'Mortal terror': Trump journalist details origin of ex-president’s deepest fears

14 August 2024

Tim O'Brien, veteran journalist and senior executive editor at Bloomberg Opinion, has been interviewing Donald Trump for years — from the ex-president's time building and completing Trump Tower in the 1980s, to his years starring in The Apprentice — and up to his four years in the Oval Office.

Over the years, the MAGA hopeful has developed clear and present obsessions — such as Hannibal Lecter.

MSNBC's Joy Reid on Wednesday asked O'Brien to offer some insight into why the ex-president often mentions the fictitious character.

"Part of the Hannibal Lecter references, I think, come from the fact that Donald Trump actually thinks that migrants seeking asylum belong in insane asylums," O'Brien said, "and Hannibal Lecter was in an asylum, and he can't really separate the difference of two. So, that's raw ignorance."

The longtime journalist added, "The larger cultural touch point here is that Donald Trump is, indeed, baked in amber. The clothing his wears, the celebrities he fawns over, the music he most closely relates to, is all from the 1980s. He completed Trump Tower in the 1980s. It was the first project he did apart from his father. It was the project that put him on magazine covers. It's the project that ultimately led to the book 'The Art of the Deal.' And he was celebrated as this young deal maker who could do no wrong."

O'Brien then turned to some of Trump's other obsessions.

"On a number of occasions when he talked to me about that period of his life, he had this obsession with Orson Wells and Citizen Kane," the MSNBC political analyst added, "and the idea that Wells' greatest movie was completed when he was still in his 20s, and he never really equalled it again. And he had this great fear that Trump Tower would be the signature moment of his life. And in fact, he then went on a whole bankruptcy spree, and through most of the late 1980s and 1990s, he was a punchline about the excesses of the 1980s, until The Apprentice came along, which lifted him up as a celebrity. But still no one took him seriously. And then he became president. So the long arc here is tracing the life of someone who actually never grew up and never grew beyond this one era in which he felt he was celebrated without anyone blinking."

Reid added, "People who are aging, oftentimes will retreat to a comfort space. And it's not necessarily Alzheimer's, but it's part of the aging brain, where you start off talking about one thing, and you end up back where you're comfortable." Noting that O'Brien has interviewed Trump for decades, the MSNBC host asked, "Does he feel fully cognitively healthy?

The Bloomberg editor replied, "Some is an ageing brain. But let's remember his father died from Alzheimer's. Donald Trump has always lived in mortal terror of the fact that he may have the gene, and may die of Alzheimer's, too."

O'Brien added, "I think this is more than someone just aging. This is somebody i think who is living in the past for the reasons you identified, which is that it's common to go back to what you know. There's another thing to really remember is that the United States is going to become a minority/majority country within the next 20 years or so, and he is standing up for a world he came from – a primarily white world."

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