Trump 'desperately grasping for control' as lackeys dish on his health: report

U.S. President Donald Trump attends a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., December 2, 2025. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

Earlier this week, New York Magazine published Ben Terris’s investigation into the issue of President Donald Trump’s health. Intelligencer writer Benjamin Hart points out that Trump has not tried to sue the paper over the story, so he must be happy with the report.

But Hart finds what’s also important about the president’s clearly deteriorating health is the political and media infrastructure that has grown up around his failing health to hide and normalize it.

“It’s a bunch of his lackeys sucking up to him in print talking about how he’s so powerful and so superhuman that they can’t even keep up with him,” Terris told Benjamin in an interview. “… I think he infected the administration. There’s this kind of brain worm that everybody seems to have, where they can’t help [but] debase themselves when talking about how powerful and awesome their boss is and how they are just mere mortals by his side who can’t keep up with him. So as much as it’s a story about his health, it’s also about how he runs a government, how he’s desperately grasping for control.”

“We can all see with our own eyes that he seems to fall asleep in meetings, that his ankles have swollen, that he’s got this bruise on the back of his hand,” Terris added. “He’s not exactly the pinnacle of health. You don’t have to prove that, because it’s proven out there. And then to have these people say ‘Don’t believe what you see with your own eyes’ is itself a story.”

Terris said Trump’s co-workers also know that the best way to “appease Dear Leader” is to exaggerate his vigor.

“There’s no penalty in Trump’s administration for praising him too much,” said Terris. “There is probably a penalty for making him seem human when he wants to be seen as superhuman. And so my guess is the people that I talk to believe that Trump is healthy and has great energy and is hard to keep up with, and then they use language that is Trumpian because that’s the best way to survive in Trump’s administration.”

But what shakes Terris to his foundation and makes him worry about U.S. democracy is the extreme to which even medical professionals are taking the act.

“The problem with this administration is they’ve created a world in which people that you’re supposed to be able to trust, you just can’t fully take it at face value,” Terris told Benjamin. “It used to be that if a doctor from Walter Reed told you something, you’d be like, ‘Yep, that sounds right.’ And it used to be that if the Secretary of State told you something about the health of the president, you’d be like, ‘Yeah, that’s probably right. He’s a serious man.’ But we are now in a world where you don’t know what you can believe anymore. They’ve created this … fictionalized version of [Trump] that’s so absurd that you know you can’t believe all of it, but you don’t know how much of it you can believe.”

The fact of the matter is that Trump, at 79, is looking old, said Benjamin. The large bruise on his hand looks old. His constant napping during Cabinet meetings look old. His increasingly slurred and meandering speech before millions of viewers is the epitome of fading Grampa.

Yet, “it’s very North Korean or Russian, the way his advisers praise him,” said Benjamin.

Read the Intelligencer report at this link.

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