Fred Trump Sr., the pugnacious developer then in his late 80s, didn’t recognize two of his children at a party, recalled Mary L. Trump, who attended the gathering. And when he did recognize Donald, the family patriarch approached his son with a picture of a Cadillac that he wanted to buy — as if he needed his son’s permission.
The incident, Mary L. Trump said, left Donald Trump visibly upset at his father’s descent into dementia, which medical records show had been diagnosed several years earlier. Trump reflected his anguish in an interview around that time, with Playboy in 1997 reporting that seeing his father “addled with Alzheimer’s” had left him wondering “out loud about the senselessness of life.”
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 regularly claims to have passed the test twice, but through a spokesman, his campaign declined to release 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.
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