Trump's Big Memory Lapse Sets Off 'Dementia Don' Claims From Critics

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When things are going well for Donald Trump, they're thanks to his leadership. When things are going badly for Donald Trump, they seem to be the fault of Joe Biden. Trump seems to have a fixation on Biden; per Time, "Biden" was one of the Trump administration's top five used words in Trump's first 100 days in office during his second term. One of Trump's latest Biden references was on Truth Social, but it has people questioning not Biden's legacy, but Trump's memory. Trump posted, "THE BIDEN FBI PLACED 274 AGENTS INTO THE CROWD ON JANUARY 6. If this is so, which it is, a lot of very good people will be owed big apologies." There's a couple of things in that short statement that deserve a deeper look, least of which is the fact that on January 6, 2021, Trump was very much in office.

People on social media are using the occasion to revive questions about Trump's mental acuity; Trump's gotten the nickname "Dementia Don" for similar lapses in memory. One person said on X, "Trump was POTUS on Jan 6, 2021, and had been for 4 years. Yet he says 'Biden FBI.' Don't give him a pass for this. His mind is long gone. He can't keep it together. His thoughts, like his words[,] are broken fragments and confusion." Others agreed that Trump was showing his age with that post.

One critic wrote, "He plays fast and loose with time frames so he can blame anyone but himself." And another person quipped, "The emperor not only has no clothes he can't remember where he put them."

Some people were tagging Jake Tapper, CNN reporter and host, who wrote the book "Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again." They're wondering why Tapper isn't talking more about Donald Trump's seeming slips the way he went after Joe Biden. Other people think that it isn't a sign of Trump's memory going, but instead, something intentional: "it's a flat out lie, he knows it, we all know it. He does it because he thinks if he repeats it enough, the masses will believe it" (via X).

Trump's reference to 274 FBI agents in the crowd on January 6 seems to be claiming that it was FBI agents, not Trump supporters, who instigated the riot. Kash Patel, Trump's current FBI director, has confirmed that the agents were sent in after the Capitol had been broken into. Trump has made this claim before, but this appears to be the first time that he blames it on Biden's FBI.

This latest slip or intentional lie by Trump is hardly the first time that he's been taken to task over January 6. Trump was called out over January 6 in part for not being able to tell his supporters that he'd lost the 2020 election. Trump pardoned all those convicted of offenses on January 6 after he began his second administration in 2025. One woman refused the pardon as she felt that what she and others had done on the day wasn't right.