'Something is wrong': Concern mounts over rambling and slurring Trump

U.S. President Donald Trump uses a gavel after signing the sweeping spending and tax legislation, known as the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act," at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 4, 2025. REUTERS/Leah Millis TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY

As President Donald Trump slurred his way through a speech about AI, a conservative group urged people to recognize that “something is seriously wrong with him.”

The Lincoln Project shared a clip on X of Trump talking about “the grid.” As he rambles about how “we're fixing the grid,” the president starts to slur, seeming to say “nobody's gonna challenge you or challenge me, I think this was my idea, I said, wait a minute,” although it is unclear. From there Trump says “we will need triple the energy” and continues on that tangent before the clip cuts off.

“No one can say this sounds normal at this point,” The Lincoln Project posted on X. “Something is seriously wrong with him.”

Last month, American psychologist, psychiatrist and former Johns Hopkins Medical School assistant professor Dr. John Gartner told iPaper that he believes Trump may have had a stroke or be suffering from the same Alzheimer’s that struck down his father, Fred Trump.

“The main way to diagnose dementia is that we see a deterioration from someone’s own baseline in these four areas: language, memory, behaviour, and psychomotor performance,” Gartner told iPaper. Referring to a video of Trump weaving as he disembarked a plane to a conference in Davos, Switzerland, Gartner said that this “relates to one of the signs of what I think he has: frontotemporal dementia. That walk is called a wide base gait where he swings his right leg in kind of a semicircle and that drives him to the left. That seems to have gotten dramatically worse recently.”

In addition to possibly being Alzheimer’s, Gartner speculated that “it may be related to the stroke I think he’s had on the left side of his body.”

Gartner is not alone in speculating that Trump has had a stroke. In January Dr. Bruce Davidson, a professor at Washington State University's Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine, said he believes the 79 year-old president experienced a stroke "six months ago or more."

"I think his stroke was on the left side of the brain, which controls the right side of the body," Davidson told authors Sidney Blumenthal and Sean Wilentz on their podcast. "There are videos of him shuffling his feet, which is not what we’d seen previously when he was striding on the golf course. We’ve seen him holding his right hand cradled in his left. Earlier in 2025, he was garbling words, which he hadn’t done before and which he’s improved upon more recently." He also speculated that Trump’s apparent excessive daytime sleepiness could also be linked to a potential stroke.

New York Magazine’s Ben Terris, writing in February, argued that Trump is able to obscure observations about his health because his past behavior has been so erratic.

"Donald Trump is about to be 80 years old," Terris said. "Just by dint of that fact, it's a worthwhile story to cover. One reason I think that Trump is able to 'get away' with some things that could be signs of aging is that they could also just be signs of Donald Trump being Donald Trump. He has been a chaotic figure for a long time. He's got this rambling way of talking. He says unhinged, outrageous stuff. He did that 15 years ago. He does that now."

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