In recent months, there has been no shortage of alarms raised over President Donald Trump’s physical and mental health, with polls showing the majority of Americans doubt his “stamina and sharpness” to lead. On Friday, one of his family members discussed his “undiagnosed condition,” and delved into the thing he “fears most.”
This is according to Trump’s niece, psychologist Mary L. Trump, in conversation with political operative Sidney Blumenthal, the latter of whom wondered of the president “has always been crazy. We know he’s mad, but is the deterioration accelerating, and how fast?”
“I think that’s a really good and important point to underscore,” said Mary Trump. “This isn’t a different guy. This isn’t somebody who’s suddenly becoming a worse person or a more unhinged person. You see some of Donald’s former allies trying to distance themselves from him by saying, ‘He’s not the guy I knew.’ Yes, he is. He’s been exactly the same person for decades. What we’re seeing now is the perfect storm of cognitive, psychological, and physical decline simply revealing who he is in a way that’s making it more obvious for people who either haven’t been paying attention or, for their own reasons, wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt and pretend he was something he wasn’t. So yes, the decline is worsening, and that’s simply what happens.”
Here she raised the issue of “his psychiatric disorders,” asserting that “these are longstanding, untreated, undiagnosed conditions,” and explaining, “When you don’t treat an illness, it worsens over time. The psychological deterioration is also being accelerated by the combination of cognitive and physical decline. He’s 80 years old, and he’s not healthy. Alzheimer’s runs in my family. My grandfather had Alzheimer’s, and his symptoms began worsening in his early eighties. He was also physically healthier than Donald is.”
Blumenthal noted that, “Donald loves strongmen, and he loves to be seen as a strongman himself. He loves to cozy up to Vladimir Putin and stand beside Xi Jinping. He talked endlessly about the love letters he received from Kim Jong Un. Now, however, he’s encountered actual strongmen who are defeating him. This must be a tremendous shock to him.” This prompted Mary Trump to emphasize her president uncle’s frailty, explaining how it contributes to his greatest fear.
“I don’t know that he can grapple with it on a conscious level, which is exactly why he’s becoming increasingly desperate,” she explained. “He’s trying to do several things simultaneously: change the subject, change the narrative, and somehow manufacture a win. What I find fascinating is that, because of the ways in which he admires and makes himself subservient to so-called strongmen, he reveals just how weak he actually is. It reminds me of one of the fundamental truths about Donald that people need to understand.”
“The thing he fears most is humiliation,” she continued. “And right now, he’s being humiliated on a daily basis by the consequences of the very things he chose to do, from the ridiculous, like the reflecting pool, to something as catastrophic as the war with Iran. Deep down, he is now, just as he has always been, a terrified little boy. Everything he does is driven by fear and by a desperate need to avoid humiliation.”
This, says Mary Trump, has made the president an easy target for manipulation. As she explained, those in his orbit “understand his narcissism and his profound insecurities. He’ll approve almost anything as long as he’s getting what he wants in return. Right now, what he wants most is adulation, compliments, power, and money. Mostly money, but the rest matters to him too.”