Donald Trump appeared to brand JD Vance “incompetent” as his vice president was forced to listen during a televised Cabinet meeting.
Asked by a reporter about a sprawling fraud scandal in Minnesota on Tuesday, Trump went on a rant about Somali immigrants before swerving off into a bizarre riff about Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and the 2024 vice-presidential debate.
“Look, I think the man’s a grossly incompetent man. I thought that from the day I watched JD destroy him in the debate,” Trump said, referring to the televised debate last October when Vance faced off against Walz and MAGAworld declared it a rout.
With Vance sitting across the table from him, the president then added, “I was saying, who was more incompetent? That man or my man? I had a man and he had a man. They were both incompetent.”
Given that Trump’s “man” in the debate was Vance—Walz’s Republican opponent in that debate—it appeared Trump was referring to his own VP as incompetent.
There is, however, another equally damning explanation.
Trump’s remark in full—“I had a man and he had a man. They were both incompetent. And uh, I had a man and a woman. I thought she was very incompetent too”—suggests the 79-year-old might have forgotten that Kamala Harris had replaced Joe Biden as Democratic nominee.
Apparently referring to Harris, Trump continued by falsely suggesting that she was now the Democratic frontrunner for 2028, even though the former vice president has not even announced a run.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House and Vance’s office for comment.
Trump’s awkward Vance comment builds on the pair’s strange love-hate relationship. Before Vance, 41, reinvented himself as one of Trump’s most devoted lieutenants, he privately and publicly torched the president—calling him “cultural heroin,” a “moral disaster,” “an idiot,” and even musing in 2016 that he might be “America’s Hitler.”
On the 2024 campaign trail, as Vance cast Walz as a soft-on-crime, big-government liberal who’d mismanaged his state, Walz painted Vance as an extremist Trump enabler who’d sold out his earlier qualms for power.
In response, Vance said he’d been “wrong” and claimed he was misled by “dishonest” media coverage of Trump’s record.
Trump’s bizarre Vance comment fits a broader pattern that has alarmed medical experts and the electorate.
Leading psychologist Dr. John Gartner—a former professor at Johns Hopkins—last month told the Daily Beast Podcast that Trump is showing a “massive increase” in clinical signs of decline and is in “gross” deterioration compared to his first term.
Days later, public health physician Dr. Vin Gupta told The Meidas Touch Podcast that there is “reason to be worried” about Trump’s evident “age-related cognitive decline,” pointing to his increasingly halting public performances and his implausible claim that he didn’t know which body part doctors had scanned during an October MRI.
Those concerns have been fueled by repeated moments of confusion—such as on Monday, when he forgot within seconds that he had just refused to answer a question, then launched into a disjointed rant anyway.
During Tuesday’s Cabinet session, Trump also appeared to struggle to stay awake. Cameras captured him closing his eyes for extended stretches—part of nearly six minutes of apparent dozing in the two-hour-plus meeting.
It follows other viral clips of Trump seemingly nodding off during an Oval Office press conference on drug prices last month, even as the White House insists he is in “optimal” health and the president himself boasts that he is “sharper” than he was decades ago.
The Walz–Trump feud has been escalating for days, centered on Trump’s attacks on Minnesota’s handling of Somali immigration. Over Thanksgiving, Trump used an offensive slur to brand Walz “seriously ret—ed” while ranting about Somali refugees and crime, prompting outrage and fresh scrutiny of the president’s own health.
Walz, 61, who served as Kamala Harris’ running mate in 2024 and has long sparred with Trump over immigration and policing, hit back last Friday, posting a four-word clapback—“Release the MRI results.”
Walz then doubled down in a subsequent TV interview, calling the term “damaging” and “hurtful” and warning that Trump’s midnight tirades and evasiveness about his “perfect” MRI raise serious questions about whether he’s mentally fit to serve.
The White House finally released a statement about the scan results on Monday, but that only served to raise further questions about his health.
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