How Trump’s Team Is Hiding How Fast He’s Aging |
How Team Trump Helps Hide How Fast He’s Aging
Donald Trump is in obvious physical decline—but you wouldn’t know it from how his team tells it.
The president’s increasingly erratic behavior may be a sign of his rapid aging.
Donald Trump has always been loud and unfiltered; his figure, at six foot three inches tall and 224 pounds, is imposing. His penchant for drawing attention has not waned, even as he approaches his 80th birthday. By all means, Trump appears, perhaps more than ever, to be everywhere.
Yet over the last several months, Trump’s hallmark character traits have sparked global concern about his stability and judgement. The 79-year-old has spent hours at Walter Reed Medical Center, fallen asleep during more than a dozen critical meetings, appeared lost and disoriented around foreign heads of state, frequently slurred his speech, appeared with discolored and bruised skin on several occasions, has thrown cheap and petty insults at members of the press, challenged longstanding U.S. alliances, and even taken jabs at the pope.
His bombastic attitude and careless disregard is no longer instilling confidence in his base—instead, The Atlantic’s Jonathan Lemire suggests that Trump’s increasingly leaky filter could be an important warning sign about Trump’s old age.
In contrast, former President Joe Biden was visibly thinner and weaker as he approached 80. To avoid embarrassing public flubs, Biden withdrew from the spotlight, handing his aides the public-facing reins of the administration while he managed the country from a quiet White House.
Trump has not approached his second term in office with the same caution. The president regularly dominates headlines and steals the spotlight. That’s a clear attempt to create a public perception that Trump is just as fine as he’s always been—but there are major differences between the 79-year-old Trump and his 70-year-old self when he first entered office.
For one, Trump has dramatically scaled back his travel, according to Lemire. He is taking fewer foreign trips, and his domestic travel schedule has dwindled in comparison to his first term.
His “displays of disinhibition” are also more pronounced, writes Lemire. Trump’s famously unscripted rants now prominently feature multi-minute deflections or tangents on completely unrelated topics in which Trump will sometimes refer to himself in the third person.
Trump has prioritized his “executive time” in the morning, in which he binges cable television and uses his phone, and has fallen in love with $145 Florsheim loafers, swapping his dressier shoes for the soft-cushioned leather oxfords.
Trump’s team has circled the wagons: They insist repeatedly on his health and mental sharpness. Many of his Cabinet gladly wear the (poorly sized) Florsheims Trump has bought them. Lemire posited that the latter move was so Trump’s own shoes don’t stand out.
Trump has also enjoyed more leisure than ever: So far, the president has spent more than a fifth of his second term—about 21.95 percent—golfing. Trump has hit the links at least 106 times since he returned to office, which puts him on pace to exceed the 307 days he spent golfing over the course of his first term.
Former President Barack Obama, in comparison, racked up a total of 333 rounds of golf over eight years in office.
The American public is apparently wising up to Trump’s age: A Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll released last week found that 59 percent of Americans do not believe that Trump has the mental acuity to lead the country.
ICE Agent Charged With Four Counts of Assault in Minneapolis
The Hennepin County District Court charged ICE’s Christian J. Castro after he fired his gun at a Venezuelan immigrant and then lied about it.
On Monday, Hennepin County District Court charged ICE agent Christian J. Castro over the shooting of Venezuelan immigrant Julio Sosa-Celis on January 14—in the middle of “Operation Metro Surge”—with four counts of second-degree assault with a deadly weapon and one count of falsely reporting a crime.
Castro had not been previously identified. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty told the Minnesota Star Tribune they found out who he was thanks to medical records from Castro, who visited a hospital right after the shooting, and an interview by state law enforcement where the shooting took place.
At the time, the federal government charged Sosa-Celis and his roommate Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna with assaulting a federal officer and posted their mug shots online. Then–Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem accused them of “attempted murder,” and DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said the pair “began to resist and violently assault the officer.” McLaughlin claimed that an unnamed ICE agent, fearing for his life, had fired a defensive shot while on the ground because he was being beaten with a shovel.
Video evidence showed that in fact, Castro was standing up and shot Sosa-Celis through the closed door of his apartment, and no shovel assault took place. After an FBI special agent testified that Castro and DHS’s account was wrong, Castro and other ICE agents were placed on administrative leave and the charges against Sosa-Chelis and Aljorna were dropped.
This is the second time an ICE agent has been charged in Hennepin County for their actions during the Trump administration’s immigration offensive in Minnesota. Last month, agent Donnell Morgan Jr. was charged with two counts of second-degree assault for allegedly pointing a weapon at drivers. But there still haven’t been charges filed over the two highest-profile ICE-related deaths from the operation, those of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
“It’s just a very unique scenario,” Moriarty told the Star Tribune. “We obviously are trying to be very thoughtful and intentional. While I understand people really want accountability and they saw what they saw in the [Good and Pretti] videos, this is incredibly complex. The last thing we want to do is make a mistake if we feel something is appropriately charged and get dismissed out of federal court.”
Moriarty added that the federal government’s refusal to share even basic information with local and state agencies about Good and Pretti’s deaths hasn’t helped investigators. In March, Minnesota state prosecutors sued the federal government to force their hand.
“Think about how unprecedented that is,” Moriarty said. “The........