“Meandering and confusing”: Trump showed cognitive decline in interviews, author says
Donald Trump demonstrated “severe memory issues” and gave several alarming false recollections in interviews for a book chronicling “The Apprentice,” author Ramin Setoodeh said.
Setoodeh interviewed the former president six times in “meandering and confusing” conversations for his book “Apprentice in Wonderland,” and says that Trump didn’t remember speaking with him afterward.
“My first sit-down interview was in May,” Setoodeh noted in an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. “We sat down again towards the end of the summer, and when I sat down, you know, there was a very blank expression on his face. So I asked, ‘Do you remember when we spoke recently,’ and he [Trump] said, ‘No, I have no memory of that.’”
Trump also appeared to forget that he was no longer in charge of foreign policy, leaving one interview early to “deal with” a conflict in Afghanistan.
“He [Trump] also seemed to think that he still had some foreign policy powers,” he noted. “There was one day where he told me he needed to go upstairs to deal with Afghanistan, even though he clearly didn’t,” he said, adding that Trump actually called the nation “the Afghanistan.”
In another instance, Trump purported that Joan Rivers — who passed away in 2014 — voted for him.
“He confidently told me, and declared, that Joan Rivers voted for him when he ran for president, and Joan Rivers died in 2014,” Setoodeh recalled. “She would not have been able to vote for Donald Trump.”
The “Apprentice in Wonderland” author said Trump was at his happiest during their conversations when discussions focused on “The Apprentice.”
“He would talk about what he did at the White House and he would become gloomy, and unhappy, and resentful.”
On conversations surrounding an alleged tape of Trump saying the N-word on the set, Trump claimed, unprovoked, that if he were to have said it, he wouldn’t have done so while mic’d, Setoodeh said.
78-year-old Trump, who has recently had a spate of public verbal flubs and mental slips, is set to debate 81-year-old Joe Biden on Jun 27.