Get Ready for the ‘Trump Is Senile’ News Cycle

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, May 27, 2025

 

We’re now two months, three books, and countless op-eds and cable news segments into a media-led campaign devoted to retroactively exposing the extent of President Joe Biden’s infirmity while he occupied the Oval Office. The exercise has been fruitful. Even if the overall portrait produced by these reflections isn’t surprising — most of the country suspected that Biden’s decrepitude was as bad or worse than what we all saw on camera — the extent of the cover-up has been disquieting.

 

We should now be embarking on the phase of this campaign that yields recommendations. How was it that Democrats deceived themselves and their co-partisans to such a degree? To what extent was Joe Biden in control of his faculties and the country, or was he compelled to outsource his constitutional duties to subordinates or perhaps mere associates? How can we as a country ensure that such a circumstance never occurs again?

 

At least, those are the questions those who are conducting this critical look back should be proposing. We’re not hearing that yet. But why? Perhaps, like the effort to disguise Biden’s decrepitude, this campaign is yet another instrumental effort to secure political advantage. Once the decks are cleared and Biden’s deterioration can be plausibly deemed “old news,” prepare yourself for an all-hands effort to explore the depths of Donald Trump’s mental acuity.

 

The subject was gingerly broached during an MSNBC interview with Original Sin co-author Alex Thompson on Sunday. Thompson agreed with his interlocutor, Ayman Mohyeldin, that the cascade of Biden books established a “double standard” in the way Trump is covered. “I mean, are you out there also investigating and reporting about Trump’s health in the same rigor that you did this book?” he asked. Thompson maintained that, when it comes to Trump’s health, a code of silence prevails. The president has not and will not release his medical records, after all. In an earlier interview, the book’s co-author, Jake Tapper, called on his colleagues to be “even more aggressive when it comes to demanding transparency on health issues.”

 

That’s not just reasonable but a vital corrective to the motivated blindness that typified the Biden years. And yet, we can anticipate how cynically the press will pursue this directive. We’ve already been privy to it.

 

This month, the Daily Beast’s David Rothkopf wondered whether the president wasn’t “catawampus, past-it, mentally unwell or even broken.” At the risk of his thesis, Rothkopf retreated to the partisan instinct to insist that Trump’s inconstancy is deliberate and “intentional.” Still, the caprice Rothkopf sees in the actions of the president and his subordinates is “crazy” in a colloquial sense.

 

Reason’s Jacob Sullum asked us to survey a transcript of the president’s interview with ABC News correspondent Terry Moran, in which Trump claimed that a controversial image of knuckle tattoos justified Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s deportation to El Salvador, and asks the big question: “If he were senile, how would we know?”

 

A clip of the president alongside Speaker Mike Johnson last week featured the president turning from reporters in one direction only for the speaker to gently guide him in another. This, a cast of online hysterics insisted, would have been an explosive senior moment in which the president walked “straight into a wall” but for Johnson’s intervention.

 

Trump was similarly accused of senility last week when he confused the Japanese company “Nippon” with the Japanese company “Nissan.” Trump’s meandering address to West Point graduates raised questions “about his mental decline.” Trump “lives in fear of going down the path his father went down, which was dementia, followed by Alzheimer’s, into his 90s,” the journalist Tim O’Brien speculated. But time comes for us all. “Watching how he answers questions now compared to Trump 1.0, he slurs his words a little,” O’Brien continued. “He looks weary. He is slouched.”

 

Really? Of course, we could engage in a subjective analysis of the president’s gate, posture, and demeanor over the past decade, and we’re sure to see the mark those years have left on the man. But is Trump any less coherent in the transcription of his remarks today than he was ten years ago? Does he issue misstatements, half-truths, or outright falsehoods more than he once did? Is he any more capricious than he was in his first term?

 

Reporters who call for more scrutiny of our gerontocratic governing class are correct, and Trump himself may be experiencing the aliments that accompany his advanced age. But it’s hard to look beyond the politically advantageous timing of these new concerns about the president’s relative acuity. After all, the last bout of handwringing over Trump’s mental faculties was also a product of political opportunism.

 

In the final weeks of the 2024 campaign, media outlets and personalities wondered whether the 40 minutes Trump spent dancing on a rally stage, while some attendees were receiving medical attention, was an indicator of senility. Trump’s clipped sentences, “confused words,” and his recollection of an audience for his audience-free debate with Kamala Harris called into question his “cognitive fitness,” Dr. Kavita Patel wrote for MSNBC that same month. Indeed, “we must raise questions about his mental state and his decision-making abilities.” The New York Times agreed. “He rambles, he repeats himself, he roams from thought to thought,” a four-bylined October report read, “some of them hard to understand, some of them unfinished, some of them factually fantastical.” The experts and algorithms the Times consulted found that the president was more inclined to use superlatives and appeal to absolutes in his speeches — “a sign of advancing age.” He “frequently reaches to the past for his frame of reference,” and “seems confused about modern technology.”

 

The clear political motives that inspired the pre-election news cycle about Trump’s mental state and the similarity to the conditions that gave way to the current conversation are not dispositive. Aging follows Hemingway’s path toward bankruptcy: gradually at first, then all at once. The Fourth Estate is obligated to pursue that story in ways they did not under Biden, and they surely will.

 

When they do so, however, reporters might appeal to the moral authority they are seeking to reclaim via this burst of reflections on the Biden years. With that, the effort to transpose Biden’s sin onto Trump and his courtiers will enjoy the presumption of dispassionate objectivity. It just might work, too, even if it shouldn’t.