Donald Trump has a new nickname. Dozy Don, after struggling to keep his eyes open in the Oval Office. This is preferable, I suppose, to being called Dirty Don, following the congressional release of a trove of Jeffrey Epstein emails in which the late paedophile financier wrote, “I know how dirty Donald is,” but suggests less vigour and may be more wounding to the US President’s amour-propre.
Watching Trump slouch in his chair, rub his eyes and nap on and off for 20 minutes (yes, the Washington Post timed it) at a White House event announcing lowering prices for weight-loss drugs this month was a reminder that Dozy Don, like “Sleepy Joe” Biden, can’t win the ultimate race – the one against time.
The US President’s superhuman vigour is the stuff of legend. Having witnessed the 2020 election campaign unfold, when Trump caught Covid-19 in the final stretch and came roaring back pumped on Regeneron, I honestly believe he could have won if there had been a bit more time to regain his mojo. As with last year’s assassination attempt in July, it was as if nothing could floor him.
That he coulda, shoulda have won in 2020 remains a source of grief and fury for Trump. But the four years in the wilderness have brought him closer to turning 80 next July, less than halfway through his term of office. Whether he can make it to the finish line in 2028 with his health and vigour intact is in serious doubt. And the cover-up of Biden’s incapacity has made voters more alert to the danger of pretending he can.
This problem could be more manageable if Trump’s advancing age were not matched by growing political frailty. The two are entwined. The “lame duck” label he has fought to avoid by sheer will and threats to unseat or destroy any Republican critics can’t be wished away by magical thinking as his political power ebbs.
Trump can hide his cankles behind the Resolute desk, slather make-up on his hand bruises, refuse to disclose why he had an MRI scan and have his White House doctor boast that he has “the cardiac age of a 65-year-old”. But every voter in America knows their 80-year-old grandfather is not as vigorous or as switched on as they used to be.
Some anxious White House advisers are urging Trump to tour the country delivering speeches on the economy and hammering home a message about “affordability” after losing the elections for governor in Virginia and New Jersey, and seeing left-wing radical Zohran Mamdani, 34, sweep from nowhere to become mayor of New York.
Only a third of voters approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, health care and the federal government, according to an Associated Press/NORC poll. Overall, American adults disapprove of his performance in office by 62-36 per cent.
But as one White House official cautioned to CNN: “You can’t convince people that their experience, what they’re feeling at home, isn’t reality.” And that’s if the US President is up to an exhausting, campaign-style domestic tour on top of his other priorities.
Cracks in the Maga coalition are growing over Trump’s perceived neglect of “America First” policies in favour of chasing a Nobel peace prize and sealing his foreign policy legacy.
This week, Trump hosted Syrian leader Ahmed Al-Sharaa at the Oval Office. “The White House is clearly not the best at selling economic ideas,” said Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist. “If you’re going to have the President of Syria, that’s fine,” he added. “Next one’s domestic. One Syria, next one’s domestic.”
Republicans have so far remained astonishingly tolerant of the Trump family’s wealth grab of up to $1.8bn (£1.4bn) in cash and gifts since the 2024 election, totted up by the Center for American Progress.
However, an interview this week on Fox News with Laura Ingraham, a Trump booster turned tough inquisitor, reinforced the idea that Trump is drifting into Marie Antoinette levels of detachment from reality.
First, Trump insisted that “costs were way down” and any news to the contrary was a “con job” by Democrats or the product of “fake polls”.
“So you are saying voters are misperceiving how they feel?” Ingraham asked incredulously.
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Trump promised good times ahead, but also suggested that housing costs could be lowered by introducing 50-year mortgages. Having turned himself into a billionaire by leveraging debt, he genuinely couldn’t fathom why voters might not want to die in hock to the banks.
“It’s not even a big deal,” he said. It was like saying taxes are for the “little people”, as the hotel magnate Leonie Helmsley famously observed in 1989.
Trump is better than any politician at making the voters believe in his alternative reality. But there are some facts of life that he can’t even defy. Who are the voters going to believe? Trump or their own “lyin’ eyes”? That’s why he can’t afford to fall asleep on the job.
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