Donald Trump’s niece has warned that his apparent mental decline during his scandal-ridden second stint in the White House is setting off his most dangerous traits.
“It goes without saying that Donald is a terrible leader, but one of the things that makes him a dangerous one is his incredible insecurity,” Mary Trump, daughter of the president’s late brother Fred Trump Jr., said in a video uploaded to her YouTube channel Monday.
“What seems to be happening is that he’s becoming more and more insecure over time,” she went on. “It seems the more he gets of what he thinks he wants—money, power, chaos—the more insecure and afraid he becomes.”
As evidence, she pointed to the president’s renaming of both the Kennedy Center and the Institute of Peace earlier this month.
“Perhaps renaming the Institute of Peace after himself will trick the Nobel committee into thinking that Donald actually cares about peace, which he does not,” she added, referring to the president’s bitter disappointment at being passed over for perhaps the most coveted prize on the planet earlier this year.
Mary Trump is far from alone in raising concerns over the state of the aging president’s mental health since he assumed office for the second time in January.
Amid a growing raft of highly public flubs—including routinely confusing the names of countries, opponents, and foreign leaders; vicious and unprovoked verbal attacks against journalists; falling asleep during high-profile meetings; repetitive and at times incoherent speech—fears continue to mount that the 79-year-old leader is simply not up to the job.
Clinical psychologists have previously shared with the Daily Beast how these and other gaffes may very well represent “clinical signs of dementia,” which have in turn exacerbated what’s perceived as an underlying malignant personality disorder.
“Whatever personality issues or problems [people with dementia] have begin to deteriorate and they become even more crude, disorganized, aggressive, confused versions of that personality disorder,” Dr. John Gartner, a former professor of psychology at Johns Hopkins University, told The Daily Beast Podcast in November.
Mary Trump is of much the same view, having said she recognizes the same symptoms in the president as those suffered by his late father, Fred Trump Sr., toward the end of his life.
“There are times I look at him and I see my grandfather,” she 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,” she went on, adding that the president’s long-criticized difficulty with impulse control seems to be “deteriorating as well.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment on this story.
