Former President Donald Trump recently invited his extended family to Mar-a-Lago in the mid-1990s. It has been noted that as the clan gathered at the palatial Florida estate, though, his father was struggling, according to Mary L. Trump, Donald’s niece via MSN.
Mary L. Trump, an attendee, claimed that Fred Trump Sr., the abrasive developer who was in his late 80s at the time, failed to identify two of his children present at the celebration. And as soon as he realized who Donald was, the father of the family came up to him holding a picture of a Cadillac he wanted to purchase, acting as though he required his consent.
According to Mary L. Trump, the event caused Donald Trump to become openly distraught at his father’s cognitive decline—which, according to medical documents, had been identified several years before. During that period, Trump expressed his distress in an interview; Playboy (1997, reported) that he had wondered “out loud about the senselessness of life” after witnessing his father “addled with Alzheimer’s.”
“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.”
As the 77-year-old Trump is eyeing to return to the White House, he is still focused on the ravages of dementia. However, 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 regularly dropped claims to have passed the test twice, but through a spokesman, his campaign rejected to reveal his test results or to specify when he most recently took it. Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Tex.), the former White House physician, said in an interview this month that he administered it to Trump once, in January 2018.
Trump in November released a three-paragraph letter in which Bruce Aronwald, a doctor of osteopathy, said that Trump’s health was excellent and that “cognitive exams were exceptional” but provided no details. Aronwald did not respond to a request for comment.
