Donald Trump ‘On Drugs, Whether We Want To Face It Or Not’ Says ‘Apprentice’ Staffer After Sniff-Filled Speech
Donald Trump on Wednesday morning delivered a nationally televised address in which he appeared to back away from an armed conflict with Iran, less than 24 hours after an Iranian missile attack on U.S. troops stationed in Iraq. But the speech came under criticism for Trump’s delivery in which he made repeated sniffing sounds and mispronounced several words, as recounted by the news site Raw Story.
His mannerisms during the speech provoked a reaction from a former staff member on Trump’s long-running reality TV program The Apprentice. That ex-staffer, Noel Casler, took to Twitter, reiterating his previous allegation that his former boss is addicted to stimulant drugs.
“Trump is on drugs, whether we want to face it or not,” Casler wrote. “He is an Adderall addict and has been addicted to speed for decades.”
The former Apprentice staffer added that Trump’s alleged drug addiction was “NO secret in TV Production.”
Adderall is a drug made from a combination of amphetamines that is normally prescribed for treatment of Hyperactive Attention Deficit Disorder, but can also be used without proper authorization recreationally as a stimulant.
Casler also referred in his tweet to Trump’s repeated sniffing sounds, saying that he takes “U.K. Sudafed…to control those sniffles and for the buzz.”
In October, photographs surfaced online showing Trump in his Trump Tower office with multiple boxes of the United Kingdom version of the decongestant Sudafed clearly visible in his open desk drawer.
At the time, Casler claimed that Trump “ate U.K. Sudafed like candy” during tapings of The Apprentice.
“Tolerited” pic.twitter.com/2oDBNibR6Y
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 8, 2020
Trump, as seen in the video above, also audibly stumbled over the word “tolerated” in his Wednesday Iran speech. That video appears consistent with previous instances during Trump’s speeches in which he has displayed trouble pronouncing common English words.
In August, video showed Trump failing to correctly pronounce or slurring familiar words such as “absurd,” “armed forces,” “applicable,” and “obstacles.”
Trump’s repeated instances of slurring and stumbling over easy-to-pronounce words has been the subject of controversy for much of his term in office. In 2018, The Atlantic magazine published a report by medical journalist James Hamblin titled “Is Something Neurologically Wrong With Donald Trump?”
In the article, Hamblin said that Trump’s slurring of words could result from a symptom as harmless as “dry mouth,” but could also be the alarming result of an “acute stroke.”
Hamblin called for creation of a new federal system which would be used to evaluate the cognitive and neurological health of U.S. presidents.
Without such a system, Hamblin wrote, a president could be “hallucinating, threatening to launch a nuclear attack based on intelligence he had just obtained from David Bowie,” but the medical community would be helpless to do anything about it, except “speculate from afar” on that president’s neurological condition.
