President Donald Trump, who during the 2024 election cycle branded himself as the antithesis of Joe Biden’s sleepy demeanor, is now facing the same criticisms he once embraced. During a White House Cabinet meeting on Dec. 2, the president appeared to drift off.
Multiple times during the meeting, Trump’s head dipped and his eyes appeared closed with little movement while the advisers positioned around him spoke to the press. Trump’s potentially sleepy appearance seemed especially noticeable during Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s remarks. While Rubio passionately defended the president’s foreign policy, Trump looked, at a minimum, visibly fatigued.
What matters isn’t whether Trump was technically asleep—it’s the double standard. He spent years making age and mental acuity a central political issue when it came to his predecessor. Yet when the sitting president receives the same scrutiny, he expects the public to brush it off as “fake news.”
“You people are crazy,” Trump dismissively told reporters after being questioned about the events of the Dec. 2 Cabinet meeting. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also told members of the press that the president was “listening attentively” throughout the entire meeting.
But the footage suggests otherwise.
Sure, it would be reasonable to argue that Trump is in the midst of the world’s most stressful job. He’s an aging man—who wouldn’t be tired in his position? You could try to say that the camera was at such an angle, or the room was lit in such a way, that it made the president appear more tired than he actually was.
Whether he was unconscious or not, the president shouldn’t be surprised that the chickens have come home to roost.
After years of reducing President Biden to “Sleepy Joe,” Trump is now shocked that Americans are applying the same standard to him. Biden’s age-related gaffes became a serious political vulnerability, eventually forcing him out of the race for the White House — but he wasn’t the one throwing jabs at rivals for their cognitive fitness. Maybe Biden realized that politicians who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Trump, on the other hand, has been pelting them for years.
“Where’s SLEEPY JOE? He’s SLEEPING, that’s where!!!” Trump posted on Truth Social on May 1, 2024.
Statements like these give President Trump very little wiggle room for moments like the one seen in the Cabinet Room.
The concerns about an aging president’s physical health and mental cognition are valid concerns, regardless of what color tie they have on. It was concerning when Reagan nodded off in Cabinet meetings, it was concerning when Biden appeared to snooze at a 2021 climate conference and it’s still concerning now that it’s Trump.
The image of a sleeping president feeds a growing suspicion among the American electorate that Washington, as a whole, has fallen into a deep slumber of indifference.
Asleep to the needs of working families. Asleep to the pressures of wages, rent and groceries. Asleep to the anger that grows when Washington can’t—or won’t—do anything about it.
We are still in year one of Trump’s second presidential term. With continued economic slowdowns looming in the future and an ongoing armed conflict with South American drug cartels, how can Americans expect President Trump to rise to the occasion when he can barely stay awake during Cabinet meetings? And how will he be able to function by year four?
