After a brutal week following more rumors of ill health, inhospitable crowd receptions at two major sporting events, a snubbing by a fellow world leader, and the shooting death of longtime ally Charlie Kirk, President Donald Trump has drawn a scathing review from political analyst David Rothkopf.
“Donald Trump right now has precisely zero wins since he has become president again,” Rothkopf told Joanna Coles on The Daily Beast podcast.
“I mean you could say the Big Beautiful Bill, but the reaction of the public to the bill has been terrible,” said Rothkopf. “It’s hugely unpopular.”
“I think all this is weighing on him. And his own mortality is weighing on him. And the Epstein thing is weighing on him, and he just looks like he can’t handle it,” he said.
Pointing to Trump’s drooping face at a 9/11 memorial event, getting booed at a Yankees game on Thursday, and his incoherent attempt to downplay reports about Russian escalating its attacks on Ukraine, Rothkopf says the warning lights are flashing about the president’s ability to do his job.
Asked how he was holding up after Kirk’s death on Thursday, Trump veered into a celebration of his much-hyped White House ballroom.
“Is anybody home?” Rothkopf said in response to the non-sequitur. “What’s going on between those ears?”
“It’s like, I don’t know, somebody with dementia—and I’m not saying that that’s what he has—searching for the right word or phrase, trying to recall what it was that got them to where they are right now.”
“I just think he’s losing it,” he said.
Rothkopf, who served in the Clinton administration and worked as editor of Foreign Policy Magazine, told Coles that Trump cannot afford many more weeks like the disastrous one he has just experienced.
Pointing to a string of recent failures, including the lack of a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine following his Alaska summit with Vladimir Putin, the continuing disaster in Gaza, and the dismal jobs report, Rothkopf said that Trump may simply not have the “energy” to pull himself and his administration out of their present slump.
Failure to course-correct amid increasing challenges to America’s global position is not only endangering the country but the entire world, Rothkopf argues.
“[Other world leaders] don’t trust us,” Rothkopf says. “They try to deal with Trump and Rubio in much the same way you’d sort of humor an older relative who’s losing it.”
“They’re all planning to go their own way. They’re all becoming less dependent on the United States and more dependent on one another.”
Noting that the international leadership of the United States has been the foundation of global stability since the end of World War II—under the philosophy of “Pax Americana”—Rothkopf says the decline of Trump is already seeing other world leaders step in.
“With that gone—and with people wanting to test the limits of what they can do, like Putin, like Netanyahu, like perhaps Xi Jinping—it’s super dangerous to have a void,” Rothkopf said.
The accumulation of failures during Trump’s second term and the increasingly apparent inability to maintain international order, Rothkopf argues, suggests the president is dragging global politics toward a serious tipping point—one that may already be inevitable.
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