https://newrepublic.com/article/204740/trump-11-senile-moments-2025-year-review
Cognitive Decline? These Were Trump’s 11 Most Senile Moments This Year
When Donald Trump wasn’t busy falling asleep in front of the cameras, he spent his first year in office struggling to form coherent thoughts.
For the last year, the nation has witnessed President Trump’s rapid physical and mental decline. The 79-year-old president has repeatedly lost track of his thoughts, his whereabouts, and even his grasp on the English language.
The New Republic’s breaking news team has put together a list of the president’s most senile moments in his first year in office.
1. Trump falls asleep in front of the cameras
Since taking office his second time around, Trump has fallen asleep roughly a dozen times in public. It happened during Cabinet meetings, in the middle of his own bombastic military parade, at the U.S. Open, while meeting foreign leaders, and even during the Pope’s funeral. But the trend suggests that Trump’s bad habit is getting even worse.
The 79-year-old president has scorned reports about his health, insisting that he’s in “perfect” condition—a paragon of health—with excellent stamina for the job. He has even suggested that negative reports about his health could be tantamount to “treason.”
Yet for all his bravado, he has routinely appeared with strange discolorations on his hands, has received MRI scans, spent hours at Walter Reed Medical Center, and, of course, keeps napping at some remarkably inopportune times.
In December alone, Trump dozed off at least four times. The first was during a Cabinet meeting on December 2, in which the president was caught closing his eyes on several occasions, sometimes for minutes at a time.
The second incident this month happened in the middle of a peace signing agreement between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Trump readily took credit for resolving the countries’ feud, but couldn’t manage to stay awake for its historic closure.
The third time Trump was caught falling asleep on camera this month was during an announcement unveiling a multibillion dollar bailout package for America’s farmers. The much-needed relief must have been an awfully boring topic for the president, who was spotted sinking in his chair and jolting awake several times. However, the “very stable genius” did stay awake long enough to make a snarky comment about lawnmowers, which he said “you need about 185 IQ to turn on.”
The anti-woke president struggled to stay awake a fourth time the week before Christmas, when he seemingly drifted in and out of consciousness moments after signing a historic order reclassifying marijuana.
— Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling
2. “It’s an old term but it means basically what you’re buying, food.” — Trump, on groceries
Some old men love to golf, others like to fish. Trump, meanwhile, enjoys few hobbies more than goading the media, a muscle that he exercises relentlessly. But one of his recent standbys to snag a headline is so absurd that it has sparked wonder as to whether the president has literally anything in common with a normal person.
Trump, a silver spoon nepo baby that received a “small loan of a million dollars” from his dad to start his business, has publicly expressed wonder and fixation over the word “groceries” for more than a year now. His apparent awe has raised more than a couple eyebrows; it’s also raised questions as to whether he’s ever walked into a grocery store.
It began on the 2024 campaign trail, where the everyman wouldn’t just mention the high cost of groceries—he’d also rhapsodize about the word itself, frequently repeating the phrase “very simple word, groceries.” Eventually, it made its way into his vocabulary.
“Who uses the word? I started using the word—the groceries,” Trump told Meet the Press with a completely straight face in December 2024.
Since then, “groceries” has become something of an exotic fixture in Trump’s lexicon, a wondrous, alien find that he can take out of his Cabinet of Curiosities to wow his phenomenally rich associates like a 20th century explorer.
“It’s such an old-fashioned term but a beautiful term: groceries,” Trump mused in April. “It sort of says a bag with different things in it.”
But the grocery neurosis hasn’t stayed between Trump and his gang of sycophantic enablers. Instead, Trump has tried to share his fascination with world leaders, waxing poetic about “groceries” during a meeting with the United Arab Emirates in May while making himself look wildly out of touch in the process.
“It’s an old term but it means basically what you’re buying, food, it’s a pretty accurate term but it’s an old-fashioned sound,” the very stable genius announced to our Middle East allies.
— Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling
3. “Nobody knows what magnets are.”
Trump, who has obsessed about magnets for years, made a particularly wild claim last month: “Nobody knows what magnets are.”
In an interview about the economy with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, Trump suddenly began rambling about China and magnetic trains.
“President Xi was willing to do the railroad things—that’s magnets,” he said. “Now, nobody knows what a magnet is. If you don’t have a magnet, you don’t make a car. You don’t make a computer, you don’t make televisions and radios and all the other things. You don’t make anything. It’s a 30-year effort to monopolize a very important thing. Now, within two years, we’ll have magnets, all the magnets we want, but we don’t—because of tariffs, I called, I said listen, you’re going to play the magnet, we’re going to play the tariff on you.”
This wasn’t the first time Trump had waxed dramatic about magnets. In January 2024, he informed a crowd that magnets stop working if they get wet.
“Magnets. Now all I know about magnets is this: give me a glass of water, let me drop it on the magnets, that’s the end of the magnets,” he babbled.
— Tori Otten and Adrienne Mahsa Varkiani
4. Sad Charlie Kirk died but look at my ballroom
While describing his despair at learning that Charlie Kirk had been fatally shot in Utah, Trump took the opportunity to plug his $400 million White House ballroom while speaking on Fox & Friends in September.
“I was in the midst of, you know, building a great—for 150 years they’ve wanted a ballroom at the White House, right? They don’t have a ballroom, they have to use tents on the lawn for President Xi when he comes over, if it rains it’s a wipe out, and so I was with architects that were design[ing]—it’s gonna be incredible,” Trump rambled.
Later, the president changed the subject from Kirk to construction yet again while taking questions from reporters outside of the White House.
“How are you holding up over the last three and a half days?” asked one reporter, who’d also wished him condolences for Kirk.
“I think very good,” Trump replied. “And by the way, right there you see all the trucks, they just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House. Which is something they’ve been trying to get as you know for about 150 years, and it’s gonna be a beauty, it’ll be an absolutely magnificent structure.”
— Edith Olmsted
5. Trump reveals he thinks “medbeds” are real
As part of a late-night posting spree on Truth Social in September, Trump shared a video of himself announcing a “historic new health care system”—only to delete the post just 12 hours later because the video was a clearly computer-generated hoax.
In the video, a phony Trump sat behind his desk in the Oval Office, claiming that every American would receive their own “medbed card” which would give them access to facilities “designed to restore every citizen to full health and strength.” Medbeds are part of a far-right conspiracy theory claiming that the so-called Deep State has access to futuristic medical pods that can cure any ailment.
It’s entirely possible that the president posted the video by mistake, thinking it was a real news story—and apparently forgetting he never made such an announcement. Either that, or he was elevating a far-right conspiracy theory as a means of waving to his extremist supporters, or just trolling anyone who cares about the difference between truth and fiction.
— Edith Olmsted
6. “Da-da, da-da, da-da, bop, bop, bop”
At a September speech to troops in Quantico, Virginia, Trump went off on a tangent about his fear of tripping and falling on stairs—and admitted that former President Barack Obama was better at walking down them.
“I’m very careful, you know, when I walk down stairs.... 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.… You walk nice and easy. You’re not, you don’t have to set any record. Be cool. Be cool when you walk down,” Trump said, referring to how he scales the steps on Air Force One.
But then, Trump brought up his old fixation with Obama and how he disliked the way the 44th president handled stairs better than him.
“But don’t, don’t bop down the stairs. So 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 continued, singing and doing a little jig. “He’d go down the stairs, wouldn’t hold on, I said it’s great, I don’t wanna do it. I guess I could do it, but eventually bad things are gonna happen, and it only takes once. But he did a lousy job as president.”
Why Trump felt the need to tell a room full of the country’s highest-ranking military leaders about this is anyone’s guess, although it probably has to do with how much he hates Obama, and he’s probably more than a little jealous.
— Hafiz Rashid
7. Trump wanders off while meeting the Japanese prime minister
Trump’s visit to Japan in October began with a welcoming ceremony of that sort full of all the trappings and ceremony that he loves, but he was soon out of his element.
As he walked into a room full of dignitaries and a Japanese military band, Trump seemed to forget where he was going, even leaving Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi behind while she respectfully acknowledged the troops assembled to meet them.
Trump gets angry whenever media reports point to some kind of mental or physical decline. But it’s hard to argue with a video showing a 79-year-old person in a formal setting not knowing what he’s supposed to do and just walking away aimlessly.
— Hafiz Rashid
8. Trump goes for a stroll on the White House roof
On one sunny Tuesday afternoon in August, President Trump found himself on the White House roof.
“Sir, why are you on the roof?” reporters asked.
“Just taking a little walk. It’s good for your health,” Trump replied. Asked what he’s building “up there,” he made a vague gesture that clarified little, possibly in the shape of a dome, and said, “Something beautiful.”
While this curious rooftop jaunt remained unexplained, it may have had something to do with the numerous architectural changes Trump has announced at the White House, including a $400 million ballroom and a Rose Garden renovation, both of which have drawn backlash for their extraordinary cost and their lack of reverence for the structural history of the White House.
— Malcolm Ferguson
9. “And then they said skedaddle!”
“And then they said ‘skedaddle!’ The word skedaddle, and that went psshh like this,” Trump said at the McDonald’s Impact Summit, for some reason believing that this was the appropriate audience to discuss Israel’s military strikes on Iran.
Pantomiming a plane dropping bombs, he continued on undeterred.
“And I mean, it’s so unbelievable. And that knocked out Iran nuclear capability. And all of the Middle East became a different place. And now we have peace in the Middle East. And at the United Nations today they approved the board of peace.... I think it’ll be a board like no other, other than perhaps the McDonald’s board. You have a very good board.”
— Adrienne Mahsa Varkiani
10. “It is, TEPUBLICAN??? Or, TPUBLICAN???”
We’ve all unfortunately grown accustomed to Trump’s incessant shitposting over the years. But occasionally there are moments that truly make you question if he’s sending his “truths” straight from his phone without a second look. His “tepublican” and “panican” musing was one of them.
“There is a new word for a TRUMP REPUBLICAN, which is almost everyone (GREAT POLICY IS THE KEY!),” he said last month on Truth Social. “It is, TEPUBLICAN??? Or, TPUBLICAN???”
While there is certainly an internal split between MAGA Republicans and traditional GOPers, both of these names pretty much suck. And they don’t instill any faith in his mental acuity either, especially given that the post came just one hour after an angry rant about how mentally and physically healthy he was.
— Malcolm Ferguson
11. “Everything’s computer”
Trump’s short-lived stint as a proud Tesla owner kicked off with a bang when the president was stunned to see just how automated the electric vehicles are.
While staging a weird Tesla commercial at the White House in March for his then-best buddy Elon Musk, Trump announced he intended to buy one of the cars.
“I’m going to buy because number one, it’s a great product. It’s as good as it gets,” he told reporters. “And number two, because this man has devoted his energy and his life to doing this. I think he’s been treated very unfairly by a very small group of people.”
Trump then revealed he had no intentions to drive his shiny new red car. “I haven’t driven a car in a long time,” he admitted. “I’m going to have it at the White House, and I’m going to let my staff use it, I’m going to let people at the place use it.”
Upon getting in his car for the first time, Trump marveled at the interior and proclaimed, “Everything’s computer!”
The love affair turned out to be fleeting. Amid his drawn-out breakup with Musk in June, Trump reportedly weighed selling the car that he never intended to drive in the first place.
— Tori Otten
Scott Olson/Getty Images
