A declining president travels abroad

The world leaders who met with a bumbling Trump knew that all it takes to curry his favor is something shiny or celebratory.

Nov 03, 2025

By Shalise Manza Young

Instead of last month’s trip to Asia being seen as a success or talked about for important foreign policy or tariff discussions, much of the attention is instead being focused on Donald Trump’s behaviors and speech.

He became more of a laughingstock than world leader.

There have been questions about Trump’s mental fitness for over a year, but the president’s signs of mental decline are impossible to ignore and far beyond what we’d expect to see from a 79-year-old man. Even those of us who aren’t nearing 80 know the feeling of walking into the kitchen and completely forgetting why; we’ve all had slips of the tongue here and there.

But watching Trump at a welcome ceremony with new Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi offered striking visuals: Trump’s shoulders were slumped, he had difficulty walking in a straight line, at one point kept walking when it appeared he was supposed to pause in front of the military with Takaichi, appeared to salute to no one in particular, and wandered around to the point that Takaichi had to resort to being his guide.

It was so bad that one user on X/Twitter set Trump’s meanderings to the theme from “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

Speaking to American troops on the USS George Washington, Trump rambled nonsensically. At one point he went from saying that troops were being “aggressive” asking for a picture with him—“Sir, can I have a picture, sir?”—to whether steam or electricity should be used to power catapults on aircraft carriers, insisting the former was the better choice.

“Seriously, they’re spending billions of dollars to build stupid electric. And the problem, when it breaks, you have to send up to MIT, get the most brilliant people in the world, fly ‘em out. It’s ridiculous,” Trump said. “The steam, they, they say they can fix it with a hammer and a blowtorch, and it works just as well, if not better, and I love the sight of that beautiful steam pouring off that deck, with the electric you don’t have that.”

A few minutes later, Trump claimed President Joe Biden “used to say he was a pilot. He was a pilot, he was a truck dri-- whatever, whoever walked in. He wasn’t a pilot. Wasn’t much of a president either, to be honest with you, that I can tell you.”

Over the roughly 50 minutes he talked, there were a litany of similar non-sequiturs, fragments of sentences, and lies.

In South Korea it was more of the same. In the same run-on sentence Trump called Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi a good looking man and “a killer!,” might or might not have imitated Modi’s accent, and then continued to push his story that he ended the brief India-Pakistan conflict from earlier this year, a claim India has debunked.

Make no mistake: The leaders who met with Trump knew that all it takes to appease Trump is something shiny or celebratory—a golf club and golf ball from Takaichi, a replica golden crown from South Korea’s Lee Jae Myung, and a red carpet and dance troupe (with Trump awkwardly “dancing” along, natch) from Malaysia to meet Air Force One.

Before leaving for Asia, Trump again bragged about getting a perfect score on what he framed as an I.Q. test, taking aim at two women he has frequently called “low I.Q.”—Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas)—and challenging them to ace the test the way he supposedly had.

“Let Jasmine go against Trump. I don’t think Jasmine…. The first couple questions are easy: a tiger, an elephant, a giraffe, you know. When you get up to about five or six and then when you get up to 10 and 20 and 25, they couldn’t come close to answering any of those questions,” Trump muttered.

Trump was describing a cognitive assessment, not an intelligence one. He later told reporters he had also undergone an MRI while at Walter Reed Medical Center. Given that he’d undergone his annual physical six months earlier, his admission has further raised alarms about what exactly is happening and how serious Trump’s condition is.

Please understand this isn’t meant to demean those suffering from dementia. It is heartbreaking to watch a loved one deal with its effects: a mother who confuses her grandson with her younger brother; a father who can no longer remember the rules to play his beloved spades; a neighbor who leaves the house unnoticed and walks to a bus stop on a busy street.

The signs were there long before the election. Harry Segal, a senior lecturer in Cornell University’s psychology department, noted in April 2024 that there were clear signs of early dementia in Trump but that President Joe Biden was just showing his age. In October 2024, 230 doctors signed an open letter declaring Trump too mentally unstable to serve, citing his diminished vocabulary, lack of impulse control, overuse of superlatives, and deteriorating motor functioning, among other markers.

And yet seemingly every headline from legacy media outlets before Biden reluctantly dropped out of the race had been about his mental well-being, not Trump’s.

Lack of sleep and upending the circadian rhythm of a dementia patient can contribute to “sundowning,” or the worsening of symptoms, which could explain what we saw from Trump in Japan after a 23-hour flight.

We know Trump is headstrong, and it’s pretty clear that he is completely surrounded by yes-men and -women this time around. But sending Trump halfway around the world in his current state was malpractice by his advisers.

For someone who claims he is a strong man, he looked feeble. And confused. And weak.

Trump’s behavior has been excused away for years, and now it is worsening. Were he absolutely anyone else, I would feel badly for him.

But as Trump wanders the world embarrassing himself and the United States, it is we the people who are suffering.

Shalise Manza Young was most recently a columnist at Yahoo Sports, focusing on the intersection of race, gender and culture in sports. The Associated Press Sports Editors named her one of the 10 best columnists in the country in 2020. She has also written for the Boston Globe and Providence Journal. Find her on Bluesky @shalisemyoung.