Trump raises eyebrows with 'bizarre' rant about Fox host’s 'attraction' to Sean Hannity

President Donald Trump went on an incoherent rant on Monday that once again put on display his apparent difficulty staying focused on a single subject.

While speaking on the TV program “Fox & Friends” on Monday, Trump meandered away from discussing the two-year anniversary of the assassination attempt against him in Butler, PA in order to talk about co-host Ainsley Earhardt being engaged to his longtime friend, Fox News personality Sean Hannity.

“Well, let’s put it this way. So I’ve known Ainsley longer than the two of you. I’ve known her through a great gentleman, a very handsome man named Sean Hannity,” Trump told “Fox & Friends.” “She seemed to be attracted to him for whatever the hell reason, right?”

He continued, “So I’ve known her for a long time. And I once told her a long time ago, I said, ‘This is a very dangerous—being president is a very dangerous profession.’ I said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me that, Ainsley? I wouldn’t have run.’”

The Daily Beast called the president's answer "bizarre." In the past, Trump himself has characterized his meandering style in interviews as "the weave," while critical journalists have accused the mainstream media of "sanewashing" Trump by refusing to emphasize the unusual way he answers questions.

"As applied to Trump," Columbia Journalism Review's Jon Allsop wrote in 2024, "the idea is that major mainstream news outlets are routinely taking his incoherent, highly abnormal rants — be they on social media or at in-person events — and selectively quoting from them to emphasize lines that, in isolation, might sound coherent or normal, thus giving a misleading impression of the whole for people who didn't read or watch the entire thing. ... If journalists are sometimes sanewashing Trump, why are they doing it?"

This is not the first time in recent days that Trump has made gaffes which raise questions about the 80-year-old politician’s fitness for office. Speaking with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at a NATO summit last week, Trump referred to Iran as “the Islamic Republic of Japan” and mistook Zelensky for Russian President Vladimir “Putin.”

“There was absolutely and utterly no awareness that he had said the wrong country's name… You can even see him emphasizing this fact,” psychologist and body language expert Dr. John Paul Garrison said at the time. “He does that when he feels very strongly about something. You can see he's raising his eyebrows right here — he wants everybody to hear what he's saying. And there's no attempt to correct this. He has no idea based on everything I'm seeing that he just said the wrong country's name.”

Speaking with AlterNet in May, psychiatrist Dr. Henry Abraham (formerly of Tufts University) elaborated on the traits Trump has displayed which suggest he may be declining. Abraham co-signed a May letter from a group of 36 top physicians and mental health experts urging Congress to investigate Trump’s health and remove him from power through the 25th Amendment if necessary.

“There has been a frightening progression of symptoms,” Abraham told AlterNet. “These include grandiosity without moral safeguards, paranoia, impulsivity, vindictiveness, easy misperception of being harmed, moments of omnipotence, uncontrolled rage, and sole control over the use of nuclear weapons in a time of war. As a psychiatrist reviewing these, I can only say ‘Yikes!’”