Democrats are challenging President Donald Trump’s mental sharpness after he drifted into a curious aside about the distinction between two words that share the same pronunciation yet hold different meanings.
He uttered the remark during a Mother’s Day press conference at the White House on Wednesday. Before the tangent, the president claimed that drug trafficking in the United States had declined.
“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.
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Many people took to social media to mock the president’s offhand remark about “sea” and “see.”
“When he says ‘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 makes sense because there’s no one Trump loves more than himself, and he proves his alleged ignorance every time he speaks,” added @brettafarley.
“Glad he cleared that up; that’s not something anyone with a functioning frontal lobe would say,” commented @outsmartedeconomy.
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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 CBP data indicate that the figure is not accurate.
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 seizures have risen again, with CBP reporting 28,500 pounds of drugs seized in March.
None of these figures reflect the overall quantity of drugs trafficked; they cover only what has been seized. CBP did not provide data on the share intercepted or on how non-intercepted quantities have shifted.
Dessa Bergen-Cico, a public health professor at Syracuse University who researches drug trafficking, told U.S. News & World Report that there isn’t a large disparity in the amounts intercepted under the Biden and Trump administrations.
She cautioned that the decline in seizures does not necessarily signal a reduced drug flow; rather, it signals a shift in how operations are conducted, with traditional CBP maritime interdiction partially supplanted by U.S. military and Coast Guard efforts.
