RS test U.S. President Donald Trump gestures during the White House Faith Office Luncheon at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 14, 2025. REUTERS Nathan Howard
New Yorker Columnist Susan Glasser warned that President Donald Trump’s poisonous combo of strength obsession and failing health was likely going to push him to more and more extreme behavior as he rages against his fading vigor.
Speaking with former Bulwark editor-in-chief Charlie Sykes on his Saturday year-in-review podcast, Glasser said the signs are already showing and we’re not even out of Trump’s first year of his second term.
“You have a president pushing 80 who’s clearly less able to project physical strength than he was before,” Glasser said. “ … ‘Strong’ was his favorite word in the vocabulary, so the weaker and older he becomes the more unhinged he will be as a result.”
“That was always the risk of electing a man at his age at the time of his election,” Glasser added. “That is inherently a destabilizing factor in the Trump second term, because we’ve seen that Trump is an escalator. He goes more and more over the top, and as he ages the less able he will be to restrain himself.”
Sykes pointed out that Trump appeared to be most visibly unraveling since his shrill December Speech to the Nation, which Sykes described “as just a complete cluster----”
“The evidence is right before your eyes,” Glasser agreed. “Go look at a clip of Donald Trump speaking at a rally in 2016 vs speaking at rallies in 2024 and 2025. He’s much older. He’s much less structured and disciplined. This is a man who no longer even pretends to find a noun or a verb in his sentences. And the amount of time he was speaking doubled between his 2016 campaign and 2024.”
“He went back on the road recently to try to persuade Americans there an affordability ‘hoax’, and he spoke at the rally for 97 minutes. This is a sign of where we’re headed with him: Verbal incontinence,” Glasser said.
Glasser also made note of Trump’s more perceptible warning signs of mental wandering during his less lucid public appearances.
“He’s talked at various points about going to heaven and how he might not get in … when you‘ve got an almost 80 year old talking like that while knocking down the East wing of the White House and slapping his name on the US Institute of Peace and the John F. Kennedy Center, this is a dangerous combination of aging and narcissism that’s only going to become a more salient aspect of the Trump administration over the next few years.”
Watch the full podcast at this link.