President Donald Trump's latest speech is the latest indicator that he is losing his mental faculties and "slipping badly," The Bulwark editor and former conservative Jonathan Last said in a new video released on Tuesday.
The speech, delivered at the McDonald's Impact Summit in D.C. on Monday, featured Trump arguing for his plan to make prices more affordable, during which he proclaimed voters are "lucky" he won the 2024 election and went rambling into all sorts of various topics.
"Donald Trump held a big event with McDonald's corporate people yesterday," said Last. "I don't know if you've spent a lot of time really paying attention to listening to the words coming out of Trump's mouth when he's talking at length. Not just little clips here and there but, but really getting dialed in. It's pretty bad. It's pretty bad."
"I went through that speech, really line by line, and you can see kinds of mental decline in there which are absolutely shocking," Last continued. "And shocking even going back to a year ago." He directed viewers to a broader piece he wrote for The Bulwark on the subject.
In that piece, Last highlighted a number of specific moments that seem to show Trump "sundowning," including a moment in which he boasted about being congratulated by the owners of Google for how much traffic he is generating.
"I want to thank, uh, as you know the famous Sundar and Sergey, Sergey Brin. These are two guys that own and run a place called Google. They called me the following day after I did that McDonald’s little um, skit, because it was it wasn’t a commercial. You got it for nothing. It was a skit and they told me that it and I didn’t know them. I just, I said, 'Who are they?' They own Google. I said, “That’s pretty good. That’s not bad.”
Trump's mental acuity has been in question for years, but alarm has risen more rapidly in recent months. The president, for his part, insists he is lucid and routinely boasts that he "aced" the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), a dementia screening that he appears to have confused with an IQ test.