President Donald Trump gave a speech Thursday outside the White House, in which he announced the establishment of the United States Space Command, claiming that “it’s going to be a whole different ballgame” for “those who wish to harm” the country via outer space, according to a CNN report.
But Trump appeared to deliver the Space Command introductory speech in a sluggish, halting manner which saw him taking long pauses as he seemed to struggle to recall such basic facts as the year of his own inauguration, leading Vox.com reporter Aaron Rupar to observe via his Twitter account that “Trump is speaking very deliberately and seems to be having a hard time today.”
Rupar later assembled a video contrasting excerpts from the Thursday speech with a clip of Trump’s campaign launch announcement speech in Trump Tower — this speech was delivered slightly more than four years ago, on June 16, 2015, as CNN reported. In the earlier speech, Trump appears to speak quickly and energetically, in particular when boasting about his own claimed wealth, declaring, “I’m really rich!”
The new video showing an apparent decline in Trump’s public speech patterns comes about eight days after another video assembled by Rupar showed the president in two public events that day slurring and stumbling over common words and phrases such as “armed forces” and “applicable,” as The Inquisitr reported.
Compare and contrast: Trump speaking during his June 2015 campaign launch speech vs. Trump speaking today pic.twitter.com/TTG5EArhJZ
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 29, 2019
Commenters on the video expressed alarm at what many felt was an evident decline in Trump’s neurological condition over the past four years.
“I’m no physician, but Trump is slurring like he has a transient ischemic accident or a stroke,” remarked one Twitter commenter.
“He’s on some serious meds,” replied another Twitter user.
The speculation about Trump being on “meds” may have some basis in fact. As The Inquisitr reported, journalist Kurt Eichenwald revealed last year that while working for Newsweek , he uncovered medical records showing that Trump used a prescription drug to treat an unspecified “metabolic imbalance.” But Newsweek refused to publish Eichenwald’s report on the findings, he said.
That drug was supposedly Diethylpropion, which is known by the brand name Tenuate. The drug is intended for use over only short time periods measuring months or weeks, but Trump took the drug over eight years, according to Eichwenald’s previously unpublished Newsweek article, which the reporter himself posted online via the archival document site Scribd .
The Space Command introduced by Trump on Thursday is not the same as the “Space Force” proposed by Trump as a sixth branch of the U.S. Armed Forces, after the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard. But the Space Command is not new, despite Trump’s announcement. According to the Federation of American Scientists , the U.S. Space Command was established in 1985 under President Ronald Reagan.
