In an address from the White House in December, Donald Trump claimed that, over the past 11 months, his administration had brought “more positive change” than any government in US history.
“There has never been anything like it,” Trump added.
It’s true that his second term has been unusual, including in some ways which the president might not appreciate. That’s because Trump, 79, has shown erratic and at times confused behavior throughout 2025, leading to questions about his mental and physical performance.
Trump has appeared to fall asleep during some meetings; amid others, he has drifted off-topic, launching into bizarre segues on interior decor or about whales and birds. His public appearances have lacked focus, and he has used speeches to ramble about how Barack Obama walks down stairs, or to invent stories about the Unabomber.
The unpredictable behavior has forced the White House to repeatedly defend Trump’s mental acuity, often in hyperbolic terms. Trump himself has bragged that he “aced” an assessment which tests for early signs of dementia, but over the course of his 11 months in office, examples of unusual behavior have piled up.
There was the case in mid-July, when Trump told a detailed story about how his uncle, the late professor John Trump, had taught Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (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.
Later that month, during a meeting with the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, Trump abruptly switched from discussing immigration to ranting about “windmills”. Speaking, non-stop and unprompted, for two minutes, Trump claimed 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 number killed by domestic cats and from them flying into power lines).
Another incident that raised questions about Trump’s state of mind came in September. Trump summoned the country’s top military commanders to a meeting in Virginia, and treated them to a speech touting his alleged successes before saying this:
America is respected again as a country. We were not respected with Biden. They looked at him falling down stairs every day. Every day, the guy’s falling down stairs.”
Trump continued:
I said: ‘It’s not our president. We can’t have it.’ I’m very careful, you know, when I walk downstairs for – like I’m on stairs, like these stairs, I’m very – I walk very slowly. Nobody has to set a record, just try not to fall because it doesn’t work out well. A few of our presidents have fallen and it became a part of their legacy.
We don’t want that. Need to walk nice and easy. You not have – you don’t have to set any record. Be cool, be cool when you walk down, but don’t, don’t bop down the stairs. That’s the one thing with Obama, I had zero respect for him as a president, but he would bop down those stairs, I’ve never seen – da da da da da da, bop, bop, bop, he’d go down the stairs, wouldn’t hold on. I said, it’s great, I don’t want to do it. I guess I could do it, but eventually bad things are going to happen and it only takes once, but he did a lousy job as president.”
The White House has repeatedly batted away questions about Trump’s mental acuity, a spokesperson told the Guardian earlier this year that his “mental sharpness is second to none”, while Ronny Jackson, a Republican congressman who previously served as Trump’s doctor, claimed he was the “healthiest president this nation has ever seen”.
Still, the speculation over Trump’s health is unlikely to go away, with the Daily Beast reporting that Democrats are planning to make his mental acuity and fitness a key issue ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
They will have a fair amount of ammunition. In November, Trump, the oldest person to be inaugurated as president, said he had undergone an MRI, but couldn’t remember which body part received the scan. That month he also appeared to fall asleep during a meeting in the Oval Office – the same thing happened during a cabinet meeting in early December, and again two weeks later, at a press conference announcing cannabis reforms.
Earlier this year, Trump mixed up Albania with Armenia when discussing a peace deal involving the latter; discussing autism in a speech at the White House, he mused about “certain elements of genius that can be given to a baby”. Announcing that 13 grants would be awarded to investigate autism, Trump added: “Nothing bad can happen, it can only good happen.”
Among these moments of confusion have been incidents of Trump lashing out without inhibition. In December alone, he declared Somali immigrants to be “garbage” and, in a move that shocked even some Republicans, essentially blamed Rob Reiner for his own death.
Trump finds time to say and do these things despite a reduced schedule. On average, Trump’s scheduled events only start at about noon, and usually end at 5pm, a shorter workday compared to his first term, the New York Times found, while the number of his official appearances has decreased by 39%.
A White House official told the Guardian: “Not all of the president’s meetings are listed on the daily guidance that is distributed to the press.”
Liz Huston, the White House assistant press secretary, said in an emailed statement: “The Guardian is a left-wing mouthpiece that should be deeply embarrassed to publish this garbage. As the President’s physician, Dr Sean Barbabella, has made clear time and again – and as the American people see with their own eyes every single day – President Trump remains in excellent overall health.
“President Trump’s relentless work ethic, unmatched energy, and historic accessibility stand in sharp contrast to what we saw during the past four years when the failing legacy media intentionally covered up Joe Biden’s serious mental and physical decline from the American people. Pushing these fake and desperate narratives now about President Trump is why Americans’ trust in the media just fell to a new all-time low.”
A Pew Research Center survey in November found that 56% of US adults “say they have a lot of or some trust in the information they get from national news organizations”, which is 11 points lower than in March 2025, and 20 points lower than it was in 2016.
That same month, a poll by Gallup found 36% of American adults approve of Trump’s performance, the lowest rating of his second term. Earlier this year YouGov found that half of Americans think Trump is too old to be president.
Throughout the year, the White House has ferociously defended Trump against accusations he is in decline. Yet the questions about Trump, who will turn 80 in June, are unlikely to go away.
