President Trump’s visit to Walter Reed Medical Center for a three-hour “preventative medical checkup” came amid mounting scrutiny over whether the 79-year-old commander in chief is showing signs of age-related decline — a controversy reignited by grainy footage from Arlington National Cemetery.
The president declared on Truth Social that everything “checked out perfectly” following his fourth publicly disclosed health exam since returning to office. The checkup followed weeks of pressure from Congressional Democrats, who sent a letter to the White House physician demanding cognitive screening results after no annual physical had been scheduled as of late April.
A 30-second clip from an Arlington National Cemetery ceremony thrust Trump’s health back into the center of American political debate. The video appears to show Trump with his eyes closed during remarks by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at a Memorial Day tribute to fallen U.S. service members. Social media users accused the president of dozing through one of the nation’s most solemn annual observances, claiming he showed “no respect.” The clip’s low resolution makes verification difficult — no high-resolution streams of the ceremony exist, and the camera sat at a considerable distance — but the optics alone have proven politically combustible.
A Pattern Stretching Back Months
The Arlington footage is the latest installment in a yearlong drip of video that critics have seized on to question whether Trump, who turns 80 on June 14, retains the stamina demanded by the presidency.
In December, Trump appeared to doze repeatedly during an hours-long Cabinet meeting, even after opening the gathering by invoking “Sleepy Joe Biden” and insisting he was “sharper than I was 25 years ago,” batting back a detailed New York Times account of an apparently slowed second term. Over the next hour and a half, he appeared to lose a running battle with his own eyelids — including roughly 15 minutes in, as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick lavished praise on “the greatest Cabinet ever for the greatest president ever.” Cabinet members Scott Turner, Brooke Rollins, Scott Bessent, Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Lee Zeldin sat through the same meeting.
Trump addressed the episode directly weeks later. “I didn’t sleep. I just closed them because I wanted to get the hell out of there,” he told the room, drawing laughter from Lutnick. The meeting, he conceded, had been “a little bit on the boring side.” Trump spoke for nearly 25 minutes straight before announcing, “We’re not going to go through the whole table.”
Additional incidents followed in rapid succession. In March, Trump faced accusations of nodding off during a security roundtable in Memphis, Tennessee. Then, in April, authentic C-SPAN footage from an Oval Office meeting captured Trump closing his eyes for 12 seconds, opening them briefly, then shutting them for 10 more seconds. The White House dismissed concerns about the real footage as misreading of “blinking.” Around the same time, a deepfake video circulated on Facebook depicting Trump striking his head on the desk — a fabrication traced to a self-described “digital memeist.”
A viral clip showed Trump leaning over the Resolute Desk with his eyes closed during a healthcare affordability event, after which CNN cardiologist Dr. Jonathan Reiner publicly suggested Trump may suffer from “daytime somnolence” and called for formal sleep testing. Governor Gavin Newsom seized the moment with a familiar jab: “Dozy Don is back.”
Doctors and Politicians Pile On
A group of physicians issued a public statement calling for Trump’s immediate removal from office on medical grounds, citing what they described as mental instability. The unprecedented demand has been amplified by polling: multiple surveys showed a majority of Americans no longer believe Trump is mentally fit to serve. An earlier Ipsos/Washington Post poll had found that just 40 percent of Americans believed the president possessed the mental capacity to perform his duties.
Trump, who was inaugurated for his second term on January 20, 2025, alongside Vice President JD Vance, has pushed back forcefully. During a speech, he defended himself at length on the subject of cognitive testing — even as observers noted heavy makeup appearing to cover bruising on both of his hands, the latest in a series of unexplained physical markings that have fueled speculation.
Fact-Checkers Urge Caution
Independent fact-checkers have repeatedly pumped the brakes on the most viral claims. Snopes has examined allegations that Trump nodded off at the 2024 Republican National Convention and at the funeral for Pope Francis, in addition to the December Cabinet meeting and April Oval Office gathering. In several cases, the most damaging visuals turned out to be manipulated or impossible to verify.
The Arlington footage falls into that murky category. Pixels and shadows obscure Trump’s face, and the camera’s distance prevents anyone from declaring definitively whether his eyes were open or closed. Yet the political damage does not appear to hinge on certainty. Each new clip has rekindled mockery of Trump’s own years of attacks on his predecessor as “Sleepy Joe” — a label voters, and a growing number of doctors, are now turning back on the man who coined it.
