‘He has trouble completing a thought': bizarre public appearances again cast doubt on Trump's mental acuity
For more than a year Trump, 79, has exhibited odd behavior at campaign events, in interviews, in his spontaneous remarks and at press conferences. The president repeatedly drifts off topic, including during a cabinet meeting this month when he spent 15 minutes talking about decorating, and appears to misremember simple facts about his government and his life.
During his presidency, Joe Biden was subjected to intense speculation over his mental acuity – including from Trump. After Biden's disastrous debate performance in June 2024, when he repeatedly struggled to maintain his train of thought, scrutiny over Biden's fitness eventually led to him not running for re-election.
Trump, however, has largely been saved the same examination, despite examples of confusion and unusual behavior that have continued throughout his second term and were on full display on his recent trip to the UK.
Over the weekend Trump, during a meeting with the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, abruptly switched from discussing immigration to saying this: 'The other thing I say to Europe: we've – we will not allow a windmill to be built in the United States. They're killing us. They're killing the beauty of our scenery.'
Trump proceeded to speak, non-stop and unprompted, for two minutes about windmills, claiming without evidence that they drive whales 'loco' and that wind energy 'kills the birds' (the proportion of birds killed by turbines is tiny compared with the amount killed by domestic cats and from flying into power lines).
The abrupt changes in conversation are an example of Trump 'digressing without thinking – he'll just switch topics without self-regulation, without having a coherent narrative', said Harry Segal, a senior lecturer in the psychology department at Cornell University and in the psychiatry department at Weill Cornell Medicine.
For years, Trump has batted away questions about his mental acuity, describing himself as a 'stable genius' and bragging about 'acing' exams – later revealed to be very simple tests – which check for early signs of dementia.
But Democrats have begun to more aggressively question the president's fitness, including Jasmine Crockett, the representative from Texas, and California's governor, Gavin Newsom, and this week alone offered multiple examples of Trump exhibiting odd conduct.
Asked about the famine in Gaza on Sunday, Trump seemed unable to remember the aid the US has given to Gaza, and forget that others had also contributed.
Trump claimed the US gave $60m 'two weeks ago'. He added: 'You really at least want to have somebody say thank you. No other country gave anything.
'Nobody acknowledged it, nobody talks about it and it makes you feel a little bad when you do that and you know you have other countries not giving anything, none of the European countries by the way gave – I mean nobody gave but us.'
Trump seemed to not realize or remember that other countries have given money to Gaza – the UK announced a £60m ($80m) package in July, and the European Union has allocated €170m ($195m) in aid. And the Guardian could not find any record of the US giving $60m to Gaza two weeks ago. In June, the US state department approved a $30m grant to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a group backed by Israeli and US interests which has been criticized by Democrats as 'connected to deadly violence against starving people seeking food in Gaza'.
The White House did not respond to questions about Trump's claimed $60m donation.
Segal said another characteristic of Trump's questionable mental acuity is confabulation. 'It's where he takes an idea or something that's happened and he adds to it things that have not happened.'
A high-profile example came in mid-July, when Trump claimed his uncle, the late professor John Trump, had taught Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, at MIT.
Trump recalled: 'I said: 'What kind of a student was he, Uncle John? Dr John Trump.' I said: 'What kind of a student?' And then he said: 'Seriously, good.' He said: 'He'd correct – he'd go around correcting everybody.' But it didn't work out too well for him.'
The problem is: that cannot possibly be true. First, Trump's uncle died in 1985, and Kaczynski was only publicly identified as the Unabomber in 1996. Second, Kaczynski did not study at MIT.
'The story makes no sense whatsoever, but it's told in a very warm, reflective way, as if he's remembering it,' Segal said. 'This level of thinking really has been deteriorating.'
Aside from the confabulation, there have been times when Trump seems unable to focus. During the 2024 campaign there was the bizarre sight of Trump spending 40 minutes swaying to music onstage after a medical emergency at one of his campaign rallies. Trump's rambling speeches during his campaign – he would frequently drift between topics in a technique he described as 'the weave' – also drew scrutiny.
The White House removed official transcripts of Trump's remarks from its website in May, claiming it was part of an effort to 'maintain consistency'. It is worth reading Trump's remarks in full, however, to get a sense of how the president speaks on a day-to-day basis.
At the beginning of July, Trump was asked, 'What is the next campaign promise that you plan to fulfill to the American people?' He then rambled about meeting foreign leaders and removing regulations, adding:
Sign up to This Week in Trumpland
A deep dive into the policies, controversies and oddities surrounding the Trump administration
after newsletter promotion
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. You can't – in areas where you have so much water they don't know what to do with it. Uh, you have a shower head the shower doesn't uh, the shower doesn't, you think it's not working. It is working. The water's dripping out and that's no good for me. I like this hair lace and [sic] – I like that hair nice and wet. Takes you – you have to stand in the shower for 20 minutes before you get the soap out of your hair. And I put a, a thing – and it sounds funny but it's really not. It's horrible. And uh, when you wash your hands, you turn on the faucet, no water comes out. You're washing whole – water barely comes out it's ridi – this was done by crazy people. And I wor – wrote it all off and got it approved in Congress so that they can't just change it.'
'Any fair-minded mental-health expert would be very worried about Donald Trump's performance,' Richard A Friedman, a professor of clinical psychiatry and the director of the psychopharmacology clinic at Weill Cornell Medical College, wrote in the Atlantic, after a stumbling performance from Trump in his debate against Kamala Harris last September.
He added: 'If a patient presented to me with the verbal incoherence, tangential thinking, and repetitive speech that Trump now regularly demonstrates, I would almost certainly refer them for a rigorous neuropsychiatric evaluation to rule out a cognitive illness.'
At a recent cabinet meeting called to discuss the flooding tragedy in Texas, the war in Ukraine and Gaza, the bombing of Iran, and global tariffs, Trump went on a 13-minute monologue about how he had decorated the cabinet meeting room.
After talking about paintings which he said he had personally selected from 'the vaults', Trump said. 'Look at those frames, you know, I'm a frame person, sometimes I like frames more than I like the pictures,' and added he had overseen the cleaning of some china.
As department heads, including the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, waited to be dismissed so they could go and do their jobs, Trump continued:
Here we put out – 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! Tora!, you see movies about the White House where wars are being discussed, oftentimes they'll show those lamps or something like those lamps, something that looks like them. Probably not the reals, because I don't think they're allowed to – this is a very important room, this is a sacred room, and I don't think they made movies from here.
You never know what they do. But they were missing, er, medallions. See the medallions on top? They had a chain going into the ceiling. And I said: 'You can't do that. You have to have a medallion.' They said, 'What's a medallion?' I said: 'I'll show you.' And then we got some beautiful medallions, and you see them, they were put up there, makes the lamps look [inaudible] so we did these changes.
And when you think of it, the cost was almost nothing. We also painted the room a nice color, beige color, and it's been really something. The only question is, will I gold-leaf the corners? You could maybe tell me. My cabinet could take a vote. You see the top-line moldings, and the only question is do you go and leaf it? Because you can't paint it, if you paint it it won't look good because they've never found a paint that looks like gold. You see that in the Oval Office.
Er, they've tried for years and years. Somebody could become very wealthy, but they've never found a paint that looks like gold. So painting is easy but it won't look right.'
The White House pushes back aggressively on the issue of Trump's mental fitness.
'The Guardian is a left-wing mouthpiece that should be embarrassed to pass off deranged resistance leftists as 'experts'. Anyone pathetic enough to defend Biden's mental state – while being labeled as unethical by their peers – has zero credibility. President Trump's mental sharpness is second to none and he is working around the clock to secure amazing deals for the American people,' said White House spokesperson Liz Huston.
So do his political allies. 'As President Trump's former personal physician, former physician to the president, and White House physician for 14 years across three administrations, I can tell you unequivocally: President Donald J Trump is the healthiest president this nation has ever seen. I continue to consult with his current physician and medical team at the White House and still spend significant time with the president. He is mentally and physically sharper than ever before,' said congressman Ronny Jackson.
In April, Trump's White House physician, Dr Sean Barbabella, wrote that the president 'exhibits excellent cognitive and physical health and is fully fit to execute the duties of the commander-in-chief and head of state'. He said Trump was assessed for cognitive function, which was normal.
That report hasn't stopped people from questioning Trump's mental acuity.
'What we see are the classic signs of dementia, which is gross deterioration from someone's baseline and function,' John Gartner, a psychologist and author who spent 28 years as an assistant professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, said in June.
'If you go back and look at film from the 1980s, [Trump] actually was extremely articulate. He was still a jerk, but he was able to express himself in polished paragraphs, and now he really has trouble completing a thought and that is a huge deterioration.'
Gartner, who during Trump's first term co-founded Duty to Warn, a group of mental health professionals who believed Trump had the personality disorder malignant narcissism, warned: 'I predicted before the election that he would probably fall off the cliff before the end of his term. And at the rate he is deteriorating, you know … we'll see.
'But the point is that it's going to get worse. That's my prediction.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Reuters
10 minutes ago
- Reuters
Breakingviews - US-India standoff is about more than Russian oil
HONG KONG, Aug 5 (Reuters Breakingviews) - The standoff between the U.S. and India may well get worse before it gets better. Having slapped a 25% tariff on goods the South Asian country sends to America, Donald Trump is vowing to ratchet up the rate over the $4 trillion economy's purchases of Russian oil. New Delhi calls the threat unjustified and unreasonable. A deal with Washington is possible, but diffusing the situation looks tricky. Far from being a winner in the U.S. president's global trade war, India is rapidly emerging as a big loser alongside China. Trump's desire to isolate the People's Republic - and its exporters routing goods through Southeast Asia - was initially expected to benefit India, which sent $87 billion of goods to the U.S. last year. His sudden cooling on Russia, though, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi's reluctance to open up his country's agriculture market out of a desire to protect millions of poor farmers, have put India in his firing line. India's economy can withstand Trump's aggressions, for now. Nomura, a Japanese bank, reckons the 25% U.S. tariff on imports from India might shave 20 basis points off its 6.2% GDP growth forecast for the country's current financial year. Sure, New Delhi argues its purchases of cheap Russian oil, which comprise 40% of its crude imports, are a "national compulsion" and keep global prices in check. But India can manage without it: at 2.1%, its consumer price inflation is at the lowest level since January 2019, so giving up the roughly $4 discount per barrel on Russian supplies would not cause too much domestic pain at current prices. Yet India has a lot more besides oil to lose from giving Russia the cold shoulder. The duo's longstanding relationship may be undergoing a managed decline, opens new tab as New Delhi diversifies its weapons supplies, but Moscow remains a reliable partner to India and relations with the country buttress its multipolar foreign policy. Trump's decision to work with Pakistan to develop its oil reserves, and his subsequent taunt that it perhaps will sell oil to neighbouring India one day, further underscore why New Delhi may always keep some distance from Washington. India can perhaps afford to wait and see what the U.S. agrees with China. Beijing has vowed to protect its energy sovereignty in response to similar U.S. threats over Russian oil purchases. That poses a major obstacle for Trump to strike any grand bargain with the world's second-largest economy. Ultimately the U.S. may see value in preserving a warm relationship with India as a counterbalance to China. The wait, however, will be awkward. Follow Una Galani on LinkedIn, opens new tab and X, opens new tab.
The Guardian
10 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Tuesday briefing: What the fraught talks to reach a ‘Paris agreement for plastic pollution' could bring
Good morning. Not only does plastic waste clog up waterways, beaches and strangle sea life, it also causes havoc inside the human body. Tiny fragments – invisible to the human eye – are probably swimming around your lungs, blood and liver right now. This represents a 'growing and underrecognised danger' to human health, the latest report in the Lancet warns, as 10 days of tense talks kick off in Geneva today, with 179 countries due to hash out a kind of 'Paris agreement for plastic pollution'. These talks – which have been going on since 2022 – have been dogged by deep disagreements. More than 100 nations want a legally binding cap on plastic production, while petrostates want to keep things vague, and maybe promise to, errrrr, do some more recycling, perhaps? It's possible talks will collapse with no reference to cuts to plastic production. I spoke to the Guardian's environment correspondent Sandra Laville about why the sixth (and hopefully final) round of talks are likely to be so fraught and what a good deal could look like. Weather | Gusts of more than 100mph from Storm Floris have brought travel disruption, power cuts and the widespread cancellation of events across large parts of the UK. Disruption to the rail network in Scotland is expected until around 4pm on Tuesday, ScotRail has said. UK news | A member of the House of Lords urged ministers to crack down on Palestine Action at the request of a US defence company that employs him as an adviser. Police are planning to arrest anyone demonstrating in support of Palestine Action this weekend. Politics | The Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, is not telling the truth about the 'real failures of 14 years of Conservative government', the former Conservative prime minister Liz Truss has said. Tommy Robinson | The far-right activist known as Tommy Robinson has been arrested by British police on suspicion of grievous bodily harm after a man was allegedly assaulted at a London railway station. Gaza | More than 100 critically ill and injured children in Gaza hope to come to the UK as soon as possible after the government announced a scheme to provide those in severe need with NHS care. The United Nations agreed to create a treaty on plastic in 2022. Since then, five separate negotiations have failed to secure an agreement. Initially, the idea was for the treaty to address the whole life cycle of plastics, but plans have since been watered down. The last round of talks – held in Busan, South Korea – broke down at the end of last year. 'There was some concern we wouldn't even get another meeting,' says Sandra Laville. Country representatives are resuming today for 10 days of talks in Switzerland. Although plastic is often seen as a cheap material, it's expensive when you factor in the cost of cleaning up the damage it causes – the latest report found it is responsible for at least $1.5tn (£1.1tn) a year in health-related damages. And almost all plastic is made from fossil oil and gas. Producing all of this plastic results in greater emissions than those produced by Russia – the world's fourth-largest polluter. According to the University of Oxford's Our World in Data, plastic production has increased sharply over the past 70 years. In 1950, the world was producing two million tonnes of plastic to more than 450m tonnes today. Less than 10% of the world's plastic is recycled, and more than 40% is stuck in landfill. 'Single-use plastic is the big earner for lots of companies and the petrochemical industry,' says Sandra. There were a record 220 fossil fuel and chemic industry lobbyists at the December talks in Busan. That was far more than even the host nation's delegation of 140 and was three times the number of independent scientists. Hotel and flight costs make the treaty negotiations expensive to attend, which is why rich industrial interests can flood the talks with lobbyists while smaller countries, scientists and NGOs struggle to find the funds. Why is this such a pressing problem for human health? Plastic is, in many ways, a wonder material, but the most rapid increase in production is for single-use plastics, things such as drinks bottles and fast-food packaging, which we sometimes use for a matter of minutes before chucking away. This sort of plastic may be a big earner for companies, but it is not essential for human wellbeing, and the drawbacks are significant. The latest review, published in the leading medical journal the Lancet, was carried out by leading health researchers and doctors. They found plastics cause disease and death from infancy to old age because they are laced in more than 16,000 chemicals such as fillers, dyes, flame retardants and stabilisers which have been known to damage human health. The most vulnerable in society are the most at risk. The analysis found that foetuses and infants were subject to harms such as increased risks of miscarriage, stillbirth, birth defects, impaired lung growth, childhood cancer and fertility problems later in life. What are delegates going to achieve? There are two groups battling it out in Geneva. One is comprised of more than 100 countries – including the EU – which support legally binding global reductions in plastic production and the phasing out of single-use plastic products. The other camp are countries with large fossil fuel industries, such as Saudi Arabia, Russia and Iran, who say they don't want any suggestion of tackling plastic production. The latter group want the agreement to focus on better management and recycling of waste, and for countries to implement voluntary or national measures. 'Countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, and China have moved the discussion away from production towards, 'Oh we just need to manage the waste better, oh we just need to recycle more',' says Sandra. Since 2022, these divisions have become more entrenched. Countries such as Egypt and Malaysia have plastic industry representatives in their national delegations. Meanwhile, the 100 high-ambition countries are not going to fold – the evidence shows we have to reduce plastic production to reduce pollution. 'That's why it all collapsed in Busan in December,' says Sandra. The nature of any agreement is still up the air – it's possible a meaningful treaty will be agreed, or they have further meetings, or some countries agree to pursue a 'coalition of the willing' treaty outside the UN. Greenpeace is calling for at least a 75% reduction in plastic production by 2040. But if an agreement can be reached, it would be the equivalent of getting the Paris agreement for climate negotiations. 'You can argue the Paris agreement hasn't done much, but there has been an agreement, and we just haven't had one on plastic pollution. So this is the kind of vacuum that needs to be filled,' says Sandra. What does this say about international environmental diplomacy? 'I think there was this real optimism in 2022 when the idea of a treaty was agreed,' says Sandra. Scientists were saying that getting a good agreement could be a gamechanger for cutting plastic pollution. But the winds appear to have changed. 'By last November that optimism had all gone.' The US – which is the world's second-largest producer of plastic after China – has flip-flopped positions during negotiations, but now appears to be aligned with other major fossil fuel producers and is supporting the least ambitious option. China and Iran are also among the countries looking for less ambition, an option they describe as 'realistic'. It comes as the Trump administration in the US rolls back environmental policies, including a longstanding finding on greenhouse gas emissions endangering health. Andrés del Castillo, senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), a non profit providing legal counsel to some countries attending the talks, said oil states were questioning even basic facts about the harm to health caused by plastics. 'We are in a moment of revisionism, where even science is highly politicised,' he says. Hopes for a 'last-chance' ambitious global treaty to curb plastic pollution are looking dim – but a weaker agreement still shows international diplomacy functions. 'It doesn't feel as if the world is ready to address any of this,' says Sandra. 'I do think that any treaty – as long as it's not really weak – is a good thing to hold up.' Sign up to First Edition Our morning email breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what's happening and why it matters after newsletter promotion Nels Abbey is compelling in this column on Kemi Badenoch's 'comedic, but sadly revealing' rejection of her Nigerian heritage – not least, he writes, because her life 'hardly describes the general Black experience'. Charlie Lindlar, acting deputy editor, newsletters Someone in Teesside has (or had) been sharing their house with a rat the length of a carry-on luggage bag. Rats are getting bigger and bolder as cash-strapped local authorities can't deal with pest control. Quite a memorable read – if only for the picture at the top. Phoebe Some strong takes here in Michael Hogan's list of TV characters so bad they ruined shows. Emily from Friends ('unfunny wet blanket') gets a rough go of it, but Ted Lasso's Nate Shelley deserves even deeper condemnation. Charlie Millions of people are in line for payouts after the launch of a compensation scheme for those affected by the car finance scandal. This is a useful explainer on who is eligible and what you need to do. Phoebe Forget something to read, how about something to cook? Rukmini Iyer's baked feta tacos with pink onion and pineapple salsa is a fun, fuss-free dinner that, she promises, 'comes together in minutes'. Charlie Football | Everton have raised their bid for Tyler Dibling to about £40m and opened talks with Chelsea over signing Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall (pictured above) as they attempt to ease David Moyes's transfer frustrations. Formula One | Lewis Hamilton gave a remarkably downbeat response after a 12th place finish in the Hungarian Grand Prix on Sunday, prompting questions about his future. The former world champion suggested he was in turmoil and that he would 'hopefully' return when F1 resumes after the summer break. Football | Fifa is facing a multibillion-pound claim for compensation from a group of former players after last year's ruling by the European court of justice that its transfer rules are unlawful. The Guardian leads with 'Police warn of mass arrests at Palestine Action protest'. The Mirror reports on Nigel Farage under the headline 'Fanning the flames'. The i reports 'Home Office to detain small boat migrants for deportation to France in days'. The Times has 'PM and police at odds over migrant suspects'. The Telegraph reports 'Parents pay £500m to beat school VAT raid'. The Financial Times says 'Tesla awards Musk $30bn of stock to keep billionaire focused on business'. How the Trump administration made a sewage crisis 'woke' How did the Trump administration upend a landmark civil rights victory for environmental justice? Nina Lakhani reports. A bit of good news to remind you that the world's not all bad Last year, Chiara Wilkinson (pictured above) felt increasing guilt about getting to the end of a week and facing a fridge full of wilted ingredients. A long commute and grand ideas about what she had the time and energy to cook meant that a lot of food got chucked in the compost bin. But last summer, while auditing her overall spending, she also started growing a few vegetables. 'It was as if a switch had been flicked in my mind – as if it had taken the idea of growing my own food to truly understand the value and timescale of food production,' she writes. She committed to using up every scrap of uneaten food and became more flexible about following recipes. Apples in a curry? Yes, please. Leftover roast potatoes with spaghetti? Delicious. It hasn't been without what she terms 'flavour disasters', but she has found the challenge has made her less ambitious but more creative. 'Best of all,' Wilkinson writes, 'I've rediscovered what I loved about cooking in the first place: the joy of making something delicious out of almost nothing.' Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday And finally, the Guardian's puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow. Quick crossword Cryptic crossword Wordiply
BBC News
37 minutes ago
- BBC News
Oxford controversial bridge scheme cost rises by £3.7m
A controversial bridge will cost an extra £3.7m to build because of delays caused by a recent judicial review, a local authority has Oxpens River Bridge, which would link Oxpens Meadow to Grandpont Nature Park in Oxford, was approved last year and was supposed to have been built by against the bridge launched a judicial review into the decision earlier this year, which was dismissed by the High Court on all five counts in bridge was initially expected to cost £10.3m, but the city council now estimates it will cost £14m. Oxford City Council said the increase in cost was due to the inflation of construction costs, caused by the delay from the judicial a report prepared ahead of a scrutiny committee meeting on Tuesday, the council said it was working with potential benefactors, including Homes England and the University of Oxford, to bridge the funding gaps. Construction work on the bridge is set to begin in early 2026, with a view to be completed by February Friends of Grandpont Nature Park, who brought the judicial review, said it "hopes to save [the taxpayer] millions by scrapping the project altogether".The group has submitted an appeal against the high court decision, and is waiting to hear whether it can city council previously said the bridge would provide a walking route between Osney Mead and Oxpens - with both areas set for regeneration with new homes and for the bridge currently consists of £8.8m from the Oxfordshire Housing and Growth Deal, and £1.5m from the Housing and Infrastructure Fund from Homes opposed to the development argue locals would lose a cherished nature park, emphasising that there is already a bridge a short distance away that could be fixed instead. You can follow BBC Oxfordshire on Facebook, X (Twitter), or Instagram.
