Donald Trump's mental decline is facing fresh scrutiny in Washington after journalist Michael Wolff claimed on a podcast on Wednesday, 27 May, that the 79-year-old President is 'exhausted by the job,' repeating the same stories every ten minutes and prompting what he called a quiet 'mortality watch' in the West Wing.
Concerns about Trump's health have simmered for years, but they have sharpened since his latest physical examination and a series of unexplained trips to Walter Reed National Military Medical Centre.
The White House has repeatedly insisted these visits are routine. Wolff and his co-host onInside Trump's Head, Joanna Coles, are distinctly unconvinced, arguing that the official reassurance sounds very much like the language deployed when something is anything but routine.
On theDaily Beastpodcast, Wolff painted a portrait of a president worn down not just by age but by the cumulative strain of his own governing style. Trump, he said, is nearly 80, overweight, sleep-deprived and 'manic,' a combination that appears to be catching up with him in real time.
'What is striking now is not simply Trump's age, but how much suddenly depends on a man who looks exhausted by the job itself,' Wolff argued, warning that the margin of error for the presidency has narrowed uncomfortably around a visibly diminished leader.
In his view, the physical questions cannot be separated from the political ones. A President who lives on adrenaline, late nights, and fast food will, at some point, meet the limits of his own body.
Wolff went further than most commentators are willing to go in public. He suggested 'a very decent likelihood, higher than in most modern presidencies, that he does not physically survive the term.'
It is a stark claim, and one that rests on his reporting rather than any disclosed medical diagnosis. He described a president 'increasingly unable to carry the weight of things going wrong around him, a man whose body finally seems to be catching up with his chaos.'
Pressed by Coles on what that might look like, Wolff replied: 'There's a very good chance that it just ends all of a sudden ... no warning, no preparation. He falls.'
There is no medical evidence offered to back that prediction; it is, as he effectively admits, an extrapolation from behaviour and atmosphere rather than from charts and scans.
Source: International Business Times UK
