan… and they did, they stayed a little back, a little off the front lines.’
The comments sparked revulsion in Europe and Britain, where politicians and veterans blasted his comments as patently untrue – 457 British troops died in the conflict.
After a phone call with Sir Keir Starmer, Trump rowed back on his words, writing on his Truth Social platform: ‘The great and very brave soldiers of the United Kingdom will always be with the United States of America. In Afghanistan, 457 died, many were badly injured, and they were among the greatest of all warriors.’
The sense that the President is becoming unhinged, however, hasn’t gone away. The previous day at the Davos summit, he repeatedly confused Greenland with Iceland and – even after a noticeable pause – mispronounced Azerbaijan as ‘Abba-baijan’.
When he was not making other absurd claims – such as boasting he had slashed prescription drug prices by ‘1,000 per cent, 600 per cent, 1,500 per cent’ – he unleashed a stream of gratuitous insults and nonsensical assertions, outrageous even by his own standards.
Trump pictured at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week. From the moment he first entered the Oval Office, Democrats have sought to stoke anxiety over his fitness
Others who encounter him – including the Daily Mail’s own Robert Hardman – insist he remains sharp and engaged (Pictured: the President dancing at December’s World Cup draw)
These included declaring the Swiss were ‘only good because of us’, insisting everyone present ‘would be speaking German’ were it not for the US, and dismissing Somalis as ‘low-IQ people’.
Last week, Trump cut into a White House press briefing about his first year in office to ramble on about his childhood baseball exploits – his mother assured him he could be a professional player, he boasted – and the barred windows of the mental institution bordering the park where he played.
In the same 90-minute press conference, he revived debunked 2020 election conspiracy theories, claimed Washington DC residents ‘can act like real lovers’ since he deployed the National Guard to tackle crime, and insisted that ‘God is very proud’ of his first year back in office.
Whatever the Almighty thinks, others were seriously worried by Trump’s performance. ‘Are we watching a real-time mental health crisis with Trump? Seriously,’ posted ex-Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger.
Ty Cobb, a former White House lawyer who served during Trump’s first term, agreed there had been a ‘significant decline’ in the President’s mental faculties.
‘He’s always been driven by narcissism,’ Cobb said. ‘But I think the dementia and the cognitive decline are palpable, as do many experts, including many physicians.’
Cobb described Trump’s remarks about seizing control of Greenland as ‘not the comments of a rational human being and certainly not presidential’, adding: ‘I don’t think there’s anybody outside the United States who believes Trump is sane.’
Stephanie Grisham, Trump’s former White House press secretary who has since defected to the Democrats, labelled the press conference ‘bizarre, even for him’.
During his presidency, Mr Biden was often criticised for his seemingly declining mental state
Writing on social media, she added: ‘It’s all the usual rambling, off-topic tales, half-truths, lies, ‘I’ve fixed everything – no one has ever seen anything like it’ stuff… but it’s low-energy and feels like he’s mentally slipping. Congress – please wake up.’
Grisham appeared to be alluding – as many critics have explicitly done – to the 25th Amendment of the US Constitution, which provides for an involuntary transfer of power if a President is deemed incapable of governing.
A particular low point, cite his opponents, is Trump’s astonishingly petulant text message to Norwegian prime minister Jonas Gahr Store, in which he complained that he no longer felt obliged to think ‘purely of peace’ because Norway had not awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize – something it cannot do in any case.
Last Monday, Dr Jonathan Reiner, a cardiologist who treated former Republican vice president Dick Cheney, said the text, released by the Norwegian government, ‘should trigger a bipartisan congressional inquiry into presidential fitness’.
Others argue that to grasp the full extent of Trump’s increasingly erratic behaviour – Trump Unfiltered, as it were – one need only examine his frenetic, conspiracy laden social media output, which even his most senior aides reportedly no longer attempt to restrain.
Often posted late at night, the volume is staggering. On a single evening in December, Trump unleashed 160 posts in under five hours – at times firing them off at a rate of more than one a minute.
Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s chief adviser, says: ‘Americans are increasingly unnerved by the President’s rambling appearances and late-night screeds.
‘Whether it’s age or advisers who can’t check his worst instincts, Mr Trump is acting in ways no American president has.’
Speculation has also gathered that the increasingly garrulous President is suffering from logorrhoea, a speech disorder (Trump and Biden in the Oval Office in November 2024)
Team Trump remains fiercely defensive about his health, a topic that visibly irritates the President himself. And no doctor who has examined him has formally diagnosed a cognitive disorder.
He has admitted undergoing a CT scan last October for what officials described as cardiovascular concerns, experimenting with compression socks for swollen ankles – before abandoning them – and taking more aspirin than advised.
Indeed, having ‘clipped’ his hand on a table, he blamed the drug for creating the large purple bruise on his left hand that reporters noticed at Davos.
However, Trump insists he’s in ‘perfect health’, which he attributes to his ‘good genetics’. He says he’s inherited his boundless energy from his parents, who were both full of beans well into old age.
A few weeks ago, he boasted of having ‘aced’ a cognitive test for the third consecutive time. Yet given that the exam includes tasks such as drawing a clock, recalling five words and identifying animals including a tiger and a duck, the achievement may be less dazzling than he suggests.
For now, if the President truly wishes to reassure the world he’s fit to govern, he might begin by showing he knows the difference between Greenland and Iceland.
