Sleepy Donald Trump? Umm, No, He's Not Joe Biden

Debra J. Saunders
Thu, 04 Dec 2025 17:54:23 -0800
Opinion

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump, the very man who branded former President Joe Biden "Sleepy Joe" during the 2020 and 2024 campaigns, has been caught on camera seeming to nod off — during Tuesday's Cabinet meeting and a recent Oval Office event.

Critics on the left are gleeful.

Let them have their jollies. Because one of these old men is not like the other.
Updated: Thu Dec 04, 2025

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump, the very man who branded former President Joe Biden "Sleepy Joe" during the 2020 and 2024 campaigns, has been caught on camera seeming to nod off — during Tuesday's Cabinet meeting and a recent Oval Office event.

Critics on the left are gleeful.

Let them have their jollies. Because one of these old men is not like the other.

Trump, 79, has presided over nine Cabinet meetings this year.

Biden, 83, held nine Cabinet meetings during his four years in office.

During a Tuesday interview, DealBook founder Andrew Ross Sorkin brought up Trump's health. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent brought up "one of the greatest scandals" of all time: the media's lack of coverage of Biden's "diminished capacity."

Noting that Trump just held a lengthy Cabinet meeting and phoned him twice at 2 a.m. last week, Bessent argued, "For 10 months, the Biden administration did not have a Cabinet meeting. How are you going to invoke the 25th Amendment if the Cabinet secretaries never see the president? Which they didn't."

While cable news channels are all over clips of Trump seemingly nodding off, they weren't exactly profiles in courage with Biden who, in 2020, campaigned for the White House from the privacy of his Delaware home.

Biden's lockdown campaign was followed by a COVID-19 presidency known for hospital masks, school closures and talking up working from home.

Trump plowed through COVID-19. He understood the importance of getting Americans back to work.

I'll never forget the October 2020 evening when Trump returned to the White House after spending 72 hours at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where he was treated for the coronavirus.

After Marine One touched down on the South Lawn, Trump walked up the long, crescent-shaped South Portico stairs and, from the balcony, took off his light mask and saluted in a show of will and resilience.

From day one of his second term, Trump went after bad regulations. Just this week he proposed rolling back car fuel efficiency standards. His Make America Healthy Again campaign has taken on the childhood disease crisis. His robust enforcement of immigration law has discouraged illegal border crossings.

No small feat: Trump brokered a Gaza ceasefire deal that resulted in Hamas' release of the surviving 20 Israeli hostages.

Trump talks to the press almost daily.

In 2022, The New York Times reported that Biden had given 38 interviews during a fixed point in the presidency compared with 116 for Trump's first term, 198 for former President Barack Obama, 71 for George W. Bush and 75 for Bill Clinton.

It's not just the media. Biden was cloistered even from his own staff.

In the tell-all book "Original Sin," Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson write of the insider who told them, "Five people were running the country, and Joe Biden was at best a senior member of the board."

At Tuesday's Cabinet meeting, Trump was engaged, not asleep at the switch. He hopscotched from one issue to the next. Yes, at moments he seemed to be fighting to keep his eyes open. Rather than react defensively, however, Trump confronted the age question.

"I'll let you know when there's something wrong," Trump offered. "There will be someday. That's going to happen to all of us. But right now I think I'm sharper than I was 25 years ago. But who the hell knows?"

Is Trump cognitively sharper than he was 25 years ago? Probably not, given his age. But he knows more about the presidency and the world, which has made him remarkably effective.

And there's no mystery as to who's making the decisions in this administration.