Donald Trump’s mental decline is evident in his inability to “read the room” during public appearances, according to the 80-year-old’s niece.
Mary Trump, a 61-year-old psychologist and frequent critic of her uncle, appeared on an episode of Fast Politics, hosted by Molly Jong-Fast, to discuss the worrying trend of the president blurting out whatever comes to mind while delivering speeches.
The pair cited an extraordinary moment on Tuesday when Trump went off script while giving a eulogy at Lindsey Graham’s funeral to needlessly state that “not everybody” liked the South Carolina senator.
Jong-Fast asked her guest whether the president has lost the ability to “not say the quiet part out loud” as he gets older.
“I think that Donald did have the ability to read the room better,” she replied. “He was good at pushing the envelope in ways that, and then recalibrate in real time.”
Mary Trump cited a time when her uncle praised the COVID-19 vaccine during a rally but was then booed by sections of his MAGA supporters. As a result, “we never heard him say that again,” Mary Trump said.
“Now we’re seeing that he does not have the ability to do that. What that means is he’s losing impulse control, and that’s a part of his overall cognitive decline,” she added.
Jong-Fast then mentioned Trump’s flop speech at the rearranged White House Correspondents’ Dinner on July 24, which the president failed to recover from after he “really bombed” while reading numerous unfunny jokes from a prepared speech.
One of the jokes that landed completely flat was a vile jab at CNN’s Kaitlan Collins when he compared her to transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, who became a MAGA target after her partnership with Bud Light in 2023.
“And he didn’t recalibrate. He just criticized the speech and kept going,” Jong-Fast said. “And people were pretty shocked.”
Trump replied: “When you’ve got this very old man who’s clearly not doing well in every category of being human—psychologically, emotionally, cognitively, physically—we shouldn’t be shocked when he stands up in front of a room full of people to whom he is deeply hostile, and and many of whom he’s endangered with his rhetoric, to read a speech he’s never read before and had absolutely no hand in writing, and have him go off script, indulge his grievances, and not be able to process the fact that it’s not working anymore.”
She added that Trump’s failure to realize he was bombing was also evident when the octogenarian president told the same “deeply unfunny” joke three times about running again in 2028, despite being constitutionally barred from doing so.
In response, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told the Daily Beast: “Mary Trump is a stone-old [sic] loser who doesn’t have a clue about anything.
“President Trump’s sharpness, unmatched energy, and historic accessibility stand in stark contrast to what we saw during the last administration when Democrats and the legacy media intentionally covered up Joe Biden’s serious mental and physical decline from the American people.”
