Donald Trump has lost the ability to "read the room," a crucial political skill, according to his niece, Mary Trump.
In an appearance on Molly Jong-Fast’s “Fast Politics” podcast, Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist and vocal critic of her uncle, stated that he previously possessed a greater capacity to gauge an audience and adjust his approach in real time.
She cited an instance during the coronavirus pandemic when Trump was booed at a rally for promoting the vaccine, after which "we never heard him say that again." This, she suggested, demonstrated his former ability to "push the envelope" and then "recalibrate."
However, Mary Trump now believes her uncle "does not have the ability to do that," linking this change to concerns about his cognitive abilities. "What that means is he’s losing impulse control and that’s a part of his overall cognitive decline," she said. The former president has not been diagnosed with any medical condition.
Jong-Fast pointed to Trump's recent address at the White House Correspondents' Dinner as an example of this perceived lack of recalibration. She described the speech as a failure, noting that he repeated jokes and focused on criticism, despite the audience's apparent shock.
"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 — you 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," Mary Trump stated. "It just isn’t working anymore."