‘Is Donald Trump Well?’ MS NOW’s Katy Tur Does Deep Dive on President’s Mental Acuity

MS NOW anchor Katy Tur asked her viewers on Monday if President Donald Trump is still mentally fit, taking a deep dive into polls showing a growing number of Americans are starting to ask the question.

“Is Donald Trump well? Is his head in the presidency? Does he have the mental acuity to lead this country?” Tur began to kick off the segment, adding:

More people are starting to doubt that — beyond, of course, Democrats who have always doubted it. This is being borne out in two new polls: the first one from the Washington Post, ABC, and Ipsos, which finds the number of people who think he lacks the mental sharpness to serve effectively is now climbing to 56%; and the second, from Reuters and Ipsos, which shows six in 10 Americans now say President Trump is becoming more erratic as he ages.

That includes a growing number of Democrats, independents, and Republicans. Why is that? Well, the apparent sleeping during cabinet meetings and Oval Office visits probably isn’t helping. Neither are the stories about how he’s forcing his top aides to wear his preferred brand of shoes — buying them in incorrect sizes that he’s guessed they wear. He also doesn’t sound as energetic and clear as he did even a few years ago, comparatively speaking, of course. Case in point: the wild asides mid-thought.

He has always done that to a degree, but now he’s doing it in the middle of White House cabinet meetings, largely defined by deadly serious issues like the war in Iran or alleged political prosecutions. Listen to this one, when the president took a sharp left turn during complaints about what he argues is criminally wasteful spending for construction at the Federal Reserve.

Tur then played a reel of showing some of what she was talking about:

You could have done that building — if it was properly done and planned, you would have done the building for… I would have done it for $25 million, and it would be better, it would be better.

See this pen right here? This pen is an interesting example — it’s the same thing. So this pen is very inexpensive, but it writes well. I like it, but I can’t have the pen the way it was — you know what it is. I don’t want to give too much publicity, but they do treat me well: Sharpie. So I came here and they have $1,000 pens. Beautiful pen, ballpoint.

A thousand — it was gold, silver, gorgeous. But I’m handing it out to kids that don’t even know what they’re doing.

“What is this, Mommy?” And it had another problem: they didn’t write well. There’s no ink in the pen and it costs $1,000.

This one — I called the guy, I said I’d like to use your pen, but I can’t have a gray thing with a big ‘S’ on it. He said, “Oh, paint it black.” I said, that’s nice. “And I can even paint the White House on it, sir, if you like — in gold, almost real gold.” Not bad. For $5, I get a much better pen than for $1,000, and I can hand them out, and actually they become hot as a pistol.

“All right. The thing is, the company that makes Sharpies told the Washington Post the conversation the president said he had with the head of Sharpie about those pens never happened — which means, if true, he made it up and interrupted a cabinet meeting to tell a story he fabricated or hallucinated about his favorite pen. Again, this is not the first time he’s been caught making stuff up. Here he is talking about Maryland Governor Wes Moore last summer,” Tur continued, showing another clip of Trump:

I met him at the Army-Navy game. They said, “Oh, there’s Governor Moore — he’d love to see you.” He came over to me. He hugged me. He shook my hand. You were there. He said, “Sir, you’re the greatest president in my lifetime.”

“Okay, so Wes Moore quickly came out and said that conversation was imaginary — it never happened,” she continued, concluding:

The month before that, the White House struggled to defend a story the president told about his uncle, John Trump. He had claimed Ted Kaczynski — a.k.a. the Unabomber — attended MIT, except John Trump died more than a decade before Kaczynski was identified, and Kaczynski never attended MIT.

He’s told that story multiple times in the past. I could go on, and I will for a moment longer. There’s the yarn he told about a former president recently telling him they wished they had Trump’s courage to go into Iran — all the living presidents have denied it.

There’s the one where he claimed Tucker Carlson reached out to profusely apologize amid a MAGA split over U.S. involvement in Israel’s strikes on Iran, which Carlson has flatly denied. There are also the countless stories about his friends — friends who are getting cheaper quote “fat shots” overseas, or friends who claim they’ve illegally witnessed illegal voting, or the boat company owners who complain about electric engines and then praise him for being smart enough to ask about electrocution and whether it’s better to be electrocuted by a boat battery or eaten by a shark in the ocean.

While a lot of this has always just been part of who Donald Trump is — a man who works the room, seeks attention, seeks applause — he’s now about to be 80 years old, and he’s launched a war that he does not seem to have a plan for.

Watch the clip above via MS NOW.

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