More likely related to foot drop, which has a number of causes, most commonly related to nerve compression/damage or muscular issues.
There have been (?scurrilous?) posts on Twitter in the past couple of days, showing video of a White House ceremony where a woman standing behind the seated Trump starts fingering her nose repeatedly, with staff/handlers subsequently rushing press out of the room. Supposedly she was signifying that Trump had dropped a load in his drawers and they were shooing out reporters before they could detect the stink.
After Trump’s meeting with Putin in Alaska, much was made of his inability to walk in a straight line. There was an article in which a doctor analysed the video of Trump wandering from side to side of the red carpet. He said that dementia patients often display a circular movement of one leg that causes them to veer off course. Then they overcompensate in the other direction. The video in the article was slowed down, and you could clearly see the circular motion of Trump’s right leg.
If anyone remembers that article, I’d love to read it again.
I have heard Dr. John Gartner talk about that numerous times although mostly in videos. Here’s a Salon article from March of 2024 where a different doctor (Dr. Elisabeth Zoffman) also talks about Trump’s weird gait:
That’s a 2-year-old article, written before Biden’s disastrous debate performance, and IMO it hasn’t aged particularly well. I would count it as evidence against the idea that there’s anything seriously wrong with Trump, at this point. (A lot of the evidence cited – poor vocabulary, lack of inhibition, socially inappropriate behavior, lack of self-awareness – just seems to be part of his natural personality, as far as I can tell. He’s immature, not terribly bright, and probably has some age-related cognitive decline, but none of that means he’s ill or that he’s declining particularly fast.)
Case in point:Trump endorses a TX state senate candidate who gets clobbered in a special election by a Democrat, and less than 24 hours later “forgets” he had any interest in or knowledge of the race.
Seems more like his usual blatant lying than dementia though it’s being viewed as the latter.
Before his term ends though, signs of serious mental decline will be commonplace and undeniable.
