Democrats are questioning President Donald Trump’s mental acuity after the president veered into a peculiar aside about the difference between two words that have the same pronunciation but different meanings.
Trump made the comment during a Mother’s Day news conference at the White House on Wednesday. Before going on a tangent, the president claimed drug trafficking in the United States was down.
“You see, drug traffic coming into our country is way down,” he told a crowd of military mothers. “And by sea, by sea, by ocean, by the water.”
“You know, a lot of people say, ‘What do you mean sea?’ Is it see, like vision? No, it’s sea, S-E-A,” the president said.
Many people took to social media to mock the president’s random comment about “sea” and “see.”
“By ‘a lot of people’ he means himself. Someone just explained this to him before the press conference started,” @boredallie wrote on Threads.
“When Trump said he loves the poorly educated, it made sense because there’s no one Trump loves more than himself and he proves how poorly educated he is every time he opens his gobhole,” @brettafarley added.
“Glad he cleared that up, said no one with a functioning frontal lobe,” @outsmartedeconomy said.
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California Governor Gavin Newsom, a strong critic of Trump, also poked fun at the president’s seemingly odd comment, while mocking the president’s “all caps” writing style.
“LITTLE D’S BRAIN IS DECLING RAPIDLY IN REAL TIME,” he wrote on social media. “TODAY HE WAS CONFUSED BY THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ‘SEE’ AND ‘SEA.’ VERY SAD!”
Earlier this week, Trump bragged about acing cognitive tests, explaining that one section asked him to identify a squirrel among a group of animals.
“Gavin Newscum is the worst governor in America, and he also may be the dumbest,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle told The Daily Beast in a statement. “President Trump’s sharpness, unmatched energy, and historic accessibility stand in stark contrast to what we saw during the last administration when Democrats and other lunatics like Newscum intentionally covered up Joe Biden’s serious mental and physical decline from the American people.”
Aside from the spelling lesson, experts say Trump is misrepresenting U.S. Customs and Border Patrol data.
“98.2% of Drugs coming into the U.S. by Ocean or Sea have STOPPED!” the president said in a Truth Social post last month.
But according to CBP data, that number is inaccurate.
In July 2025, CBP seized 223,923 pounds of cocaine, fentanyl, heroin, marijuana, and methamphetamines in open water or near coasts. That number fell to 4,463 pounds in November 2025, a difference of 98.2%.
But this year, drug seizures have been on the rise. CBP reports 28,500 pounds of drugs were seized in March.
None of this reflects the total amount of drugs being trafficked, only those seized. CBP did not include information such as the proportion of drugs intercepted or how the number of drugs that are not intercepted has changed.
Dessa Bergen-Cico, a professor of public health at Syracuse University who studies drug trafficking, told U.S. News & World Report there is not a huge difference between the quantities of drugs intercepted under the Biden and Trump administrations.
The drop in drug seizures does “not straightforwardly indicate reduced drug flow,” Bergen-Cico said. “Rather, they reflect a jurisdictional and operational transition in which traditional CBP maritime interdiction has been partially displaced by U.S. military and Coast Guard operations.”
