A leading Gen Z pundit ripped into Donald Trump over his government shutdown plot, playing into reports of the 79-year-old president’s alleged cognitive decline.
Jack Cocchiarella, whose eponymous YouTube show has 1.25 million subscribers, tore into the president on Thursday night as the shutdown reached the end of its second full day.
Appearing on CNN, he accused Trump of using the shutdown as an opportunity “to go out and golf, to, I guess, maybe remodel some more parts of the White House—he just doesn’t seem interested in negotiating.”
The 23-year-old YouTuber, who once claimed to have been suspended from Trump’s social media platform Truth Social, didn’t hold back when asked by host Laura Coates about his thoughts on the shutdown, triggered after the administration failed to get its spending plans through Congress.
“Trump to me is kind of this dementia-addled nursing home patient in the White House right now,” Cocchiarella began. “He’s leaning on [budget director Russell] Vought, he’s leaning on [Deputy Chief of Staff] Stephen Miller because he doesn’t want to get the job done.”
Trump has displayed troubling signs of cognitive decline, fueling concerns about his fitness for the presidency. For example, on Monday, during a joint White House press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump incorrectly remembered when his first presidential term began.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
Cocchiarella said Trump was not interested in ending the shutdown. “He’s taking pleasure in what Russ Vought said would be the traumatizing of federal workers. That was their goal coming into this administration,” Cocchiarella said.
“And so it seems like that’s all they want to do. And I don’t know how that gets any Democrat who actually cares about people who are going to see their premiums double, triple, come to the table. And why would you? It’s an administration that doesn’t want to engage.”
The shutdown began on Oct. 1 after Republican spending proposals failed to secure secure the 60 votes needed to get through the Senate and the White House rejected Democrat demands for increased spending on health care. With no government funding deal in place, hundreds of thousands of federal employees deemed nonessential by the White House were told they would work without pay.
The shutdown will continue until Congress reaches a deal on a funding bill. The last shutdown, during Trump’s first term in 2018, lasted for 35 days—the longest in U.S. history.
Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, has been directed by Trump to oversee possible federal shutdown layoffs.
“I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity,” Trump said on Truth Social on Thursday.
Trump also mentioned Vought’s links to Project 2025, a 900-page initiative created by the far-right Heritage Foundation that seeks to expand the powers of the president, purge federal civil servants deemed part of the “deep state” in favor of conservative loyalists, and dismantle the Department of Education and other federal agencies.
“I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent,” Trump added.