As one listens to Trump’s speeches, it’s hard not to hear the disjointed sentences that have no ending, the rants about “Fascists, Communists, radical leftists, Socialists,” and other targets of his rage, the non sequiturs, the slurred and meaningless words.
He and his allies frequently accuse President Biden of senility. Could Trump be projecting his own fears?
The Washington Post reported that Donald’s father suffered from dementia:
Donald Trump invited his extended family to Mar-a-Lago in the mid-1990s. As the clan gathered at the palatial Florida estate, though, his father was badly struggling, according to Mary L. Trump, Donald’s niece.
Fred Trump Sr., the pugnacious developer then in his late 80s, didn’t recognize two of his children at the party, recalled Mary L. Trump, who attended the gathering. And when he did recognize Donald, the family patriarch approached his son with a picture of a Cadillac that he wanted to buy — as if he needed his son’s permission.
The incident, Mary L. Trump said, left Donald Trump visibly upset at his father’s descent into dementia, which medical records show had been diagnosed several years earlier. Trump reflected his anguish in an interview around that time, with Playboy in 1997 reporting that seeing his father “addled with Alzheimer’s” had left him wondering “out loud about the senselessness of life.”
“Turning 50 does make you think about mortality, or immortality, or whatever,” Trump, who had recently reached that milestone, told the magazine. “It does hit you.”
Today, as the 77-year-old Trump seeks to return to the White House, he is still focused on the ravages of dementia — but this time he is using the condition as a political weapon, alleging without medical proof that President Biden, 81, is “cognitively impaired.” Those attacks follow a long pattern for the former president, who for years has bashed enemies as mentally frail while boasting in public about “acing” the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a basic test that flags signs of early dementia.
Trump regularly claims to have passed the test twice, but through a spokesman, his campaign declined to release his test results or to specify when he most recently took it. Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Tex.), the former White House physician, said in an interview this month that he administered it to Trump once, in January 2018.
Trump in November released a three-paragraph letter in which Bruce Aronwald, a doctor of osteopathy, said that Trump’s health was excellent and that “cognitive exams were exceptional” but provided no details. Aronwald did not respond to a request for comment.
Ziad Nasreddine, the neurologist who created the test, said in an interview that if an individual in their 70s had not taken the Montreal test since 2018, the results would not be valid to cite today.
Trump’s long fixation on mental fitness followed years of watching his father’s worsening dementia — a formative period that some associates said has been a defining and little-mentioned factor in his life, and which left him with an abiding concern that he might someday inherit the condition. While much remains unknown about Alzheimer’s, experts say there is an increased risk of inheriting a gene associated with the disease from a parent…
Trump’s father’s condition also drove a wedge into his family, which fell into years of lawsuits that alleged in part that Donald Trump sought to take advantage of his father’s dementia to wrest control of the family estate — litigation that introduced reams of medical records detailing Fred Trump Sr.’s condition.
The full story of Trump’s father’s illness, and the family turmoil it sparked, casts new light on his views of an issue that’s become central to the presidential campaign, with pollsters finding a majority of voters have concerns about the mental fitness of both Trump and Biden. Those concerns have sharpened as both candidates have had lapses on the trail, with Biden mixing up the names of the leaders of Mexico and Egypt and Trump confusing former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley with former speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and warning that the United States could face “World War II” under Biden…
In the early 1970s, as Donald took a leading role in the firm, Fred Trump Sr. told the New York Times that “Donald is the smartest person I know.”
By 1990, though, the claims of Trump’s business genius were being questioned as he fell into desperate financial condition. He eventually filed six corporate bankruptcies, and he faced the prospect of personal bankruptcy as his first wife, Ivana, sought $1 billion in a divorce settlement. His high-profile casinos in Atlantic City were badly faltering.
That’s when Trump sought to change his father’s will.
Trump arranged for a lawyer to write an amendment called a codicil giving him control over the estate and to protect his inheritance from creditors. He then had two of his father’s most trusted associates deliver it to Fred Trump Sr. as if it were a formality. But Trump’s mother, Mary MacLeod Trump, forbade Trump’s father from signing it immediately. Trump’s sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, later said in a deposition that her father didn’t like how the effort to change the will was being done “behind his back…”
Experts said much remains unknown about how people get Alzheimer’s, but research has shown that genetics may play a role.
In a 2020 article about the health of Biden and Trump in the journal Active Aging, the authors wrote that “Trump does face an elevated familial risk of late onset Alzheimer’s disease (AD) as this was a major contributor to his father’s death.” S. Jay Olshansky, the article’s lead author and professor of public health at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said that “the genetic risk hasn’t changed” and that he is awaiting a new medical report from Trump to update the analysis.
[Dr. Ronny] Jackson said he had never discussed genetic Alzheimer’s risks with the former president but said he would have told him “it’s nothing he should be worried about.” (A White House spokesman, Andrew Bates, told The Post via email that neither of Biden’s parents had dementia.)
