One of the leitmotifs of Donald Trump’s stump speeches in the run-up to the 2024 US presidential election was a comparison between his mental alertness and that of then-president Joe Biden, who withdrew from the race months before the election day amid rising concerns over his declining health.
Biden, 82 at the time, appeared physically weak in public appearances and showed signs of cognitive decline.
The true state of Biden’s worsening health was kept from voters by close presidential aides during his short-lived re-election campaign, a fact that journalists Jake Tapper of CNN and Alex Thompson of Axios later detailed in a tell-all book.
Barely a few months later, the roles seem to have reversed.
President Trump, 79, has also started showing signs of mental decline soon after starting his second term in office on January 20.
He has since been caught on camera forgetting the chain of events, confusing the names of his cabinet members, losing track of time, and going on long-winded rants in response to unrelated questions.
Repeated expressions of forgetfulness and absent-mindedness by Trump have prompted analysts to ask whether the person who leads one of the world’s strongest military powers and has the power to unilaterally launch nuclear strikes is mentally fit for the office he holds.
Here are a few instances from the last few months when Trump, the oldest person to ever get elected as US president, showed clear signs of mental decay.
(Imaginary) governor Kristi Whitman
Trump left reporters confused on August 25 in the Oval Office when he kept talking about an imaginary governor named “Kristi Whitman”.
“You know, I did a favour for Kristi Whitman,” Trump said about the non-existing governor.
“Whitmer,” Trump corrected himself a few seconds later, even though “Kristi Whitmer” is still a made-up name.
Analysts were quick to suggest that Trump might have mixed up the names of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem and former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman.
Rant against windmills
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen began discussing the immigration crisis at a meeting with Trump on July 27 in earnest, but the US president’s priorities lay elsewhere.
“And the other thing I say to Europe: We will not allow a windmill to be built in the United States,” Trump said, bringing up the topic of windmills without any reason.
“They’re killing us… I’m not talking about airplanes, I’m talking about beautiful plains,” he said.
The European dignitary wore a perplexed look as Trump underwent a “total mental collapse” while babbling about the effects of windmills on marine life.
Earlier in 2023, Trump had claimed that offshore windmills were making whales go “crazy” and causing them to wash up on shore dead, a claim without any scientific evidence.
The Unabomber connection
Last month, Trump falsely claimed that his late uncle, John Trump, taught Ted Kaczynski, a mathematician-turned-terrorist popularly known as the Unabomber, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
The claim is incorrect as Kaczynski studied at Harvard, not MIT. Moreover, the president’s uncle passed away in 1985, while Kaczynski was publicly revealed as the Unabomber only in 1996.
Therefore, there is no possibility that Trump could have asked his uncle about Kaczynski in 1985 or earlier.
During the same speech, Trump also claimed incorrectly that his uncle was “the longest-serving professor in the history of MIT” (he wasn’t) and that his uncle’s three university degrees were “in nuclear, chemical, and math” (they weren’t).
Trump narrated a seemingly made-up story about his uncle and Kaczynski and inserted himself in the middle of it. “I said, ‘What kind of a student was he, Uncle John?’… He said, ‘He’d correct – he’d go around correcting everybody.’ But it didn’t work out too well for him,” Trump said.
What $60 million?
Early this month, when asked about the starvation in Gaza, Trump appeared to forget US aid details, falsely claiming that Washington donated $60 million “two weeks ago”.
“You really at least want to have somebody say thank you. No other country gave anything,” he said, implying incorrectly that no other country contributed. The UK announced an $80 million aid package in July, while the European Union set aside $195 million in financial support.
A review of aid records by the British newspaper Guardian did not reveal any record of the US giving $60 million to Gaza “two weeks” before Trump’s press talk.
Lamps and frames amid war
At a recent cabinet meeting called to discuss the heavy flooding in Texas, the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the bombing of Iran, and US tariffs threatening global trade flows, Trump spent 13 minutes delivering a monologue about how he had decorated the cabinet meeting room.
“Look at those frames, you know, I’m a frame person, sometimes I like frames more than I like the pictures,” he told the press and members of his cabinet, who nodded approvingly.
“You know these, these lamps have been very important actually, whether people love them or not but they’re if you see pictures like Pearl Harbor or Tora! Tora!” he said.
Faucets and shower heads
On July 1, when asked about his next campaign promise, Trump rambled incoherently about meeting foreign leaders, removing regulations, water restrictors in faucets and shower heads.
“I got rid of – just one I got rid of the other night, you buy a house, they have a faucet in the house, Joe, and the faucet the water doesn’t come out. They have a restrictor… Uh, you have a shower head, the shower doesn’t uh, the shower doesn’t, you think it’s not working. It is working,” he said.
Obama, Comey, and Epstein files
Last month, Trump insisted that former president Obama and James Comey, former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), fabricated the so-called Epstein files, a hypothesised document allegedly containing the names of high-profile clients of convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
This was despite the fact that both Obama and Comey were out of office when Epstein was arrested in 2019.
“I would say that, you know, these files were made up by Comey, they were made up by Obama, they were made up by Biden,” Trump told reporters at the White House.
Trump had fired Comey in 2017, two years before Epstein’s arrest. Comey has not held any government position since then. Obama had been out of office for years by the time of Epstein’s death. It was during Biden’s presidency that the US Justice Department put on trial Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell and secured a conviction against her.
Appointing ‘a terrible Fed chair’
While criticising Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, Trump seemed unable to remember that he had appointed the 72-year-old central banker to the top position during his first term in the Oval Office.
“I was surprised he was appointed,” Trump said, before possibly realising that he was the one who nominated Powell in the first place.
Trump went on to criticise Biden, who became president after his first term in office, for re-appointing “a terrible Fed chair”.
