Is Trump mentally OK? A look back at the president’s unusual behavior in 2025

In an address from the White House in December, Donald Trump claimed that, over the past 11 months, his administration had brought “more positive change” than any government in US history. Donald Trump arrives for a campaign event in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, on 19 December 2025.Photograph: Alex Brandon/AP “There has never been anything like it,” Trump added. It’s true that his second term has been unusual, including in some ways which the president might not appreciate. That’s because Trump, 79, has shown erratic and at times confused behavior throughout 2025, leading to questions about his mental and physical performance. Trump has appeared to fall asleep during some meetings; amid others, he has drifted off-topic, launching into bizarre segues on interior decor or about whales and birds. His public appearances have lacked focus, and he has used speeches to ramble about how Barack Obama walks down stairs, or to invent stories about the Unabomber. The unpredictable behavior has forced the White House to repeatedly defend Trump’s mental acuity, often in hyperbolic terms. Trump himself has bragged that he “aced” an assessment which tests for early signs of dementia, but over the course of his 11 months in office, examples of unusual behavior have piled up. There was the case in mid-July, when Trump told a detailed story about how his uncle, the late professor John Trump, had taught Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Trump recalled: “I said: ‘What kind of a student was he, Uncle John? Dr John Trump.’ I said: ‘What kind of a student?’ And then he said: ‘Seriously, good.’ He said: ‘He’d correct - he’d go around correcting everybody.’ But it didn’t work out too well for him.” The problem is: that cannot possibly be true. First, Trump’s uncle died in 1985, and Kaczynski was only publicly identified as the Unabomber in 1996. Second, Kaczynski did not study at MIT . Later that month, during a meeting with the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, Trump abruptly switched from discussing immigration to ranting about “windmills”. Speaking, non-stop and unprompted, for two minutes , Trump claimed without evidence that they drive whales “loco” and that wind energy “kills the birds” (the proportion of birds killed by turbines is tiny compared with the number killed by domestic cats and from them flying into power lines). Another incident that raised questions about Trump’s state of mind came in September. Trump summoned the country’s top military commanders to a meeting in Virginia, and treated them to a speech touting his alleged successes before saying this: America is respected again as a country. We were not respected with Biden. They looked at him falling down stairs every day. Every day, the guy’s falling down stairs.” Trump continued: I said: ‘It’s not our president. We can’t have it.’ I’m very careful, you know, when I walk downstairs for - like I’m on stairs, like these stairs, I’m very - I walk very slowly....

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