Experts have long questioned president Donald Trump’s claims of having a clean bill of health. He has been spotted with swollen ankles and dark bruises on both of his hands, which experts argue could be a sign that he’s receiving frequent intravenous treatments.
His mental acuity has also been called into question, with critics pointing to his slurred speech, nonsensical rants, and lapses in memory.
Case in point, in a recently published interview with New York Magazine, Trump struggled to recall the name of Alzheimer’s disease — a particularly dark blunder, considering the condition is characterized by progressive memory loss, and Trump has a family history of it.
When discussing his father, Fred Trump, he struggled to remember what the disease was called.
“He had one problem. At a certain age, about 86, 87, he started getting… what do they call it?” he pondered during the video.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt came to his rescue.
“Alzheimer’s,” she chimed in.
“Like an Alzheimer’s thing,” the president continued. “Well, I don’t have it.”
When asked if the disease is “something you think about at all,” Trump was vehement in his denial, but once again struggled to sound coherent.
“No, I don’t think about it at all,” he said. “You know why? Because whatever it is, my attitude is whatever.”
Swirling questions about Trump’s cognitive condition have clearly frustrated the 79-year-old. During baffling remarks from the Oval Office earlier this month, made after signing a bipartisan Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act, Trump boasted that a penchant for dairy had allowed him to “ace” all of his cognitive tests.
“I’ve aced every one of them because I drink milk,” he said.
He also boasted about passing cognitive tests on January 2 and December 9, suggesting that his neurological condition has been evaluated frequently in recent months. (He’s discussed the topic for years now, claiming to have achieved a top score on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), a 30-point cognitive screening tool to detect cognitive impairment, back in 2018.)
Also concerning is his family history. Fred Trump died at the age of 93 in 1999, after struggling with the disease for almost a decade.
Adding to Trump’s optics conundrum around his health, his top staff often defends his physical and mental health in terms so strong that it can be unintentionally comical.
Leavitt, for instance, insisted to NY Mag that the “Marine sentries who stand outside the Oval Office, they had to request more staff and bring up more Marines because the president is in the Oval Office so much.”
“They’ve never had to do that before,” she said. “They had to request more guys to stand by the door because they are running out of men to fill the shifts.”
“He’s working harder now than he did in his entire life,” she told the magazine. “Even in real estate when he was on top of the world in New York.”
More on Trump’s health: Trump’s Other Hand Is Also Now Showing a Grisly Mark