Trump’s second term has been rife with bizarre moments – here are seven

Donald Trump vowed to “plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars” during his inauguration speech last year, a bold promise that spoke to otherworldly achievements.

But during the first year of his second term, it is on the planet Earth where Trump has sought to plant the US flag. He has deployed troops to US cities, as waves of ICE agents terrorize communities. Trump has ordered the invasion of Venezuela and the capture of its leader, is engaged in ongoing saber-rattling over Greenland, and has threatened historic US allies should they oppose his efforts to seize the autonomous territory of the Danish kingdom. He has amplified online claims that Nato is a bigger threat to the US than historical adversaries China and Russia.

It has been a forceful few months, in other words, with Trump’s frantic and pugnacious approach to international relations leaving people wondering whether the US president is unhinged or following a masterplan.

Yet in the middle of his thrusting on the world stage, Trump’s past year has been marked by bizarre moments. He has yo-yoed between hours-long flurries of activity on social media and public engagements where he has appeared to fall asleep. He has fluctuated from derailing meetings by telling fictional anecdotes about serial killers, to derailing meetings by talking about different methods of descending stairs.

At 79, Trump is the oldest person to be inaugurated as US president, and his manner of speaking, increasingly odd behavior, and at times seemingly tenuous grip on reality have all raised concerns from psychiatrists and political opponents.

Here’s a look at some of Trump’s most perplexing moments.

Perchance to dream

Trump spent much of his presidential campaign decrying Joe Biden’s vigor, questioning the then president’s mental acuity and branding him Sleepy Joe. But recently it has been Trump who has appeared to be literally falling asleep during government meetings.

At a cabinet meeting in early December, Trump had his eyes closed at multiple points throughout the meeting, his head drooping down at times before jerking back up, something that was particularly noticeable as Marco Rubio spoke. (It is unclear whether the two events are connected.)

That was the second time in a matter of weeks that Trump had seemed to fall asleep during a meeting – at a press conference in the Oval Office in November he was seen slumped back in his chair, eyes closed. More recently, Trump appeared to struggle to keep his eyes open during a press conference announcing cannabis reforms, and just last week he looked ready to drift off during an event touting milk policies.

The White House’s response to questions about Trump’s snooziness has typically been to tell the public that their eyes did not witness Trump’s eyes closing. In the year since his inauguration, White House spokespeople have variously told the Guardian that Trump has “unmatched energy” and that his “mental sharpness is second to none”, while Trump’s former doctor, now a Republican representative, claims he is the “healthiest president this nation has ever seen”.

‘He’d go around correcting everybody’

Last July, during an event that was supposed to be about AI investment in Pennsylvania, Trump went off-topic to tell a story about how his uncle, the late professor John Trump, had taught Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, at MIT.

Trump recalled: “I said: ‘What kind of a student was he, Uncle John? Dr John Trump.’ I said: ‘What kind of a student?’ And then he said: ‘Seriously, good.’ He said: ‘He’d correct – he’d go around correcting everybody.’ But it didn’t work out too well for him, didn’t work out too well, but it’s interesting in life.”

The problem is: that cannot possibly be true. First, Trump’s uncle died in 1985, and Kaczynski was only publicly identified as the Unabomber in 1996. Second, Kaczynski did not study at MIT.

No explanation has ever been offered about why Trump thinks this conversation took place.

Windmills and whales

Wildlife has long been a fascination for Trump – who can forget his ruminating over whether it would be better to be eaten by a shark or die by electric shock – but his second term has seen him crowbar zoology into meetings and events at bizarre moments.

During a meeting with the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, in Scotland, Trump abruptly switched from discussing immigration to saying this: “The other thing I say to Europe: ​we’ve – we will not allow a windmill to be built in the United States​. They’re killing us. They’re killing the beauty of our scenery.”

He proceeded to speak, non-stop and unprompted, for two minutes about windmills, claiming without evidence that they drive whales “loco” and that wind energy “kills the birds” (the proportion of birds killed by turbines is tiny compared with the number killed by domestic cats and from flying into power lines).

‘Bop, bop, bop’

In late September, the Trump administration abruptly summoned the country’s top military commanders to a meeting in Virginia. No reason was offered for the meeting, and the top brass probably left without understanding why their presence had been demanded. In a speech to generals, Trump touted his alleged successes and lauded the US bombing of an Iranian nuclear facility – something that may have violated international law – before riffing about the different ways to go down stairs.

“America is respected again as a country. We were not respected with Biden. They looked at him falling down stairs every day. Every day, the guy’s falling down stairs,” Trump said.

He continued: “I said: ‘It’s not our president. We can’t have it.’ I’m very careful, you know, when I walk downstairs for – like I’m on stairs, like these stairs, I’m very – I walk very slowly. Nobody has to set a record, just try not to fall because it doesn’t work out well. A few of our presidents have fallen and it became a part of their legacy.

“We don’t want that. Need to walk nice and easy. You not have – you don’t have to set any record. Be cool, be cool when you walk down, but don’t, don’t bop down the stairs. That’s the one thing with Obama, I had zero respect for him as a president, but he would bop down those stairs, I’ve never seen – da da da da da da, bop, bop, bop, he’d go down the stairs, wouldn’t hold on. I said, it’s great, I don’t want to do it. I guess I could do it, but eventually bad things are going to happen and it only takes once, but he did a lousy job as president.”

Trump has made Truth Social, the social media app which he owns and only 3% of Americans use, the unofficial mouthpiece of his presidency.

But his use of the app has raised eyebrows. Trump has used the app to share racist posts about Somali Americans, to spread misinformation about active shooters, and to accuse some Democrats of “seditious behavior, punishable by death” (Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, later said Trump did not want to execute members of Congress).

On Truth Social, where he is free from guardrails and prompts provided by his staff, Trump has also appeared confused about which policies he has or has not announced. In September, he reposted to Truth Social an AI-generated fake video that promoted “med bed hospitals”, a video that showed an AI version of himself speaking.

Setting aside that the idea of “med beds” is a rightwing conspiracy theory – one version of the theory posits that the government and/or a group of wealthy Americans has access to medical bed-like devices that can cure almost every illness, but are withholding the technology – Trump’s post prompted a number of questions.

Did Trump believe that he had previously announced med bed hospitals? Did the president think he had given a speech about “med beds” at the White House? Did he believe that his government was about to send “med bed cards” to every US citizen? Who knows?

Gold

In July, Trump held a public cabinet meeting, called to address the flooding tragedy in Texas, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the bombing of Iran and global tariffs.

It was supposed to address those things anyway. Instead, Trump went on a 13-minute, entirely unprompted monologue about how he had decorated the cabinet meeting room.

After talking about paintings that he said he had personally selected from “the vaults”, Trump said: “Look at those frames, you know, I’m a frame person, sometimes I like frames more than I like the pictures.” The president added that he had overseen the cleaning of some china, before addressing the lighting.

Trump said: “Here we put out – you know these, these lamps have been very important actually, whether people love them or not, but they’re, if you see pictures like Pearl Harbor or Tora! Tora! Tora! [released in 1970], you see movies about the White House where wars are being discussed, oftentimes they’ll show those lamps or something like those lamps, something that looks like them. Probably not the reals, because I don’t think they’re allowed to – this is a very important room, this is a sacred room, and I don’t think they made movies from here.”

Trump then moved on to the issue of gold – he has spattered gold trimming all over the Oval Office – and mused as to whether he should add gold leaf to the walls. He said: “Because you can’t paint it, if you paint it, it won’t look good because they’ve never found a paint that looks like gold. You see that in the Oval Office.

“Er, they’ve tried for years and years. Somebody could become very wealthy, but they’ve never found a paint that looks like gold. So painting is easy but it won’t look right.”

With the US facing crises on multiple fronts, it was an odd thing to focus on. But increasingly, that has been one of the hallmarks of Trump’s second term.

Greenland (not Iceland)

Trump’s speech at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, was notable for its racism, fact free claims, and for the president claiming Nato countries, who came to the aid of the US following 9/11, would not “be there for us” in a time of need.

Yet something that also raised eyebrows was Trump repeatedly confusing Greenland with Iceland.

“[Nato is] not there for us on Iceland, that I can tell you. Our stock market took the first dip yesterday because of Iceland. So Iceland’s already cost us a lot of money,” Trump said.

The markets fell a day before Trump’s speech because of his ongoing threats to seize Greenland, not Iceland. Trump had mixed the two up. But in a pure Orwellian moment, which revealed the tight guardrails that the White House has thrown up around the ageing president, the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told people not to believe what they had seen and heard.

“No he didn’t, Libby,” Leavitt wrote in response to a reporter noting Trump had mixed up Greenland and Iceland.

“His written remarks referred to Greenland as a ‘piece of ice’ because that’s what it is. You’re the only one mixing anything up here.”