There’s an awkward déjà vu settling over Washington, the kind that makes you wonder if someone hit repeat on the decline-and-fall playlist.
For all the derision Donald Trump heaped on Joe Biden—his slowness, his stumbles, his brain fog—Trump is now displaying precisely the same physical and cognitive slippage. The wandering sentences. The wandering off. The dozing in the Oval Office. The dozing in the Cabinet Room. The slack-jawed pause when he can’t keep up and the teleprompter marches on without him.
Oh and the boast that he’d “passed” his MRI, before admitting he couldn’t quite remember whether it was actually a brain scan or something else entirely, which rather defeats the point. Happily, Karoline Leavitt reassured us, it was “perfect.”
But here’s the real difference between Biden then and Trump now: Biden was hidden; Trump is exposed. Biden’s aides did the talking; Trump insists on ad-libbing his own decline. Biden’s true deterioration emerged during the debate when he was isolated from all the people who routinely covered for him.
Trump won’t let us look away long enough to miss a single wobble.
Last year I wrote a column after watching Biden up close at the White House, describing the unsettling experience of seeing a president diminish in real time. His team knew it, too. They managed him like a fragile museum artifact: curated angles, limited exposure, a protective choreography the press reluctantly accepted.
Trump offers no such choreography. According to Dr. Bandy Lee of Harvard and Dr. John Gartner, formerly of Johns Hopkins, Trump is a textbook malignant narcissist, pathologically unable to step out of the spotlight. And because he insists on being the center of attention, we see everything, including all the signs of deterioration.
There are the physical signs: the cankles, the bruised hands, the dragging right leg.
There are the verbal signs: the wrong word, the botched pronunciation, repeated stories, the grunts.
And there’s emotional deterioration with crimson outbursts becoming a daily occurrence: “Quiet, quiet, Piggy!” “Are you stupid? Are you a stupid person?” “She’s ugly.” “He’s retarded.”
Trump is weaving, literally and rhetorically, and the country is expected to pretend it’s all part of the show.
His base cries “fake news” about his bruised hands but can’t explain why he clutches railings like he’s on a ship in rough seas. They mocked Biden’s blank stare and wispy voice but can’t account for Trump’s mid-afternoon drift into nonsense, his jerks from policy to petty grievance to word salad. They insist the cankles don’t matter, fine, but they’re attached to a man who looks exhausted simply standing upright and recently appears to be superglued to the chair behind the Resolute Desk.
And beneath his bluster, Trump knows the ground is slipping. No matter how often he tries to gaslight the country, prices are up. Health-care premiums are set to double. His boasts about “solving eight wars in eight months” have evaporated on contact with reality. His Russia-Ukraine “peace process” is a diplomatic farce that no one takes seriously but has serious consequences. And now the Epstein files, ordered released by a unanimous vote, are circling like carrion birds.
The media tiptoed around Biden’s decline, terrified of accusations of ageism. But Trump, who built his brand on dominance and stamina, is unraveling on camera like a man discovering too late that television amplifies every deficit.
He demanded constant attention and now he’s getting it, every mid-sentence blackout followed by his insistence that he’s “very coherent, the most coherent.” And when reporters point out the obvious, he snaps, calling them “scum,” “nasty people,” and, just last week, “the enemy of the body,” a mangled variant of his old mantra.
But it’s not nasty to remark on what we see. It’s accurate. Acting presidential isn’t a feeling, it’s a function. And right now the man running the country is showing all the signs of someone flailing at a job that he believes he’s performing flawlessly.
There is a moment in a bullfight when the picador, heavy on his horse, enters the ring holding the long vara—a lance—with almost liturgical calm. He isn’t lunging. He’s waiting, letting the bull, panting and confused, circle back toward him. The bull’s head hangs low. Its hooves scrape. It charges with its horns and misses the mark. When the vara comes down, the bull bellows. The staggering begins.
The picador has taken away the bull’s escape, its dignity, its power. The crowd knows. And the bull, swaying under the weight of its own failing strength, knows it, too.
Agitated and angry, the bull may still have some fight left in him. But the outcome is already a certainty. The only question left is which matador–Marjorie Taylor Greene? Mitch McConnell? Jeffrey Epstein? JD Vance?–will deliver the final blow.
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