Donald Trump has lost the ability to read the room, according to his niece, Mary Trump.
On the latest episode of Molly Jong-Fast’s “Fast Politics” podcast, Jong-Fast asked the clinical psychologist and fierce critic of the president if he was previously able “to not say the quiet part out loud.”
Watch the exchange on YouTube.
Mary Trump replied that her uncle previously “did have the ability to read the room better” and was “good at pushing the envelope” and then being able to “recalibrate in real time,” as she said he did during the coronavirus pandemic after being booed at a rally for hyping the vaccine “and we never heard him say that again.”
But now, Mary Trump said, amid growing concern over her relative’s cognitive abilities, 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, I think,” she added.
The president has not been diagnosed with any cognitive condition.
Jong-Fast noted how Trump failed to recalibrate during his address at the re-organized White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where he “really bombed,” told the same joke three times and “just criticized the speech and kept going.”
“People were pretty shocked,” she added.
Trump said she is “not sure why anybody is shocked anymore,” then explained:
“I mean, listen, 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 many of whom he has 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. It just isn’t working anymore.”