Mary Trump did not hesitate when asked why she believes her uncle, President Donald Trump, is in cognitive decline.
In a searing interview on The Daily Beast Podcast, the daughter of Donald Trump’s late older brother, Fred Trump Jr., laid out the clearest case she’s ever made that the president is exhibiting the same signs she once saw in his father, Fred Trump Sr., who had Alzheimer’s “for a very, very long time.”
The elder Trump was diagnosed with “mild senile dementia” in 1991. His physician cited symptoms of “obvious memory decline in recent years” and “significant memory impairment.” He was later hospitalized with pneumonia and died at age 93 on June 25, 1999.
The conversation began when the Daily Beast’s Chief Operating Officer Joanna Coles pressed Mary on the family history of dementia—Mary’s grandfather and grandmother both had it. 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?”
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.”
Coles asked how Donald Trump handled his father’s illness. “He was despicable,” Mary said. “He treated my grandfather like he was an annoyance. He wanted nothing to do with him.” Even though her grandfather “never forgot Donald,” she said, her uncle “would leave the room. He would ignore him. He had no use for him whatsoever.”
Mary argued that what she sees in the president today mirrors her grandfather’s unraveling: a growing obsession with money, deepening insecurity, and what she described as a collapsing ability to uphold the persona he has projected his entire life.
“This increasing obsession with wealth… it’s pathological,” she said. The president’s “grasping nature,” his “desperate need to surround himself with these excessively wealthy people,” and the frantic pace of accumulation all feel familiar to her, she said, noting Trump bolstering his coffers with crypto money and aligning himself with mega-wealthy donors like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, for example.
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.
Approached for comment on the various claims made by Mary about Trump’s mental acuity, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung told the Daily Beast: “Mary Trump is a stone-cold loser who doesn’t have a clue about anything.”
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