More voters say Trump's too old — and 'sleeping during Cabinet meetings isn't helping'

Two recent polls found that a majority of voters believe President Donald Trump’s age is negatively impacting his ability to serve as president — and one news anchor commented that “sleeping during Cabinet meetings isn’t helping.”

“Is Donald Trump well? Is his head in the presidency? Does he have the mental acuity to lead this country?” MS NOW host Katy Tur said. She then quoted two polls, the first from The Washington Post/ABC/Ipsos which found that 56 percent believe Trump isn’t mentally sharp enough to serve as president and the second a Reuters/Ipsos poll which found that more than six in 10 Americans believe Trump’s age is making him more erratic, including roughly 3 in 10 Republican voters.

“The apparent sleeping during Cabinet meetings and Oval Office visits probably isn’t helping,” Tur said. “Neither are the stories about how he’s forcing his top aides to wear his preferred brand of shoes—buying them in incorrect sizes that he’s guessed they wear."

She added, “He also doesn’t sound as energetic and clear as he did even a few years ago—comparatively speaking, of course. Case in point: the wild asides mid-thought.” Similarly Trump recently claimed to have received customized Sharpie pens, even though a company spokesperson denied the story, incorrectly claimed Maryland Gov. Wes Moore called Trump “the greatest president in my lifetime,” inaccurately linked his uncle MIT professor John Trump to Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and said right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson apologized to him over the MAGA split over Israel and the Iran war, which Carlson denied.

“While a lot of this has always just been part of who Donald Trump is—a man who works the room, seeks attention, seeks applause—he’s now about to be 80 years old, and he’s launched a war that he does not seem to have a plan for," Tur said.

Speaking to iPaper in February, psychiatrist and former Johns Hopkins Medical School assistant professor Dr. John Gartner said he believes Trump suffered a stroke or from the same Alzheimer’s that claimed the life of 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. He said that Trump’s weaving gait “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 having Alzheimer’s, Gartner speculated Trump have had a stroke “on the left side of his body.” In January Dr. Bruce Davidson, a professor at Washington State University's Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine, also said he suspects 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.”

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