Trump Projects His Dark Obsession With Alzheimer's Onto Biden
The band of MAGA crazies who have been orbiting Trump since 2016— some much earlier— are, much to the chagrin of the serious political operatives running his campaign, back. Yes, all the criminal, crackpots and conspiracy theorists are back! Yesterday Axios noted that characters like Kremlin agent Paul Manafort, sex predator Corey Lewandowski, Proud Boys-adjacent nihilist Roger Stone, walking freak show Christina Bobb, even neo-Nazi sociopath Laura Loomer are all circling. Trump, likely, finds them amusing. His campaign managers certainly don’t.
The first time I ever saw Trump I think I was 10 and he was 13, something like that. I was hanging out with my girlfriend and her family on their stoop on Avenue Z in Brooklyn. The future Orange Menace was walking with his father Fred to their office which was right around there and although no one knew them, they had a dark aura, a real evil vibe. All noise stopped until they had passed; even the bird has stopped chirping. One of the adults gave them the evil eye and cursed. Too bad no one ran inside for a cleaver… ah, woulda, coulda.
This was long before Fred Trump was diagnosed with the alzheimer’s that eventually killed him. He was still training his son in the way of greed, avarice and his me-against-the-world outlook. This is long before Trump adopted Roy Cohn as a surrogate father/mentor, though not that long before young Trump was being brought to court for racial discrimination, his first heady run in with the law and the media.
Yesterday, Michael Kranish examined the relationship between Fred Trump’s descent into senility, The Donald’s obsessive fear that he’s already on that spiral and Trump’s ugly attacks on Biden’s age and mental fitness.
In 1997, told told Playboy “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’s crooked doctors, Ronny Jackson and Bruce Aronwald have vaguely— but without details— back up his claims to mental competence, both obviously lying.
“Trump’s long fixation on mental fitness,” wrote Kranish, “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. ‘Donald is no doubt fearful of Alzheimer’s,’ said a former senior executive at the Trump Organization, who worked for years with Trump and saw him interact with Fred Trump Sr., and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a confidential relationship. ‘He’s not going to talk about and not going to admit to it. But it’s relevant because every day he is hitting Biden with whether or not he is capable mentally of doing the job.’”
In October 1991, around the time Fred Trump Sr. turned 86 years old, he visited his doctor, C. Ronald MacKenzie. In a report about that visit, the physician wrote that he had “significant memory impairment” with “early signs of dementia” and “obvious memory decline in recent years,” according to records disclosed in the court case.
Months later, a second doctor wrote in a neuropsychological evaluation that Fred Trump Sr. “did not know his birth date, was unsure of his age, and turned to his son [Robert] for help in responding to questions.” The exam by Rajendra Jutagir found that Fred Trump Sr.’s cognitive ability was below the 15th percentile for a person in his age group. He could only recall three of the previous nine U.S. presidents and could not draw the hands of a clock to show the time.
Those detailed medical reports, later entered into court filings, paint an early picture of what would be a long decline for Fred Trump Sr.— one that his son claimed not to notice for years.
“Do you recall your father suffering from any memory lapses in 1991?” an attorney asked Trump in a deposition conducted in 2000.
“No,” Trump responded.
“Do you recall him being diagnosed as having senile dementia in 1991?” the attorney said.
“No, I don’t,” Trump said in the deposition. To the contrary, Trump said that his father was “very, very sharp.”
Mary Trump said those claims were contradicted by other family members. Robert Trump, Donald’s younger brother, said that their father was in “notable decline” by 1990, as recounted by Mary Trump in a lawsuit over the will. Trump’s sister, Maryanne Barry, later was secretly recorded by Mary Trump as saying that “it was basically taking the whole estate and giving it to Donald” at a time when “Dad was in dementia.”
Regardless, by the mid-’90s even Donald Trump was publicly acknowledging the truth: that his father’s dementia was rapidly advancing.
A few years after his father’s diagnosis, Trump was driving down Fifth Avenue with his father when they passed by the Empire State Building, the iconic 102-story office tower, a landmark known well by both men. As Trump later recalled to the New York Times, his father said, “That’s a tall building, isn’t it? How many apartments are in that building?” Trump thought his father was “kidding” but eventually realized this was a sign of Alzheimer’s, he told the newspaper.
Around the same time, Trump held the family gathering at Mar-a-Lago, where Mary Trump says Fred Trump Sr. did not recognize her or two of his children, Robert and Maryanne. After the incident in which Fred Trump Sr. seemed to ask permission to get a new Cadillac, Robert said it would be taken care of, but “Donald just walked away, like, ‘Oh, God, get him away from me. He’s so annoying.’ He had no patience, none whatsoever,” recalled Mary Trump, who has more recently become an outspoken political opponent of her uncle, including writing a book that called him “the world’s most dangerous man.”
…Trump has long emphasized his belief in the importance of genetics. He has said he is a “super genius” because of his “great genes.”
Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, said such beliefs are noteworthy. “If intelligence is a genetically inherited state” as Trump believes, she said, “then something like dementia, Alzheimer’s, which do have very strong genetic components, is more of a concern to somebody who is directly related to Fred Trump Sr. as Donald is. I’m not saying he has dementia, but you can’t say the one thing and not also acknowledge the other.”
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.
Trump is absolutely going down the road to full-bore dementia. Yesterday, Dan Pfeiffer— in a post called Is Trump Cracking Under the Pressure of the Election?— urged everyone to play this clip of Trump’s rally last Saturday for everyone they know since it’s virtually impossible to view it and not realize Trump is severely mentally impaired and unfit for any kind of executive job:
“Trump,” he wrote, “made it through the Republican primary largely unscathed. He never had to get on a debate stage or adopt a position to outflank a rival. Primaries are usually messy, and the winners often emerge battered, bruised, and broken. Trump floated above the process, and his rivals' impotence made him look strong by comparison. The dynamic was interesting. Trump used his MAGA schtick to lock down his base without catching the attention of the broader electorate. He mostly communicated through MAGA-friendly media; so even when he made a mistake, it never traveled outside the MAGA media bubble… [S]ince the General Election kicked off almost two weeks ago, Trump has returned to his old, chaotic, self-destructive ways. After securing the delegates as the presumptive nominee, Trump has made critical errors daily. He can’t seem to stop saying insane, deeply politically damaging stuff. In the last two weeks, Trump has said:
He concluded, correctly, as anyone can see, that “Trump is cracking under the intense scrutiny of the General Election.”
