Donald Trump fell asleep several times during Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting

For the past nine years, it’s like pulling teeth to get the mainstream media to write about Donald Trump’s obvious poor health. It was bad during Trump’s first term in office, but there was some acknowledgement of his age and lack of executive function then. But during the Biden administration, it’s like the entirety of the American media decided that Trump’s increasingly erratic utterances, rants and visible poor health were nothing compared to Joe Biden’s age. Well, they got what they wanted, and now Trump is back in the White House, snoozing his way through Cabinet meetings and waking up just long enough to rant about Somali immigrants. From the NY Times’ “Trump Appears to Fight Sleep During Cabinet Meeting.”

President Trump appeared to be fighting sleep on Tuesday during a cabinet meeting at the White House, closing his eyes and at times seeming to nod off, after he criticized media coverage about him facing the realities of aging in office.

Over the course of two hours and 18 minutes, the president, who is 79, sometimes appeared to struggle to keep his eyes open as cabinet officials went around the room describing their work and heaping praise on him.

Asked whether Mr. Trump fell asleep, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement that the president was “listening attentively and running the entire” meeting. She cited Mr. Trump’s response during a question and answer segment at the end of the meeting, when he delivered a tirade against Somali immigrants.

“This epic moment put an exclamation point on President Trump’s ninth cabinet meeting of his second term — all of which have been entirely open to the press for the whole world to see,” Ms. Leavitt said.

Mr. Trump does appear frequently before the news media, and he takes questions far more often than his predecessor, President Joseph R. Biden Jr., did. He is a regular, outsize presence in public life.

[From The NY Times]

“He was awake because he ranted about Somali immigrants” is not a ringing endorsement of Trump’s consciousness. Many, many ancient bigots doze off in the middle of the day, then awake with a start and say something racist. The “sleepy racist” demographic is a huge chunk of the MAGA voting bloc. What will it take for the Beltway media to start covering Sleepy Dementia Don’s Cabinet-meeting naptimes, poor balance, bruised hands, multiple MRIs and secret hospital visits with the same urgency in which they covered “Joe Biden looked tired”?

Photos courtesy of Backgrid.