"He struggled": Author who repeatedly interviewed Trump recalls his "memory lapses"

Since President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race, the public's attention has shifted to the glaring age gap between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.

Trump's flailing attacks on Harris and often incoherent speeches have raised questions about his ability to serve another term. Ramin Setoodeh, a journalist who interviewed Trump six times in 2021 for his book "Apprentice in Wonderland," told Salon that he noticed lapses in the 78-year-old's memory even three years ago.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Salon: Do you think Trump sometimes says outrageous things to get a reaction from people or because maybe his age is catching up to him?

Setoodeh: I would say I think it's both.

I think that Donald Trump is a man who is in his 70s and has issues with his memory and has issues remembering the chronology of events and remembering people and their names. But also he is someone who became who he became through the prism of reality TV, and so in reality TV, you're often rewarded for saying outrageous things, and you're rewarded by ratings.

And what drives Trump, and has always driven Trump as a politician, is this idea of ratings. That's why he's so infatuated by crowd size. But because of the 14 seasons that he starred on "The Apprentice," Donald Trump is someone who gravitates towards the outrageous, the absurd, and saying, you know, things that traditional politicians wouldn't say, just to get people's attention and to capture the news cycle and to get more headlines.

In past interviews, you talked a little bit about your personal experience with his “foggy memory.” Could you give me one example?

Sure. So when I went to interview Donald Trump, my first interview was shortly after he left the White House in May of 2021. And then when I returned back to Trump Tower later that summer, because he invited me to go back to have a second interview, he didn't recall meeting with me or our first interview, and he told me that was “a long time ago.”

He struggled with the chronology of events, particularly some of the events that happened in the White House. At one point, he told me he had to go deal with “the Afghanistan.” And it was confusing because he didn't have access to the foreign policy briefings.

So there were moments where it felt like he had these memory lapses or spatial lapses. And in fact, I even noticed that the other night, when he was talking to Elon Musk and he mentioned Joe Biden. For a second, it sounded like he thought he was running against Joe Biden, and then he mentioned Kamala Harris's name. So, you know, I think clearly he has his foggy memory and his short-term memory isn't great.

Since you brought up the Elon Musk interview, people have been saying that Trump sounded like he was slurring his words a little bit, maybe like he had a lisp. Trump and Elon are blaming it on technical difficulties. But did you maybe notice that? 

I spent time with him, I didn't hear a lisp. I actually did believe the explanation that the file, I guess, was compressed in Twitter space. So as a result of that, it sounded like he didn't sound like the way he talks.

But what was interesting about that interview is that it showed really how hard it is to get Donald Trump to stay on topic, or to have one train of thought. He jumps from one subject to the next, the next, the next. I don't think Elon Musk necessarily did a very good job of interviewing him, but it is really hard to keep Trump on any script at any time, and that was something that goes back to him being on "The Apprentice."

He really needed to be edited down when he was on the show, and they would shoot him for hours and hours and then edit him down. And I think the problem with him as a politician, as president, is that there's no editors to edit him down, to make what he says coherent.

True. Jon Stewart on his podcast was doing a commentary on the Elon-Trump interview and said that Trump is the "new Biden." While Biden was still in the race, Trump avoided scrutiny in terms of his mental health, his age obviously wasn't as big of a topic compared to Biden's. What are your thoughts on that?

I think that that really oversimplifies some things.

You can make that argument, that in terms of age or the dynamics of the race, Trump now is someone that's struggling in the polls or not leading in the polls, as he once was. But I think that to say that Trump is the new Biden, misses the bigger point, which is that Biden ran a very successful administration for four years in this country. When Trump was president, you know, a million people died of COVID, we were scared to leave our homes, it was a very dark time in America. There was a lot of divisiveness. So I think to equate the two of them doesn't, to me, make editorial sense, but I understand it's like a funny punchline.

Definitely. On those lines, do you feel like Trump got a free pass while Biden was still on the ticket and seemed to be struggling more with his age? Or why do you think suddenly the focus has moved to Trump's age? 

I think that the media has struggled for the last eight years to actually cover Trump.

One of the arguments in my book is that without the context of who Donald Trump is and where he came from and his experience and his years in show business, it's hard to look at Donald Trump. You have to look at Donald Trump through the lens of all of that.

So I think a lot of political reporters and media reporters are covering Trump and they're still covering him as a traditional political candidate, and that is absolutely the wrong way to look at him. He is not someone who adheres to facts, to the truth, to any linear form of thought.

He learned on Mark Burnett's reality show that it's all about creating a spectacle and getting viewers engaged and getting people talking and drumming up drama. And so I think the media struggled to catch up to Trump. And Trump was always heading the narrative, and it was his script that everyone was following.

I think with this latest twist, not to continue the reality TV metaphor, but it kind of works with this latest twist of Biden stepping aside and Kamala Harris becoming the nominee, this was one of those reality TV twists or one of those twists that caught Trump off guard. So his campaign is now, for really the first time in a long time, in his three presidential campaigns, they're playing catch up.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

Trump’s campaign is struggling to keep him on message. Three weeks into Kamala being on the ticket, it seems like he's kind of losing his footing a little bit. 

I think on this day, yes, it does seem like the Trump campaign is losing its footing. On some days, he creates a diversion that seems completely out of left field, doesn't make any sense. And then other days, he creates another diversion that the media falls for, and then everyone plays into his narrative, and then he sort of has the upper hand.

So this idea that he can't stay on message, sure, that's an idea that we've heard about for eight years, but that's not anything new. Having spent six times interviewing Donald Trump, there's no shape or form in which he can't stay on this on message. He's like an actor who just prefers to say the lines he feels like saying. He's not someone who has a strategic line of thought. He's not someone who can keep something to himself or wait till the right moment to say something. So that's always been a characteristic of Donald Trump all the way back in the days when he started on "The Apprentice."

But I think that there needs to be significant caution right now, because it does seem like the media and the way in which this race is being framed is that Kamala Harris is now leading, and it doesn't seem like the Trump campaign will be able to catch up. I would really caution everyone with that narrative, because we saw 2016 when it seemed like everyone had already decided that Hillary Clinton was the next president of states, that didn't come to pass. There's still 80 some-odd days to go before people vote on Election Day. I think there's a lot that can change.

One of Donald Trump's talents and skills, if you want to call that, is creating diversions and confusion and being able to go up against an opponent, taking some of their greatest strength and making them into weaknesses. He hasn't been successful yet with the Kamala campaign, but I don't think his election is over yet.