This isn’t surprising considering how Donald Trump is visibly losing it on camera every day, to one extent or the other. It was only a matter of time before some medical professional decided to go out on the ice and actually venture a hypothesis or a diagnosis. In this case it’s niece Mary Trump, who is a clinical psychologist who says that her uncle is indeed beginning to remind her of her grandfather. Mary Trump knows all the characters in this family well and if anybody can assess Donald’s deterioration, it is she. She’s known the man the past half century or so she’s been alive. This podcast lasts for 44 minutes, but there is a brief synopsis from the Daily Beast below if you lack time.
Mary explained that she is “a clinical psychologist, not a neuropsychologist,” but she said she knows enough “to assess certain kinds of neurological disorders.”
What she sees in her 79-year-old uncle, she said, is unmistakable.
“There are times I look at him and I see my grandfather,” Mary said. “I see that same look of confusion. I see that he does not always seem to be oriented to time and place. His short-term memory seems to be deteriorating.” Trump’s lifelong impulse-control problems, she added, are also “deteriorating as well.”
Mary described watching Fred Sr.’s decline beginning in the early 1990s—small lapses that escalated into larger ones. By the time the family began spending Easter at Mar-a-Lago to keep him out of public view, she said, he was no longer recognizing people, including her.
She recalled standing with him when “he stopped knowing who I was.” He politely asked Maryanne Trump Barry, his eldest daughter, “Isn’t she such a nice lady?”—pointing to his granddaughter—before turning to Maryanne again and asking, “And who are you?”
Wow. What if Trump is talking to Mark Carney or Emmanuel Macron or somebody like that and he suddenly goes blank and doesn’t know to whom he’s speaking? Or worse yet, to Vladimir Putin? Can you imagine the possible national security issues involved?
The “deer in the headlights” look he often had during those years, Mary said, is the same one she now sees in Donald Trump.
Donald Trump’s nephew Fred C. Trump III said last year that he fears a similar path for the president. “Like anyone else, I’ve seen his decline. But I see it in parallel with the way my grandfather’s decline was,” Fred, 61, told People. “If anyone wants to believe that dementia did not run in the Trump family, it’s just not true.”
There you have another relative saying it. Wow. Being a Trump is a bad bargain in a lot of respects but being in line for dementia? That is one sentence I personally hope is not pronounced on me. It has already been pronounced on Donald Trump, he just can’t be convinced of it. Now here is the part that interests me.
Trump, who has repeatedly mused about getting into heaven (or not), is battling with his mortality, Mary claimed. “He seems deeply uncertain. He seems to be reckoning with the possibility that he may not be immortal after all. And that, to me, suggests that his defense mechanisms around preventing himself and everybody else from knowing the reality about him are weakening.”
His style of communication, too, is an indicator of something dark, she added. “I see this look in his eyes sometimes, like he can’t believe he said this. He can’t believe he admitted this thing. He doesn’t know who he’s talking to. He doesn’t know where he is.”
“We’re seeing all of this deterioration happening kind of at the same time,” she warned.
Yes, we are, and it would be alarming in anybody but seeing it happen in a sitting U.S. president is something else altogether. We may soon be in the situation the Brits were in when Mad King George reigned but he didn’t have the atomic bomb.
Reagan’s final couple of years in the White House have been retroactively considered to have been in the early stages of either Alzheimer’s or dementia but, at least Reagan had a wife willing to spend time at his side (without being paid for it) and he had a number of trustworthy aides who could at least keep things on track (not to mention having a VP who had a clue about the workings of the government).
Drumpf, on the other hand, has nothing but scheming, self-serving rats who wouldn’t hesitate to put papers in front of him to sign, lying about what they would do (I can see Reichsmarshall Miller putting a paper ordering the immediate imprisonment of anyone with a Hispanic-sounding surname while telling Drumpf it’s a bill reauthorizing the production of a $100,000 bill with his picture on the front and Mar-a-Lago on the back with the first production run of 10,000 bills being auctioned off to loyal MAGAts for $1,000,000 each and half the proceeds going to a new foundation dedicated to rededicating every single government facility to Drumpf).
Wasn’t it just last month that he remarked about the nice man who accompanied Chuck Schumer to a meeting in the Oval Office? It was Hakeem Jeffries.
Applauds for Mary. She has said what a lot think. She also knows how, and where, to look for, and report on in plain English, the signs and symptoms of His Wanna-Bee Maga-Stee King Snapped In The Fossil Mould, increasingly evident extending cerebral decline. Well done, Mary!