Why Trump’s 'very evident' decline is so 'devastating' for MAGA: analysis

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a breakfast with Republican Senators at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S. November 5, 2025. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

During former President Joe Biden's four years in the White House, Donald Trump repeatedly attacked "Sleepy Joe" as being in both physical and mental decline. But now that the 79-year-old President Trump is back in the White House, he becomes furious when similar things are said about him.

Trump is especially angry over a New York Times article that was published on November 25 and found reporters Katie Rogers and Dylan Freedman questioning the president's physical and mental health.

During a conversation for The New Republic's "The Daily Blast" podcast posted on December 1, host Greg Sargent (a former Washington Post columnist) and his guest, attorney/Substack columnist David Lurie, discussed Trump's rage over the Times' reporting and the reasons why it infuriated him so much.

Sargent told Lurie, "So, the New York Times piece is pretty devastating. It talks about how Trump has been dozing off at events, how he's traveling a good deal less than he used to, how he's seen in public less often. There's this brutal video of him embedded in the piece looking exhausted and befuddled."

Lurie agreed that the Times' reporting was "devastating," noting that the reporters captured Trump's "sheer and pervasive state of exhaustion" as well as his "very evident and advancing state of dementia."

Lurie told Sargent, "When the character image is punctured in any way, there's a risk the whole balloon is going to lose its air. It's the reason that the Fox News personalities recognize they have to engage in these obsequious and absurd, embarrassing demonstrations of praise, because otherwise, the image is vulnerable. It's ever more vulnerable. And when it goes, there's really nothing left — nothing left at all."

But Trump's physical and mental decline, Lurie emphasized, don't make his "natural meanness and bullying tendencies" any less troublesome.

"Well, first of all," Lurie told Sargent, "I think we're past the point of having a strain of authoritarianism. It doesn't mean that we are Putin's Russia. In fact, it's because we're not that we're seeing the kind of displays that you pointed to. It's because Trump — and his acolytes and, in the case of Fox News, the businesses that depend on the media-slash-political industry that he is the center of — all depend on Trump appearing to be like Vladimir Putin…. When the image of strength is the linchpin of a leader's political success, and then all it takes is a puncturing of the image for the success to start to dissipate."

Lurie continued, "And then, all of the tools that have been used in the past to promote Trump's image…. The praising of him in the weird Cabinet meetings, they actually end up weakening him. And that, I believe, is the dynamic."

Listen to the full New Republic podcast at this link or read the transcript here.

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