Donald Trump’s inner circle is “taking advantage” of the aging president’s “mental vacancy” to push forward their own agendas, foreign policy analyst David Rothkopf says.
The 79-year-old president launched into the new year with a string of wild moves and head-scratching gaffes that show “the decline of Donald Trump is accelerating,” Rothkopf said on The Daily Beast Podcast.
“This guy is losing it,” Rothkopf told host Joanna Coles. “He looks completely lost. And yet, at the same time, the people around him are taking advantage of the mental vacancy between his ears and pushing forward their extreme agendas faster than ever.”
Rothkopf rattled off the “offenses” Trump ushered in the new year with, from his unauthorized attack on Venezuela and saber‑rattling over Greenland, to the DOJ’s probe of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and his jaw-dropping comments about the killing of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent.
The author and former Foreign Policy magazine editor suggested people in the White House are allowed to go rogue with their own agendas “because Trump is just there going, ‘Where am I?’”
He cited a bizarre moment that transpired during Trump’s Friday meeting with global oil executives that was meant to pressure them into revitalizing Venezuela’s oil infrastructure.
During his opening remarks, Trump veered off-script to gush about his White House ballroom project before suddenly getting up to gaze out the window at the construction site, leaving Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio smiling in bemusement.
In another senior moment, Trump read aloud a private note Rubio, 54, had slipped him in an apparent effort to get him back on track.
“Marco just gave me a note,” he blurted out, before proceeding to read it to everyone: “‘Go back to Chevron. They want to discuss something.’”
Waving the note in front of him, he then announced, “Go ahead, I’m going back to Chevron.”
Rothkopf said incredulously, “Trump just read it out loud—straight—because those parts of his brain just aren’t working anymore.”
He argued that the moment encapsulates how the Trump administration is currently operating and underscores how effortlessly the president’s advisers can coax him into pushing their agendas.
“So he’s a useful idiot, not only for the Russians, but for Marco Rubio, JD Vance, Stephen Miller,” Coles chimed in.
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“You’ve got extremists and incompetence working hand in hand to produce the worst possible policies in the worst possible way,” Rothkopf said.
When reached for comment, White House Deputy Press Secretary Abigail Jackson told the Daily Beast in a statement, “This back-bench, irrelevant commentator has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about. If he had any sort of credibility he wouldn’t be relegated to the Daily Beast podcast and their two viewers.”
The Daily Beast Podcast’s latest episode drew more than 195,000 viewers on YouTube alone.
Trump, the oldest president to take the oath of office, has faced increasing speculation surrounding his cognitive health during his second term, with multiple medical experts suggesting that his decline is readily apparent.
Psychologist Dr. John Gartner previously told The Daily Beast Podcast that he believes Trump is exhibiting a “massive increase” in “clinical signs of dementia,” citing his nonsensical speeches, tendency to change topics mid-sentence, and memory lapses.
Trump’s own niece has said she sees the same symptoms in the president—who regularly struggles to stay awake during official meetings—as those suffered by his late father, Fred Trump Sr., who was diagnosed with dementia toward the end of his life.
After the president himself blurted out in October that he had undergone an MRI during a physical examination, the White House initially declined to explain why. Eventually, they claimed that it was a “preventative” measure due to his age—a claim medical experts immediately began to question.
Trump tried to assert his mental fitness last week by bragging that he had “ACED” his third straight “Montreal” cognitive test.
But Dr. Vin Gupta, a medical analyst for NBC News and former chief medical officer at Amazon Pharmacy, said, “This is not the flex he thinks it is,” noting that those who do the Montreal test with that level of frequency are usually being monitored for the presence of “early stage dementia or cognitive impairment.”
The post This Is How Trump Goons Exploit His Mental Decline: Political Guru appeared first on The Daily Beast.
