May 6, 2026, 4:03 a.m. ET
Hey, do you all remember “Sleepy Joe” Biden, the president whose age and cognitive decline Donald Trump and his plague of MAGA lemmings routinely mocked?
Well, I have some news. In a living example of turnabout being fair play, 79-year-old President Trump himself is now viewed by a majority of Americans as being mentally and physically unfit to lead.
A recent Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found that nearly 60% of Americans believe Trump isn’t mentally sharp enough to be president, and 55% think his physical health makes him unfit to lead.
Americans think Trump is just as mentally unfit as Biden was
Just a few months before Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race over concerns about his age, an AP-NORC poll found 63% were not confident he had the mental capability to be president.
So that means Trump is right in Biden territory on the mental acuity front. Sleepy Joe, meet Babbling Don.
With soaring gas prices, rising food costs and inflation, and a wildly unpopular and wholly unnecessary war with Iran, Trump is making voters pine for Biden, the man Trump has called “the worst president in history.”
By Trump’s own definition, he has become the worst president in history
A Harvard CAPS/Harris poll from late January showed 51% of registered voters thought Trump was doing a worse job than Biden. A February Rasmussen Reports poll found 48% of likely voters picked Biden as the better president, while 40% picked Trump. And a February YouGov/Economist poll found 46% of American adults thought Trump was worse than Biden.
I’m no math whiz, but I believe that by the transitive property, if Biden was the “worst president in history,” and people think Trump is doing a worse job than Biden, then Trump equals “the totally worstest – no reverses – president in history.”
That’s gotta hurt. And that polling was before the gas-price jumps and associated chaos that has come with Trump’s Iran folly.
Trump’s physical and cognitive decline is on vivid display
It doesn’t take much to understand why Americans are seeing Trump as feeble and doddering. The day I wrote this column, May 5, the president was in the Oval Office signing a memo to restore the Presidential Fitness Award for U.S. students.
Surrounded by kids, Trump got to ranting, both inappropriately and incoherently.
“We can’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon,” he said, as the children looked on. “You might be too young for this. … They probably know better than most people. But you can’t let a bunch of lunatics have a nuclear weapon, or the world would be in trouble, the world would be in trouble. So we just hit records on the Dow, it was supposed to be done in five or six years, somebody said it couldn’t be possible to reach 50 on the Dow, and I reached 50 on the first year, and then I reached 7,000.”
Trump mocks Obama in front of literal children in the Oval Office
Trump mocked former President Barack Obama for phasing out the fitness award, turning it into the Presidential Youth Fitness Program, which focused more on the overall health of children rather than on competitive athletic performances.
“Then we had the Obama administration,” Trump said with disdain in, again, a room full of children. “Wonderful, wonderful person ‒ Barack Hussein Obama ‒ have you heard of him? We had the Obama administration, which phased out this wonderful tradition of physical fitness ‒ thank you Barack, very much. Great job.”
The very-stable-genius president also tried to joke about transgender athletes with a little boy and lied about the election he lost being a “rigged election.”
With advanced age, some lose their ability to filter what they’re saying. Such was the case here, obviously. And such is the case routinely with Trump, as he threatens to destroy entire civilizations, suggests political opponents are traitors, and says the Iran war is not a war moments before referring to it as war.
Godspeed to Republicans as they approach midterms with this clown
As Americans suffer economically, Trump rages relentlessly about building a precious ballroom on the White House grounds. He is shamelessly slapping his name on buildings, money, passports – anything he can get his self-aggrandizing hands on. He struggles to stay awake during meetings, his hands constantly show bruise marks that have never been believably explained, and his diatribes have grown lengthier, more digressive and less tethered to reality than ever.
Babbling Don is certainly not fooling the American people. There is no hiding his cognitive decline or his troubling impulsiveness. So now Republicans get to ride into the midterm elections with a wildly unpopular president who most voters see as wholly unfit for the job.
Good luck with that.
Follow USA TODAY columnist Rex Huppke on Bluesky at @rexhuppke.bsky.social and on Facebook at facebook.com/RexIsAJerk.
Leave a Reply