Despite the stunningly aggressive moves President Donald Trump has taken since the start of the new year, a columnist noticed that his age-related decline is becoming more and more apparent.
The president signed off on a logistically audacious and technically impressive strike Jan. 3 against Venezuela that resulted in the capture of its leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife, but New York Times columnist Frank Bruni said that flex was belied by Trump's own physical presence when announcing the mission's success.
"When, later that morning, he stood before television cameras at Mar-a-Lago to take his victory lap, it was more a victory wobble," Bruni wrote. "He looked spent. He spoke in a mumbling, meandering fashion. He wasn’t President George W. Bush landing on an aircraft carrier in a flight suit in 2003 to deliver a speech prematurely declaring America’s interventions in Iraq a success; he was the same old Trump in the same old duds droning on in the same old way, only he sounded older."
The columnist cut him some slack, noting the 79-year-old Trump had gotten little or no sleep as the attack unfolded, and even took a 4:30 a.m. call from a Times reporter. But Bruni said his apparent feebleness was more than just exhaustion.
"His bearing and his cadence suggested something more than a mere sleep deficit, as did his inability to sound triumphant as he claimed another triumph, to flash much color as he peacocked," Bruni wrote. "At a moment like that, you’d expect there to be enough adrenaline pumping through him for a pumped-up performance. Instead, he delivered a wound-down one."
Trump seems to be on a collision course between his own physical mortality and the prospect of his losing political power after the midterm elections, Bruni wrote, and the president appears to be on a mad dash before either one of those losses occurs.
"I watch and listen to him and get the sense of a man stuffing himself at the buffet before it’s taken away," Bruni wrote. "A man bellowing, or trying to bellow, about his superiority as his voice weakens. 'Dominance,' 'dominance,' 'dominance' — he returned repeatedly to that word during his Mar-a-Lago news conference, a tic that was just as much a tell."
Trump has been busy remaking the White House to his own gilded preferences and renaming places and buildings after himself as he eyes expansion of U.S. territories into Canada, Greenland and elsewhere, but Bruni also pointed to his warning to Republican lawmakers that a midterm loss would result in his impeachment.
"That’s the statement of a man who is keenly aware of his power’s mortality — and who seems to be combating and quelling his anxiety by taking an ever more extravagant power trip," Bruni wrote.
