President Donald Trump views items on display during a visit to the Royal Collection exhibition, in the Green Drawing Room at Windsor Castle, Berkshire, on day one of the president's second state visit to the UK. (Reuters)
President Donald Trump touched on an odd theory while talking about the passing of Sen. Lindsey Graham, as noted by reporter Jim Acosta, and in doing so, might have unwittingly exposed his own fears about descending into dementia.
Acosta, who previously served for many years as CNN's chief White House correspondent, appeared on the latest edition of the "Fast Politics" podcast hosted by commentator and writer Molly Jong-Fast. During the wide-ranging conversation, the pair touched on Graham's surprise death and Trump's reaction to it, with Acosta noting that it brought out the president's long-held fascination with the so-called "race-horse theory."
“His father died just about at the same age," Trump said about Graham in an interview with Newsmax. "You know, I’m a believer in the racehorse theory, you know. If you have problems, you have problems.”
Racehorse theory, in the context of humans, is a scientifically unfounded idea about the quality of genes from one's parents determining one's quality as a person. Speaking about Trump's fixation on the idea, Jong-Fast summed it up as "you are the same as your parents, and so how you die will be the same as how your parents die."
A medical examiner's report found that Graham appeared to have died from an aortic rupture. While racehorse theory is not an accepted idea in legitimate scientific circles, it is accepted that family medical histories can indicate which conditions people are at a higher risk of developing. Graham's father died of a heart attack when he was 68, just three years younger than the senator was.
Talking about the "truly insane" idea of racehorse theory further, Jong-Fast noted that her "favorite part" of the situation was applying it to Trump himself, which might inadvertently reveal his own fear about his family history of cognitive decline.
"My favorite part of the story is that, like, Donald Trump's parents both had dementia, right," Jong-Fast said.
"Right, and his father was a son of a b——," Acosta responded. "There's that too."
Despite the pair's assertions, publicly available information does not indicate that Trump's mother, Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, suffered from dementia at any point. His father, however, famously suffered from Alzheimer's Disease and severe cognitive decline throughout the final decade of his life. This key piece of family medical history has often been cited, as the president has also appeared to deteriorate cognitively over the last 10 years, though he and his staff have strongly denied any and all claims that he is suffering from cognitive decline.