'Literally Sleepwalking': White House Insider Leak Expose Donald Trump's Alleged Severe Cognitive Decline

Donald Trump is facing fresh allegations of 'physical and cognitive decline' inside the White House, with current advisers reportedly warning he is 'extremely distracted' from the economy just months before the US midterm elections, according to CNN.

Alyssa Farah Griffin, who served as Trump's White House strategic communications director during his first term, said that multiple senior advisers are alarmed by the president's behaviour and inability to stay focused on issues that voters consistently rank as their top concern.

Griffin, who remains in contact with Trump-world insiders, described a West Wing where aides are increasingly desperate for the president to concentrate on the cost-of-living crisis, only to watch him veer off-script into side fights and personal grievances.

'The president continues to seem extremely distracted,' she told the network. 'White House advisers I talk to many of them they simply want him to focus on the economy, yet he will not do that.'

The CNN reports that several of Trump's own aides now privately talk about his 'physical and cognitive decline,' and say they are speaking out because they fear he is 'almost literally sleepwalking into a midterm disaster.'

White House Aides Say Donald Trump Won't Stay on the Economy

Trump won his second term after persuading enough voters that, whatever misgivings they had about his conduct, he would prioritise the economy and ease the squeeze on household budgets.

Polling has since shown that the economy and cost of living remain the dominant concerns for American voters, and that many of those who backed him again did so on exactly that basis.

Yet Griffin says those hopes inside the West Wing are colliding with the reality of Trump's day‑to‑day conduct.

'For some reason, he wants to talk about virtually everything but the economy and lowering the cost of living,' she said. In her view, that refusal to engage directly with voters' financial anxieties is already reshaping the political map. 'The midterms don't look great for Republicans,' she warned, adding that she believes 'it's pretty much a foregone conclusion that the House is going to flip.'

Her pessimism is backed by grim polling. A survey released the same day found Trump's approval rating has slumped to 34 per cent, the lowest level recorded by the network since the immediate aftermath of the 6 January 2021 Capitol riot at the end of his first term. According to the report, that number has been dragged down by an 18‑month run of scandals, controversies and headline‑grabbing blunders.

The most damaging factor, however, appears to be the very subject Trump's advisers want him to stick to. Roughly two‑thirds of respondents in the poll said the president's policies had 'worsened economic conditions in the country', a brutal indictment for a leader who once styled himself as a businessman president uniquely capable of managing prosperity.

Donald Trump Dismisses 'Affordability' as a Democratic Hoax

Compounding that political problem is Trump's public insistence that the affordability crisis plaguing many households is not real, or at least not his fault. While Americans report feeling squeezed at the supermarket checkout and petrol pump, the president has taken to mocking the language his critics use to describe their plight.

'It was a word, you know, made up by the Democrats: affordability,' Trump told supporters at a rally earlier this month. 'They said, affordability. I said, I've been here one day. Don't worry, I'll take care of it. And we're taking care of it.'

The claim was not a one‑off riff. In December, he branded affordability 'the greatest con job,' insisting that Democrats were weaponising the term to pin high prices on his administration. Later the same month, he escalated the line, complaining: 'They use the word 'affordability,' and that's their only word. They say, 'Affordability,' and everyone says, 'Oh, that must mean Trump has high prices.' No, our prices are coming down tremendously. They have a new word. They always have a hoax. The new word is affordability.'

If that message is meant to reassure anxious families, the data suggest it is not working. NBC News tracking figures, show grocery prices either rising or staying stubbornly high through Trump's second term. Petrol costs have surged since he launched war with Iran, hitting an increase of more than 30 per cent by late July. Together with wider economic pressures, those spikes have pushed US consumer sentiment to what NBC describes as an all‑time low.

Inside the White House, the fear, according to Griffin's sources, is that Trump either cannot or will not absorb this reality, and that his supposed cognitive decline is leaving him detached from the voters who once took a chance on him to steady their finances.

The president's staff have not publicly addressed the allegations of distraction or decline, and there has been no official medical assessment released to support or rebut them, so for now much rests on the word of former and unnamed aides rather than hard documentation.

Nothing about Trump's health or inner state has been independently confirmed, and until it is, these characterisations, however vivid, will have to be treated with a degree of caution, even as the political consequences of his choices show up clearly in the numbers.