President Donald Trump is losing his grip on reality before all of America, a Democratic senator has argued.
Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego, 46, questioned the 80-year-old president’s capacity to serve as he laid out everything that’s “deeply wrong” with Trump in an interview with The Daily Beast Podcast.
“I think there’s something wrong, deeply wrong with the president,” he told host Joanna Coles.
“First of all, I mean, mentally, I think this man has been off for quite a while. But I think he is definitely not in good health. The fact that he disappears for two, three days every couple weeks and we don’t hear from him and he has so many multiple checkups at the hospital, everything else like that,” Gallego continued.
Trump, the oldest person to be inaugurated U.S. president, has made several trips to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center since he returned to the White House in January last year.
The president had the first annual physical exam of his second term in April 2025, which was followed by a “semiannual physical” in October. This year, he had his routine medical and dental assessment in May.
Through it all, the White House has maintained that Trump is in excellent health—despite his chronically bruised hands, swollen legs, mental flubs, and public displays of drowsiness.
Just this week, Trump’s bruised and swollen hand was spotted with a fresh heaping of mismatched concealer as he bragged about his Washington, D.C. renovation projects on Wednesday. The concerning state of his hand stole the spotlight as he droned on about his renovation skills and how he’s “very good at flagpoles.”
But the White House has repeatedly reverted to blaming the bruising on Trump’s hands on frequent handshaking and his high-dose aspirin regimen, while crediting his swollen ankles to chronic venous insufficiency, a common condition where leg veins struggle to pump blood back to the heart.
“If Biden had been doing all of this, there would have been a congressional inquiry by this point,” Gallego said. “It’s not that out of the realm of possibility and it’s not necessarily a direct attack upon him.”
“He’s an overweight 80-year-old man who does not eat well. So like it’s very natural for things to be going bad,” the senator continued. “And it’s also very natural for us as a country to be asking, you know, ‘Is everything good? Who’s actually making some of these decisions?’ All these kind of things that were very legitimate questions under Biden should also be asked right now and pushed under this administration.”
Gallego also said Trump’s bizarre speeches prove that he’s “sliding.”
“I mean, you listen to him, he’s meandering all the time. He’s losing grasp of reality and time,” he said. “It’s all these things that, if we would see this kind of in some other politician, we would have said that, ‘This guy is not doing well.’ And if you just compare his verbiage and how he spoke years ago to what he is now, he has definitely been sliding.”
“I think it’s a natural thing. It’s an issue of time and just, you know, getting older. But it’s also legitimate for us as a country to be worried about that,” he added.
When reached for comment on Gallego’s remarks, the White House responded by lashing out at the Daily Beast.
“The Daily Beast is a mentally challenged, lightweight operation that constantly peddles baseless and deranged conspiracy theories about President Trump and his Administration – which is why no one should listen to them,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said. “Hopefully the idiots who work there will eventually be able to get themselves real jobs.”
Ingle, 31, got his bachelor’s degree in communications and master’s degree in business administration from Southeastern University, where his father, Kent Ingle, is president. The Florida-based institution boasts that more than two-thirds of its students attend online or through extension courses at 200 “partner sites,” which do not have to be accredited.
