US President Donald Trump made two verbal slips while speaking alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at a NATO summit on Wednesday, prompting fresh public commentary about his health and cognitive state. The moment matters because such gaffes by an 80-year-old sitting president fuel an already politically charged debate over his fitness for office, with critics seizing on the errors as evidence of decline.

In the first slip, Trump referred to Iran as "the Islamic Republic of Japan" while discussing America's missile-defence capabilities, then carried on without pause. In the second, while gesturing towards Zelensky, he twice invited a reporter to put a question to "President Putin" rather than the Ukrainian leader, before appearing to notice his error and making light of it, noting he was due to speak with Putin later that day. A pro-Ukraine account run by LSE-affiliated academic Michael MacKay called Trump's "dementia" "profound", and Illinois governor JB Pritzker had recently voiced similar claims on CNN, though no medical basis for these assertions is provided.