Trump Nephew Warns of Dementia Signs in Family—Including Trump Himself

Donald Trump’s nephew, Fred Trump III, sees worrying signs of dementia in his uncle.

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.”

“He looks older. And I get it.… Anybody who is in that office looks different than when they come out,” Trump III said. “But the things he’s spewing and the craziness, and he just can’t stick to a message. And he used to be able to stick to a message.”

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.

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.

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. 

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.”

Both comments have drawn comparisons to other disrespectful remarks Trump flung at the military during his time in office, including a 2020 Atlantic report that caught the former president repeatedly referring to fallen soldiers as “suckers and losers.”

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.