Cognitive decline? Ten extremely worrying statements from the President of the United States

At 79 years old, Donald Trump is the oldest person ever to be inaugurated president. Yes, that's right: in a role almost solely occupied by men aged 60 or older, Trump is the oldest to have been inaugurated.

While losing cognitive ability is not a joke, and certainly not something to be made light of or even analyzed, most people are not the leader of the ‘free world'.

Being the President of the United States means you are no longer just another person; you're arguably the world's most powerful public figure.

Society must hold the president to a higher standard.

In this article, we're going to list as many examples as possible of statements and behaviour made and exhibited by Donald Trump that lead us to believe that the president is in full cognitive decline, and should be sitting at home with his family, not running America.

An expert opinion

Dozens of experts have given their take on Trump's mental state. Harry Segal, a senior lecturer for the psychology department at Cornell, gave his thoughts on the signs and symptoms displayed by DJT.

“Trump has shown evidence of dementia for the past year, as indicated by his strange gait, phonemic paraphasia—when he begins a word and can't finish it—and decline in the complexity of his words and concepts. This limited capacity explains his poor debate performance, but there are two more disturbing signs of his decline.”

He cited a few specific moments, including: “[In October] he got cognitively lost in a rally and began to talk about the ‘eight circles' that Biden filled up with journalists. No one on his staff has been able to explain the reference.”

Examining behaviour

It's not hard to find a myriad of examples of Trump exhibiting concerning behaviour. We're going to take a look at some of the grossest examples.

A month ago, Trump claimed that he had halted a “nuclear” war between Iran and Pakistan, a conflict that does not exist.

On October 16, Trump told a group of reporters outside the White House that he had prevented Iran and Pakistan from descending into a nuclear conflict that would have ‘devastated the world'.

“If you look at Pakistan and Iran, I told them I was in the midst of negotiating a trade deal with… Iran and Pakistan was gonna be in line… And I said during one of my conversations, ‘Are you guys gonna go to war, two nuclear powers?' I said, ‘Here's the deal. You go to war, I'm gonna put a 200 percent tariff [on you both]. I'm gonna stop you from doing any business in the United States.'”

Firstly, Iran and Pakistan have never been in conflict. One must assume the president meant to say India. Still, it's a mistake that most presidents would have been publicly shamed for.

The kicker? Pakistan credited the U.S. with helping secure a ceasefire, but the Indian government strongly disagrees, denying that the president helped ‘in any way' in establishing the ceasefire agreement.

On the topic of made-up conflicts, Trump also insisted that he had “solved” an imaginary conflict between Cambodia and Armenia—two nations 4,000 miles apart.

Let's make this fact-check abundantly clear: Cambodia and Armenia have never fought a war.

Trump made the absurd claim at the American Cornerstone Institute's Founders' Dinner on Sept 20, 2025. While standing at the podium, rambling about how he should have won the Nobel Peace Prize, Trump said, “Cambodia and Armenia, it was just starting, and it was a bad one. Think of that.”

Cambodia did have a scuffle with Thailand the previous week, and, of course, Armenia has been in a long battle with Azerbaijan —so there is a string to connect these countries with. Still, this would be front page news during the Biden administration.

Speaking of Azerbaijan, Trump didn't forget to mention it as well. The Don has twice mistaken the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict this past fall.

The president has continually mistaken Armenia for Albania, and now even the world leaders are laughing at his memory loss. On the topic of the conflict, Trump offered his unprompted comments,

“I think that we settled Aber-baijan and Albania,”

Yes… he mispronounced the country as well. He continued by saying, “It was going on for years. It was never going to be settled… If you remember the prime minister and the presidents, they were there for many years. When they were in my office, we settled.”

To his credit, the U.S. has been credited as being a key contributor to the agreement between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Still, you'd think Trump would be able to remember, considering he hosted both world leaders in the Oval Office just a month before this embarrassing blunder.

To add insult to injury, multiple leaders then ridiculed Trump at the Copenhagen summit on October 2. Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama was caught poking fun at Trump with French President Emmanuel Macron and Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev.

“You should make an apology … to us because you didn't congratulate us on the peace deal that President Trump made between Albania and Azerbaijan,” Rama told Macron. President Ilham Aliyev then burst out laughing.

Trump managed to forget House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries' name just a day after meeting with him to discuss avoiding a government shutdown.

Speaking to reporters, Trump discussed his talks with “Chuck Schumer, who was here yesterday, along with… uhh, the, a very nice gentleman who I didn't really know. You know who I'm talking about.”

We know who he was talking about… did he?

Trump has confused Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi.

The only thing that links these Haley and Pelosi is Trump's feelings, and their gender, but a mix-up has occurred.

Trump claimed, regarding the Jan. 6 riot that, “Nikki Haley, you know they, do you know they destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence, everything, deleted and destroyed all of it. All of it, because of lots of things like Nikki Haley is in charge of security. We offered her 10,000 people, soldiers, National Guard, whatever they want. They turned it down. They don't want to talk about that. These are very dishonest people,”

Nikki Haley was in charge of absolutely nothing on January 6, 2021.

Trump invented a fake senator, Kristi Whitman/Whitmer

This one is especially concerning. In August 2025, Donald Trump confused every single reporter in the Oval Office after going on a rant about ‘Kristi Whitman,' a person who does not exist.

“You know, I did a favor for Kristi Whitman… Whitmer… Kristi Whitmer.” After a moment of confused silence the president plodded on, ““A good favor, I think. With the fish, the carp, the China carp—you ever hear of it? China carp, it's taking over your Great Lakes.”

The president glanced around the room of shocked faces before nodding to himself, seemingly satisfied with what he had just said.

It's possible the president meant Gretchen Whitmer, Christine Todd Whitman, Chris Christie, or even Kristi Noem, whom he called Kristi Kerr a few weeks earlier.

My money would be on Whitmer, since she is the only Governor responsible for a Great Lake

Names are tough, apparently.

Trump told reporters—not once, but twice—that he was “going to Russia on Friday.” – August, 2025

In reality, the president was headed to Alaska for a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“This is a tragic emergency, and it's embarrassing for me to be up here,” Trump told reporters.

He continued to say, “You know, I'm going to see Putin. I'm going to Russia on Friday. I don't like being up here, talking about how unsafe and how dirty and disgusting this once-beautiful capital [is].”

The White House had to quickly retract the statement, and Trump himself clarified the fact on Truth Social hours later.

Trump tells TIME that he ordered Israeli attacks in the fall of 2024

During the October 23 interview, TIME's reporter brought up attacks committed by Israel against the Lebanese group Hezbollah (a group funded by Iran, Syria, Lebanese diaspora, and in parts by Israel itself). Broaching the topic sparked Trump to blurt out a ‘fact' that took the interviewer by surprise:

“All of those attacks were done under my auspices, you know, with Israel doing the attacks—with the pagers and all that stuff,” Trump, who was not the president at the time, but in the midst of his campaign against Joe Biden, told TIME. “They let me know everything [happening],”

He then added that “And sometimes I'd say no—and they'd be respectful of that.”

Trump is either insinuating that he was a decision-maker for the Israeli government in 2024, or that he was president at the time.

Trump mixes up Kristi Noem with pro golfer

As mentioned earlier Trump has mistook Kristi Noem before, with a golfer.

In August, Trump called Kristi Noem ‘Christie Kerr', a female pro golfer while thanking a myriad of GOP politicians.

“I want to recognize several members of the task force, including our great Vice President JD Vance. JD, thank you very much. Thank you. Our equally great Attorney General Pam Bondi. Pam, thank you very much, Pam. Secretary of Homeland Security Cristie Kerr,”

This time, Trump caught himself right away,

“Cristie Kerr, do you know who Cristie Kerr is?” he said, as Vance and others on stage laughed. “She's a friend of mine. Great golfer.”

Noem seemed unfazed by the moment.

Quantico ramblings

We're not even going to break down Trump's unfocused, rambling speech addressing hundreds of America's military generals and admirals assembled in Quantico, Va. If you're interested, watch it; it has more content than we can disseminate here.

The generals could be seen wide-eyed and visibly concerned as the president ranted.

A cognitive test

In April 2025, Donald Trump completed the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a basic test used to gauge whether an elderly person's cognitive ability has begun to decline.

The test asks respondents to draw a clock with a specific time, identify pictures of animals, remember a series of words, and count backwards by a specific number. According to the creators of the test, it is meant to detect mild cognitive impairment as early as possible, not to measure intelligence or IQ.

Trump reportedly scored a perfect 30/30 score, which he took the time to brag about like it was the LSATS:

“One of the doctors said he's almost never seen a perfect score. I had a, had a perfect score. I had the highest score. And that made me feel good,”

“There aren't a lot of people in this room that would get every single question right, I can guarantee you.”

Then he decided to compare himself to some Democrats,

“Have [Ocasio-Cortez] pass the exams that I decided to take when I was at Walter Reed. Those are very hard—they're really aptitude tests, I guess, in a certain way, but they're cognitive tests. Let AOC go against Trump. Let Jasmine go against Trump.”

In a legendary Fox News interview, Trump also explained how he had aced the test. “It's like, you'll go, ‘Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.' So they'd say, ‘Could you repeat that.' So I said, ‘Yeah. So it's person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.'

The average toddler can identify pictures of common animals, and most children learn to read an analog clock around age 6 or 7, according to The New York Times.

But hey, it's still impressive, right?

“It's actually not that easy. But for me it was easy,”.

Again, experts estimate that the test should be easily aced by any 12-year-old, but don't take their word for it; check out the test yourself here. The toughest section for the president may have been the ‘serial subtraction' (also known as skip counting), which most American children learn in third grade. It's also important to note that this test takes no more than 10 minutes to complete.

Trump is the first American president to openly admit to a cognitive assessment.

“It's a very, very low bar for somebody who carries the nuclear launch codes in their pocket to pass and certainly nothing to brag about,” Jonathan Reiner told The Washington Post. Reiner is a professor at the George Washington School of Medicine and Health Sciences, and a cardiologist.

Some purposeful statements?

Now, beside this list of examples, Trump has also been consistently ‘misremembering' a key fact: who the president was in 2020.

Trump and his administration have made at least five statements implying that Trump was not the president in 2019-2020 over the last two months.

Trump is claiming that Joe Biden was responsible for a slew of controversies during that period, including COVID-19, the Jan. 6 riots, the deficit, the 2020 census, and school closures related to COVID-19.

Of course, Trump was either directly or indirectly responsible for all of those points.

This feels purposeful and pointed. These examples are not cognitive decline or a memory issue; these examples are purposeful manipulation.

Either the president is in cognitive decline and remembers little over the last four years, or he's openly trying to manipulate the American public. We're not sure which is worse.