I’ll be completely honest with you: I didn’t intend to write about President Donald Trump’s age again quite so soon. It was only last week that he was railing against The New York Times for daring to report that our 79-year-old president is slowing down. But his visible lethargy at his televised Cabinet meeting this week isn’t helping him change the topic.
“No naps for Trump, no naps. I don’t take naps. We don’t have time.”
Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign
On Tuesday, roughly 20 minutes into his opening ramble, Trump directly addressed the assembled reporters, taking them to task for their focus on his age. “You people are crazy,” he said, sitting in his leather chair, surrounded by his chief sycophants. “I’ll let you know when there’s something wrong. There will be someday. That’s going to happen to all of us. But right now, I think I’m sharper than I was 25 years ago. But who the hell knows.” The president then proceeded to brag — again — about having gotten “all A’s” on his physical and having “aced” a cognitive test, relishing every detail as if he’d never told these stories before.
Let’s consider Trump’s point about being sharper now than he was 25 years ago, a challenge that doesn’t lend itself to positive comparisons. An interview with St. Louis NBC News affiliate KSDK from 2000, when Trump was considering a run for president on the Reform Party ticket, is a helpful reference point. Even then, Trump was lamenting that America is being ripped off by other countries, fretting about the threat of nuclear weapons and making bombastic promises to fix a broken health care system — themes that are still core for him today.
Trump’s voice in the 2000 interview has the same pattering rhythm we’ve all grown overly familiar with. But today, the roughly five-minute interview is remarkable for how Trump stays on topic. Every answer keeps to the question he was originally asked. He repeats himself for emphasis only rarely — and without diving off into a full tangent. (It’s also worth marveling that even so brief an interview would be a struggle for Trump’s current attention span.)
Fifteen years later, when Trump had made the leap into politics and was running for president, he began holding rallies and making the longer speeches that became his signature style. Specifically, my colleague Ryan Teague Beckwith reminded me of a deep irony in the way Trump sold himself to the public during his first presidential run and how he attacked his rivals. While seeking the GOP nomination, he called Florida Gov. Jeb Bush “low energy.” The criticism stuck and helped knock Bush out of the primary race.
Trump then deployed the same attack line against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. During a July 2016 campaign rally, soon after officially becoming the Republican nominee, Trump slammed Clinton as being “low energy.” (Yes, the same line he would later recycle against Joe Biden in the 2020 and 2024 campaigns.)
“She’ll go home, she’ll take a nap for four or five hours, and she’ll come back,” Trump crowed to a cheering crowd. “No naps for Trump, no naps. I don’t take naps. We don’t have time.” This was far from a one-off dig at Clinton; for months, Trump had argued that she “lacked the strength or stamina” to be president. “We need a president who can go 24 hours a day, seven days a week — she can’t do it,” he said in a December 2015 Fox News interview.
“We’ve got a million things we could be focused on, but he’s the only leader in the world who can help end it,” Rubio said, gesturing to a man who didn’t have his eyes open.
One striking thing you can see today watching video of Trump’s anti-nap manifesto is the comparative quickness of not just his cadence but also his gestures. His motions were frenetic, at times jerky. There was none of that energy at Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting, where he was filmed closing his eyes as Secretary of State Marco Rubio praised his negotiating prowess in trying to end the war in Ukraine.
“We’ve got a million things we could be focused on, but he’s the only leader in the world who can help end it,” Rubio said, gesturing to a man who seemed lethargic, at best. The president nodded slightly when his chief diplomat addressed him directly to note the number of people who are killed each week in the fighting. The sight of a potentially dozing dictator only marginally present at a public meeting contrasted sharply with the image Rubio was attempting to paint.
When a New York Times reporter inquired about Trump’s apparent fatigue, the White House gave this absurdly indignant reply: Asked whether Mr. Trump fell asleep, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement that the president was ‘listening attentively and running the entire’ meeting. She cited Mr. Trump’s response during a question and answer segment at the end of the meeting, when he delivered a tirade against Somali immigrants. ‘This epic moment put an exclamation point on President Trump’s ninth cabinet meeting of his second term — all of which have been entirely open to the press for the whole world to see,’ Ms. Leavitt said. That pushback takes Leavitt’s shamelessness to new heights. Not only does she ask people to ignore what we’ve seen with our own eyes, but she points to the racist and dehumanizing rhetoric Trump spewed on Tuesday as proof that he was paying attention. Expecting people to ignore the fact that the president is aging is inane. And even if Trump truly is in good shape for someone his age, the average life expectancy for American men is 75.8 years. The president might be above average — but we shouldn’t forget where the bar is. Trump’s past criticism of naps has unintended irony as we watch him nod off in front of cameras. There’s nothing shameful about needing a nap every so often, or being bored enough during a meeting to close your eyes for a bit. Trump was posting up a storm on Truth Social until well after midnight the night before; it’s human to be tired after being up late. But there’s no sense in denying the obvious, either. Staying awake through an 11 a.m. meeting should not be a struggle for the nation’s leader, nap or no nap.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on politics and policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House. 
