President Trump, 79, explodes over report about signs of his aging

“The more that he ends up declining, the more people see that the MAGA industrial complex is going to be passed to somebody else, whether he wants it to or not,” Democratic strategist Ameshia Cross told theGrio.

President Donald Trump exploded in a nearly 300-word social media post against a recent New York Times report about his presidency facing the realities of aging in office.

As The Times points out, Trump, 79, has displayed signs of fatigue, including appearing to doze off during an Oval Office press conference earlier this month, and has had fewer public events and domestic travels compared to his first term in office. The analysis of Trump’s health also notes revelations the president has shared about his medical treatment, namely, a mysterious MRI.

On Wednesday, Trump blasted the “creeps” at the “failing” New York Times, calling out one of the article’s authors, White House Correspondent Katie Rogers, as a “third rate reporter who is ugly, both inside and out.”

Listing off his perceived wins in office, including on the economy despite some costs rising, and rehashing his 2024 presidential election victory, Trump wrote, “To do this requires a lot of Work and Energy, and I have never worked so hard in my life. Yet despite all of this the Radical Left Lunatics in the soon to fold New York Times did a hit piece on me that I am perhaps losing my Energy, despite facts that show the exact opposite.”

“This cheap “RAG” is truly an “ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE,'” Trump said of The Times.

“Despite all of this, I have my highest Poll Numbers, ever, and with record setting investment being made in America, they should only go up,” he falsely claimed about his public approval numbers.

“There will be a day when I run low on Energy, it happens to everyone, but with a PERFECT PHYSICAL EXAM AND A COMPREHENSIVE COGNITIVE TEST (“That was aced”) JUST RECENTLY TAKEN, it certainly is not now!” he added.

Democratic strategist Ameshia Cross told theGrio that the heightened attention on Trump’s aging is a “bittersweet irony.”

“I giggled a bit because Donald Trump is 79 years old. It is not unheard of that someone at that age would lose a bit of their step,” said Cross.

“If the argument was that Joe Biden was too old because of things that folks visibly saw in terms of declines, not only in regards to certain cognitive ability, but also in terms of how he was moving and the way that he spoke, that is the same thing that we can have for Donald Trump, who, to be quite fair, is in the same age group.”

Trump often portrays himself as a figure of strength. As Cross notes, “He’s somebody who ran on hyper masculinity.”

“He’s somebody who regularly pushes AI images of himself looking like a wrestler or having this stand against the world type image. This is a guy who used his doctors to basically tell us a height and a weight frame that was that of an NFL quarterback, that clearly wasn’t true of him,” she explained.

Despite his decade-long grip on the Republican Party, Trump is technically a lame duck president who has seen signs of that grip loosening amid Republicans breaking away from him on voting to release the Jeffrey Epstein files, which also resulted in a very public fallout with one of his staunchest MAGA supporters, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who later announced she is resigning from office.

Trump and Republicans could also face major losses in next year’s midterm elections, potentially resulting in Democrats taking control of Congress and launching a range of congressional investigations into the Trump administration.

“The more that he ends up declining, the more people see that the MAGA industrial complex is going to be passed to somebody else, whether he wants it to or not,” Cross told theGrio. “And I think that, for Donald Trump, that’s a very hard pill to swallow, because he wants to assert himself as this super strong guy who will be with us for years to come, in terms of the level of aggression and the MAGA base he’s created.”

She added, “He wants them to see him as somebody larger than life, and that image is greatly threatened if he has age-related decline.”