Donald Trump is showing signs that correspond with his family history of dementia, according to Fred Trump III, the former president’s nephew.
“I know what I saw in my grandfather. I know what I saw in Donald’s older sister, my Aunt Maryanne,” Fred Trump said.
“I just, I know the warning signs from both of my grandfathers,” he added. “Donald’s cousin, John Walters had dementia. It runs in the family. I’m not happy about it.”
Fred Trump III is the brother of psychologist and author Mary Trump, and the eldest son of Donald Trump’s late older brother, Fred Trump Jr. He has emerged as another vocal critic of the former president from within his own family.
In July, Fred Trump III endorsed his uncle’s rival for the White House, Kamala Harris.
And in a memoir which came out the same month, All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way, the former president’s nephew accused Trump of musing aloud about whether people with disabilities would be better off dead instead of causing expenses for their caregivers.
The comment came as a shock, Fred Trump writes, because his own son William was diagnosed as an infant with a rare seizure disorder that has caused significant cognitive and physical damage.
Donald Trump has said that he supported Fred Trump III, contributed to a fund to support William, and introduced the family to officials from the National Institutes of Health who might offer assistance.
Family History of Dementia
Trump III recently published a book, All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way, detailing his family history of dementia. He joined Sirius XM’s The Dean Obeidallah Show on Friday and warned that he’s seeing indicators in the former president, noting that his grandfather and Trump’s father, Fred Trump Sr., died eight years after his own Alzheimer’s diagnosis in 1999.
“You know, Donald said, ‘Oh, my father was tiptop until the end.’ I can assure you, that was not the case,” Trump III told Obeidallah.
“I know what I saw in my grandfather,” Trump III added. “I know what I saw in Donald’s older sister, my aunt Maryanne, who in the end … I am not a doctor, I don’t pretend to be. I just, I know the warning signs from both of my grandfathers.”
In November 2023, Trump’s sister Maryanne Trump Barry died at age 86. Trump III also mentioned that his uncle’s cousin, John Walters, had dementia, noting that “it runs in the family.”
Concerns About Trump's Mental State
Trump has had difficulty in his recent rallies and campaign speeches sticking to a particular topic, going off on tangents and rambling. He has trouble staying on message, drawing criticism from his fellow Republicans and leading many observers, including several mental health experts, to warn of signs of cognitive decline. If his family members are also seeing the signs, that doesn’t bode well for the former president and convicted felon.
A Shift in Republican Support
Among the myriad of guests at this week’s Democratic National Convention are quite a few notable Republicans.
Republican Ana Navarro-Cárdenas of The View will host night two of the Democratic National Convention, she announced Sunday night on Instagram. “I can’t tell you how much it means to me,” Navarro said in the video. “I’m a little refugee girl who fled communism, who fled Nicaragua at the age of eight, found freedom, found opportunity, found a home in America, and for me to have the chance to stand on that stage and help my girl, Kamala, make history and become the Democratic nominee, it’s just such a mind-blowing moment.”
Rich Logis, an ex-MAGA activist and the founder of the group Leaving MAGA, will speak at the convention on Monday. Also in attendance will be former Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger, who served Illinois’s 16th congressional district for over 10 years.
Kinzinger is scheduled to speak on Thursday just before Harris addresses the convention. Kinzinger became a target of Donald Trump after he was one of only 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump over “incitement of an insurrection.” Kinzinger and former Representative Liz Cheney were the only Republicans to vote for creating the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol—and were also the only Republicans to join the committee.
Kinzinger resigned in 2022. A spokesperson for the Illinois politician told The New Republic in 2023 that the former representative “would only vote for Donald Trump if the opponent is actual Satan.”
In June, before President Joe Biden exited the race, the Democrats hired Representative Adam Kinzinger’s former chief of staff to aid Republican outreach efforts.
Last week, a burgeoning “Republicans for Harris” organized 70,000 people to join an organizing call that included Kinzinger as well as other former politicians and White House officials.
A Democratic Platform for Palestinian Rights
The Democratic National Convention will hold its first ever panel discussion on Palestinian human rights on Monday, the result of months of effort from activists advocating for an end to U.S. support for Israel’s deadly military onslaught in Gaza, which has killed more than 40,000 people.
Panelists will include Layla Elabed, one of the founders of the Uncommitted Movement, which organized massive “uncommitted” votes during the Democratic primaries, as well as Hala Hajazi, a Democratic donor and fundraiser who has lost several family members to Israel’s ongoing military campaign. Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, a Palestinian-American pediatric physician who has been working in Gaza throughout Israel’s assault, will speak, as well.
The panel will also include Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, former U.S. Representative Andy Levin of Michigan, and Jim Zogby, the founder of the Arab American Institute.
Elabed and her Uncommitted Movement co-chair Abbas Alawieh, who is also a DNC delegate, released an official statement from the group, thanking the DNC for working with them on the panel.
“This is an important step toward recognizing the rightful place of human rights advocates for Palestinian rights within the Democratic Party. With this panel and throughout our current engagement at the DNC, we will use our platform to announce the cries of the majority of Democratic voters who want an end to the unconditional flow of U.S. weapons that Netanyahu is using to kill Palestinian families,” the statement said.
The group reiterated a previous request that Dr. Haj-Hassan should be invited to speak during the convention itself.
Harris’s campaign manager, Julie Chavez-Rodriguez, met privately with Alawieh in Detroit on Thursday, ahead of the convention. When Harris appeared in Detroit earlier this month, Alawieh and Elabed were invited to greet her, and they spoke candidly about the need for an arms embargo to Israel.
While Harris indicated that she was open to meeting with them to discuss an arms embargo, her national security adviser has insisted that the vice president does not support an arms embargo, a position that is in line with the Biden administration’s policy.
This week, 30 delegates from the Uncommitted Movement, representing the more than 730,000 Democratic voters who voted “uncommitted” in the Democratic primaries, will attempt to engage with Democratic leaders at the DNC, pushing for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and arguing for a U.S. arms embargo to Israel. Elsewhere in Chicago, massive protests are planned for the week, as activists hope to reignite dialogue around the mass killing in Gaza, which has stretched on for nearly 11 months.
The Presidential Medal of Freedom vs. the Medal of Honor
Donald Trump decided to double down rather than explain what he meant when he denigrated the military’s highest award for valor in armed service, the Medal of Honor.
Speaking with MSNBC on Saturday, the former president repeated that he believed the honor’s civilian variant, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, is “better.”
“When I say ‘better,’ I would rather in a certain way get it because people that get the Congressional Medal of Honor, which I’ve given to many, are often horribly wounded or dead,” Trump said. “They’re often dead, they get it posthumously.”
“When you get the Congressional Medal of Honor—I always consider that to be the ultimate, but it is a painful thing to get it,” Trump continued. “When you get the Presidential Medal of Freedom, it’s usually for other things, like you’ve achieved great success in sports or you’ve achieved great success someplace else.”
The clarification comes after Trump, who famously avoided the Vietnam War draft with a timely diagnosis of bone spurs, infuriated veterans across the country by claiming that the Presidential Medal of Freedom was “much better” because recipients of the Medal of Honor have been “hit so many times by bullets.”
The off-color comment was made all the worse by the fact that Trump made the remark to elevate one of his top patrons, Miriam Adelson, a heavy-handed Republican donor and the richest Israeli in the world. Adelson and her husband, Las Vegas Sands billionaire Sheldon Adelson, earned Trump’s favor after they funneled $25 million to Trump’s super PACs in 2016 and donated $5 million to his inauguration. That earned them a spot on the dais, just a few rows behind Jared Kushner, as Trump was sworn in. In 2018, their contributions effectively bought Mrs. Adelson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and in 2019 influenced Trump to recognize Israel’s sovereignty in Golan Heights, an Israeli-occupied portion of southwest Syria that the religious state captured in 1967.
Former Trump chief of staff and retired Marine General John Kelly threw out Trump’s comparison of the two honors, telling CNN Monday that the two medals are “not even close. No equivalency of any kind.”
“Think of Normandy, Iwo Jima, Vietnam, or Fallujah,” Kelly told CNN. “The Medal of Honor is earned, not won, by incredibly brave actions on the battlefield under fire typically by very young men who joined when others did not to defend their country.”
“To the service member, the oath is sacred and taken with the understanding that one could be seriously wounded, captured, or killed in living up to the words,” Kelly continued, referring to the oaths of enlistment. “No president, member of Congress, judge, or political appointee—and certainly no recipient of the Presidential Medal—will ever be asked to give life or limb to protect the Constitution. The two awards cannot be compared in any way. Not even close.”
Vance's Problematic Comparison
J.D. Vance thought he made a clever remark when he compared Kamala Harris to Jeffery Epstein on Fox News Sunday, but he was wrong.
“Giving Kamala Harris control over inflation policy, Shannon, it’s like giving Jeffrey Epstein control over human trafficking policy,” Vance told Shannon Bream Sunday morning.
“The American people are much smarter than that. They don’t buy the idea that Kamala Harris represents a fresh start. She is more of the same,” Vance added.
Far from scoring points on economic policy, Vance’s comments instead reminded everyone of Donald Trump’s associations with the notorious sexual abuser and trafficker.
It also brought attention to the fact that Trump has been using Epstein’s plane, derisively referred to as the “Lolita Express,” on the 2024 campaign trail.
On the eve of the Democratic National Convention Sunday night, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear called out Vance’s poor analogy, pointing out on CNN that it didn’t look good coupled with Vance’s views on abusive relationships and sexual assault.
“For this guy to mention Jeffrey Epstein when he has encouraged women to stay in relationships with domestic violence, and when he called someone getting impregnated through rape as inconvenient, is really something,” Beshear said.
When Trump was mentioned in the first release of Epstein-related documents from a decade-old lawsuit against the sex trafficker in January, Trump was uncharacteristically quiet—a sign that he may have something to hide and doesn’t want to draw attention to his relationship with Epstein. Vance’s remarks probably won’t make Trump and his campaign staff happy.
Trump's Meltdown Over Crowd Size
Donald Trump’s late night social media spree over the upcoming Democratic National Convention and his lackluster Pennsylvania rally had Republican strategists—and Swifties—thinking that the presidential nominee was melting down.
Trump posted at least 25 times to his Truth Social account Sunday night. In numerous separate posts, he shared A.I. images of Vice President Kamala Harris, accusing the Democrat’s team of sharing a misleading video of Trump’s crowd size at his rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, the day before.
Saturday was intended to be a campaign reset, but instead ended up reinforcing that Trump only knows how to personally belittle his political opponents. Jumping off script from what was supposed to be a speech on economic policy, Trump tapped back into some elementary-grade insults for the Democratic nominee, mocking her as “Comrade Kamala” and complaining that her team would use clips from the event that make it look like he’s “rambling, rambling.”
But that same old song and dance wasn’t enough for his supporters, who began to leave the 8,000-person arena before Trump even finished speaking.
Seeing unadulterated images of his own crowd size was apparently enough to send Trump into a spiral, claiming over several posts on Truth Social that Harris’s social media operation had inaccurately portrayed his turnout.
“We had to turn away lots of people yesterday in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, but Comrade Kamala Harris’ Social Media Operation showed empty seats, long before the Rally started, early in the afternoon when, in actuality, we had to turn away 11,500 people!” Trump wrote. “Comrade Kamala is a STONE COLD LOSER, she will FAIL and, if she doesn’t, our Country will cease to exist as we know it, turning into a Communist, Crime Ridden Garbage Dump. November 5th will be the Most Important Date in the History of the U.S.A. It’s as simple as that!…”
That didn’t sit well with political pundits and Republican strategists, who felt the hyperbolic claims and nose-wrinkling urgency made Trump look “nervous.”
“Looks like someone woke up on the gibbering barking panicked side of the bed today,” wrote Lincoln Project senior advisor Jeff Timmer.
Trump’s Deepfake Delusions
But his waning rallies weren’t the only thing on Trump’s mind during his extended social media binge. Bizarrely, Trump also seemed to be in the mood to provoke notoriously litigious pop star Taylor Swift’s notoriously mob-minded fans, sharing an A.I.-generated image of Swift clad in red, white, and blue, posing like Uncle Sam before an American flag emblazoned with the text: “Taylor wants YOU to vote for Donald Trump.”
“I accept!” Trump captioned the image.
Another Swift-related post shared by the former president depicted a group of women marching in “Swifties for Trump” shirts. (The post was labeled satire by its creator.)
“It’s a good thing that Swifties are so cool with people using her image in deep fakes and using AI to make it look like Taylor Swift is doing things she’s not,” posted Republican Representative Jack Kimble. “I’m sure none of them will be mad about this.”
It’s not the first time this summer that Trump has obsessed over Swift. During a closed-door meeting between Trump and House Republicans in June—his first visit to Capitol Hill since before the January 6 insurrection—Trump insisted on discussing the pop phenom, lamenting that she might endorse President Joe Biden while he was still in the race. Days before the meeting, Variety reported that Trump had spoken at length about Swift in a one-on-one interview, describing her as “unusually beautiful.”
Swift has not yet endorsed any candidate in the 2024 election and has been notoriously close-lipped about her political beliefs throughout her career, even through the 2016 presidential election when she was rumored to be a closet Republican. That changed when she sided with Tennessee Democrats in the 2018 midterms against now-Senator Marsha Blackburn. In her 2020 Netflix documentary Miss Americana, Swift said that she didn’t mind getting bad press for railing against Trump, whom she described as a “homophobic racist.”
More of the Same: Trump's Chaotic Speech
Donald Trump capped the first week of his campaign’s so-called “reset,” already punctuated with chaotic speeches that veered off topic into personal attacks against Kamala Harris, with yet another chaotic speech that veered off topic into personal attacks.
While Trump initially seemed more interested in staying on script than his previous failed forays, he still couldn’t help but shift his speech on economic issues into immature smears and complaining.
“Joe Biden hates her, okay? Hates her. You don’t mind if I go off teleprompter for a second, do you? Joe Biden hates her,” Trump said. “This was the overthrow of a president. This was an overthrow. They went out, and I spent $100 million fighting Joe Biden.”
Trump proceeded to make several asides, diverting to his same tired lines and some particularly meandering stories. At one point, he caught himself getting off topic.
“They’ll say, ‘He was rambling.’ I don’t ramble. I’m a really smart guy, you know, really smart. I don’t ramble,” Trump rambled.
“Anytime I hit too hard, they say, ‘He was rambling!’ Rambling?” Trump said, incredulous.
No matter how many times his campaign may try to keep its candidate on message, Trump can’t seem to stop revisiting his worn-out attacks against Harris. He once again started talking about her laugh, claiming it was “the laugh of a lunatic.”
Trump also complained again about the photo-illustration of Harris on the cover of Time magazine, which he’d previously said made her look like the “most beautiful actress to ever live.”
Trump now claimed it was because they couldn’t get a good enough picture, and scoffed at the idea that Harris was “beautiful.”
“I am much better looking than her,” Trump said, murmuring, “Much better. Much better.”
“I am a better looking person than Kamala!” Trump shouted, as the crowd cheered. But the enthusiasm of his audience was hardly consistent.
Trump’s long-winded tales lost the crowd. He told a particularly meandering story about French president Emmanuel Macron to a mostly quiet audience. Later, he reminisced about being endorsed by renowned basketball coach Bobby Knight ahead of the 2016 election.
“He endorsed me and Indiana was mine.” Trump said, to some mild clapping.
While the former president’s lame insults may wind up his crowds, even they can’t pretend to follow his winding stories.
A Football Coach's Lesson in Politics
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz showed off his football coach pep talk skills speaking to a high school football team in western Pennsylvania on Sunday.
At a campaign stop, the former high school teacher and football coach spoke on the field to Aliquippa High School football players, many of whom were likely too young to even vote, and linked the values of the sport to democracy.
“Politics isn’t that much different than this,” said Walz, who helped rebuild the Mankato West Scarlets and led them to victory in 1999. “It’s about setting a future goal and trying to reach it. It’s about doing it with dignity and hard work.”
Walz described the fourth quarter of a game where players have to trust their teammates.
“Our country’s not that different,” he continued. “Our neighbors want to be with you. Our neighbors want to do what’s right. And the more we figure out that we’re in this thing together, and we have more in common than we have separated. We’re going to do a heck of a lot better.”
He urged the students not to turn away from politics, despite political conversations feeling “pretty ugly” and “pretty negative” these days.
That negativity can be seen in many Republicans claiming that Walz is lying about coaching his winning team. One recent social media post was shared 5,000 times before it was deemed misinformation.
Clearly, the Harris campaign has a different understanding of “locker room talk” than its opponents.
The Desperation of a Dying Campaign
Donald Trump is looking for anything to boost his fortunes as his polls continue to drop, so he’s resorted to using A.I. to claim Taylor Swift and her fans endorsed him.
The former president and convicted felon shared several A.I.-generated photos on Truth Social Sunday, including one showing the pop star dressed like Uncle Sam, pointing forward with the text “Taylor Wants You To Vote For Donald Trump.” The post also included other A.I. photos of women wearing “Swifties for Trump” T-shirts. He captioned the post, “I accept!”
The post contained one photo of a Swift fan with a “Swifties for Trump” T-shirt, which reportedly is legitimate, The Independent reports. However, Swift herself has not made any endorsements in the 2024 election. She has spoken out against Trump in the past and opposed Republican Marsha Blackburn in her run for the U.S. Senate in 2018.
Trump is desperate for Swift’s endorsement, and has made some creepy comments about her appearance, repeatedly calling her “very beautiful.” Privately, some of his supporters earlier this year reportedly called for a “holy war” if she endorsed Joe Biden, and presumably that extends to Kamala Harris.
On social media, Trump’s attempt to gain sympathy from Swifties was quickly dismissed and criticized, with some calling for Swift to take legal action.
Republicans and the right wing have some bizarre views when it comes to Swift, inventing conspiracy theories about her and calling her a “psyop” because they can’t understand her popularity. Her relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce has fueled many of those conspiracies, with conservatives bewildered over her fans’ new interest in the National Football League.
Recently, Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance’s comments criticizing “childless cat ladies” drew a large backlash from many, particularly Swift fans, as the pop star is famously a cat person. If Trump thinks that some weak deepfake images will be enough to win over Swift fans after that, he fails to realize that they know him all too well.
Vance's Denial of Reality
J.D. Vance desperately tried to downplay new polls showing Kamala Harris in the lead on Sunday—but he couldn’t back up his outlandish claims.
During an interview on Fox News, host Shannon Bream asked Vance about a New York Times/Siena Poll published Saturday that found Harris was leading Donald Trump among likely voters in Arizona, 50 percent to 45 percent. The poll also found that Harris had passed Trump in North Carolina, leading him 49 percent to 47 percent, and that she had significantly narrowed the former president’s lead in Georgia and Nevada.
“What is the administration doing—the campaign doing with that data, as it comes in?” Bream asked Vance, who is not doing so well in the polls himself. “I mean, these are critical states that you’ve gotta have to have a path to 270. Are there any pivots, are there any, um, you know, reconfiguring of what you’re doing in this strategy? Because you talk about your message—but is it not landing?”
“First of all, the polls tend to radically overstate Democrats, we certainly saw that during the polling of summer of 2020 and summer of 2016. And of course, a lot of those polls were wrong when it came to Election Day,” Vance replied.
“Kamala Harris got a bit of a sugar high a couple of weeks ago, but what we’ve actually seen from our own internal data, Shannon, is that Kamala Harris has already leveled off,” Vance said. “If you talk to insiders inside the Kamala Harris campaign, they’re very worried about where they are.”
By Vance’s account, there was absolutely no reason for the campaign to change course to address Trump’s weakening polls—or the high-energy campaign that caused the shift. Behind the scenes, however, the Trump team hired several new staffers last week from old Trump campaigns, including Trump’s campaign manager from 2016, Corey Lewandowski.
Bream also asked Vance about a national Washington Post/ABC/IPSOS poll published Sunday, which found Harris to have a slight lead nationally. “Those are new numbers, so if you think the momentum is not swinging, or your internal polls are suggesting differently—every other poll that’s been released has shown great momentum in her direction,” Bream said.
“You know, Shannon, I think there are a lot of polls that actually show her stagnating and leveling off,” Vane said, claiming that Washington Post/ABC had been “a wildly inaccurate pollster in the summer of 2020.”
“And look, if you see the numbers that we’re seeing and you actually talk to the American people, I feel extremely confident that we’re gonna be in the right place come November. We can’t worry about polls, we have to run through the finish line and encourage everybody to get out there and vote,” Vance said, but he wasn’t done, he had time to sprinkle in one last conspiracy theory.
“Consistently what you’ve seen in 2016 and 2020 is that the media uses fake polls to drive down Republican turnout and to create dissension and conflict with Republican voters,” Vance said, insisting that the campaign was in a “very, very good spot.”
There is little evidence to suggest that a poll published in August could convince someone not to vote in November. If anything, a positive poll might convince someone not to vote, because they think their preferred candidate is safe, rather than a negative one convincing someone it’s a lost cause.
Since Harris began her meteoric rise in the polls, the Trump campaign has taken to the practice of disseminating “unskewed” polls, which means adjusting poll results based on the difference between election results and recalled votes of respondents, or how they claim to have voted four years ago. Trump’s pollster Tony Fabrizio and data consultant Tim Saler have claimed that new polls understate support for Trump in 2020, and that adjusting according to recalled votes creates a more accurate picture of Trump’s chances. Recalled votes are considered by some to be an unreliable metric.
The Trump campaign appears to have decided that if a new poll doesn’t line up with the recall record, it must be inaccurate. Using this method, the campaign has begun to claim that any poll that doesn’t find Trump in the lead is a lie.
