Only about one-fourth of Americans said Donald Trump was even-tempered in a recent /Ipsos poll, and 58 percent said “mentally sharp” did not describe him very well or at all. Roughly half said his sharpness has gotten worse over the past year, a result that lands as Trump moves through his second term with a style many now describe as more erratic than before.
For Claire McCaskill, the reaction was blunt. Asked about the president’s behavior, the former Democratic senator said, “Hell no.” That kind of response is part of what the poll captures: not just disagreement over policy, but a widening judgment about whether Trump still projects steadiness, even among people who have watched him for years.
Trump announced his first campaign for the White House in 2015, and critics have questioned his digressions, anecdotes that never happened and dwindling vocabulary ever since. What is different now is how much more of that pattern is being noticed in public. Over the past month, he threatened to destroy Iranian “civilization,” called on Iran to open the “f—in’ Strait” of Hormuz, mockingly wrote “Praise be to Allah” in a social media post, attacked the pope and posted an AI image of himself as Jesus.
Republicans spent four years questioning Joe Biden’s fitness, and that history now hangs over the latest concerns about Trump. The contrast is plain: the same party that framed age and cognition as a defining political test is confronting fresh doubts about its own standard-bearer, and the polling suggests those doubts are no longer confined to his critics.
The question now is not whether Trump can dominate attention. He has done that for a decade. It is whether, after years of spectacle and a recent month of provocations, enough Americans still see the steadiness that once powered his pitch — and whether that perception can survive the rest of his second term.