Video circulating online showing Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan clutching President Donald Trump’s arm to guide him during their Tuesday meeting in Ankara is drawing mockery and reviving questions about who is steering whom.
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The clip, flagged by independent journalist Aaron Rupar, showed Erdogan clutching “a wandering Trump’s arm to guide him around” as the two leaders moved through the room at the NATO summit hosted by Turkey.
The footage landed with particular sting given what Trump had just said about his host. Sitting beside Erdogan, Trump lavished praise on the Turkish leader as a paragon of strength, telling reporters that “sometimes you get along with the toughest people like him, and sometimes you don’t get along with the weakest, most pathetic people.”
“You just don’t get along,” Trump added. “Maybe you don’t respect them.”
The Turkish strongman Trump had just saluted as one of the toughest people alive was, moments later, physically maneuvering him across the room, leading onlookers to mock the image.
“Trump’s dementia is out of control,” X user Mykhaïlo Golub wrote to his 56,000 followers.
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“Today in ‘if this was Biden,'” wrote fellow X user shayne571.
The optics fed directly into a debate that has shadowed Trump’s second term. In April, 36 physicians from Harvard, Tufts, Columbia and George Washington University filed a statement into the Congressional Record warning of the 80-year-old president’s “rapidly worsening, reality-untethered, increasingly dangerous decline” and calling him “mentally unfit” to serve.
An April Economist/YouGov poll found 48 percent of Americans believe Trump is suffering modest or significant cognitive decline.
Trump’s warm words for Erdogan fit a long-running pattern of admiration for authoritarian leaders. Erdogan has ruled Turkey since 2003, first as prime minister and, since 2014, as president. The Associated Press reported that opposition parties and human rights groups accuse him of undermining democracy and curbing freedom of expression, citing prosecutions of journalists, activists and opposition politicians.
Trump is the first sitting U.S. president to visit Turkey since Barack Obama in 2015.
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Erdogan clutches a wandering Trump’s arm to guide him around pic.twitter.com/MnP2JxdVA1
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 7, 2026
