Of all the criticisms to make of him, that he’s frail and easily fatigued is the most preposterous.
T he MSNBC anchor Lawrence O’Donnell believes he’s on to a scandal — the U.S. president who held a snap summit with Vladimir Putin in Alaska, and then, immediately after, hosted a spontaneous meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and major European leaders at the White House, is so debilitated that he can barely function.
His evidence is that Donald Trump had a light public schedule a couple of days after this flurry of in-person, high-stakes diplomacy.
This would be little like a critic of Charles Lindbergh accusing the landmark aviator of being a layabout because, after landing in Paris upon the completion of his historic transatlantic flight, he didn’t do anything except sleep at the American ambassador’s residence.
According to O’Donnell, Trump’s absence might have been because he couldn’t stand up for very long or speak coherently. Apparently, he believes Trump after Alaska was basically in the same condition as an exhausted, very ill FDR after Yalta.
Perhaps the secretly enfeebled Trump is going to be the next big anti-Trump fantasy, replacing the notion from the first term that he must be a quasi-Russian agent.
There’s already a cottage industry in anti-Trump opinion pieces raising the alarm about the president’s alleged decline, and Democrats made a serious, if abortive, attempt to make Trump’s age an issue in the 2024 campaign.
A Washington Post piece retailing this line of attack during the election wondered: “The man who would (once again) be the oldest president in history has reportedly scaled back his campaign due to fatigue. So who would run his White House?”
It’d be better if Trump were 49 years old instead of 79, but of all the criticisms to make of him, that he’s frail and easily fatigued is the most preposterous.
It was clearly a lie when then–White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said she had trouble keeping up with Joe Biden. But would anyone be surprised if Trump aides half his age really did find it difficult keeping his pace?
There’s the late-night social media posts, the never-ending interactions with the media, the constant stream of incoming and outgoing phone calls, the attention to matters large (trade deals) and small (a new White House patio), and, above all, the ceaseless effort to impose his will on our domestic politics and, literally, the world.
Trump must be our most relentlessly high-spirited president since Teddy Roosevelt, who was inaugurated as the youngest president whereas Trump was inaugurated as the oldest.
Alice Roosevelt famously said, “My father always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding and the baby at every christening.”
Trump surely would have been determined to try to push aside the Rough Rider at the coffin, altar, or font.
Trump was the instigator of the high-stakes diplomacy with Putin and the Europeans, and he displayed in his session with our allies a sense of personal command — making the Europeans play by his rules — that had many commentators comparing his counterparts to schoolchildren.
Anyone who thinks Trump is decrepit must believe the opposite of the famous Saturday Night Live sketch that depicted Ronald Reagan as an amiable dunce in public but a ruthless mastermind behind the scenes. Trump, to the contrary, must be pretending to be a dynamo in public, while in private he retires to a rocking chair and dozes off while watching The Price Is Right.
The irony is that the same people who looked away from, or lied about, Biden’s decline are desperate to insist that Trump is in the same reduced state. But Biden’s struggles were plain for everyone to see, while his White House undertook measures to protect him and minimize his public exposure.
Whatever Trump is doing, it certainly isn’t hiding, or deferring to others. He may not be in the prime of his life, but he’s at the apex of his power and his ability to command attention, and he’s taking advantage of both with an obvious zest and boundless energy.
© 2025 by King Features Syndicate