Family member warns 'deteriorating' Trump has 'lost grip on reality'

On Thursday, a family member of President Donald Trump warned that his “psychological crisis” has reached a “breaking point.” This is according to his niece, clinical psychologist Mary Trump, who asserts that his latest threats, “deterioration,” and power to use nuclear weapons pose an increasingly dangerous combination.

As Mary Trump explains, while she’s noted her uncle’s “psychological deterioration” for some time now, “what he did at the United Nations General Assembly in late September was something different, though. It wasn’t just the usual cascade of lies and misstatements we’ve come to expect from him.” Instead, argues Mary Trump, the speech proved that the president’s “grip on reality” has broken down entirely. In it, Trump mused about whether he would annihilate Iran, driving them “into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations.” He went on to tout a string of debunked accomplishments that Mary Trump asserts go beyond mere lies. In her estimation, “There is no hesitation, no moment of doubt, no acknowledgment that perhaps he is conflating something he imagined with something that actually occurred. This is not a man who is deliberately lying. This is a man whose grip on reality has become so tenuous that he genuinely cannot distinguish between what he has accomplished and what he fantasizes about accomplishing.”

One of the most blatant examples, she writes, came with his proclamation that the world should rename AI “super intelligence.” This provided “perhaps the clearest view yet into his delusional thinking,” asserts Mary Trump. “He believes that by declaration, he can change the terminology used by the entire world. He is not joking. He is not being playful or rhetorical. He genuinely believes that his saying this at the United Nations means it will now happen. This is the thinking of someone who has lost the ability to understand how the world actually works, how language functions, how institutions operate.” From there, the president went on to ramble about the “Russia hoax,” the “Ukraine hoax,” climate change, open borders and China in a manner that became increasingly incoherent. According to Mary Trump, “This is not leadership. This is a deeply disturbed individual revealing his complete detachment from reality and from responsibility.” In other words, “he cannot distinguish between fantasy and fact.”

“What makes this so dangerous is that Donald is no longer operating within the confines of what might be called a personality disorder,” explains Mary Trump. “He is no longer simply a narcissist or a sociopath. He is a man whose relationship to objective reality has fundamentally broken down. When he speaks, he is not filtering facts through a self-serving lens. He is speaking from a place in which his fantasies have become, for him, indistinguishable from fact. He has been given the power of a nuclear arsenal, control over America’s military and the ability to set foreign policy for the most powerful nation on Earth. And he is using that power to act out his psychological pathologies on the world stage.”

She warns that the world should take seriously the “chilling moment” when “he presented the choice before him regarding Iran not as a policy decision to be made in consultation with his advisors, his military, his intelligence agencies and Congress, but as his personal decision. And he did so in language that suggested he was genuinely considering whether to destroy an entire nation. This is not normal. This is not something we should accept or accommodate or attempt to spin as anything other than what it is: a deeply disturbed individual revealing his complete unfitness to hold the office of the presidency.”

She concludes with a warning: “What we witnessed at the United Nations was not a president speaking to the world. It was a man in psychological crisis, broadcasting his deterioration in real time, while representatives from other nations sat and watched the leader of the free world lose his grip on reality. And we, as a nation, need to understand what this means. We need to understand that with each passing day, the danger Donald poses to this country and to the world grows exponentially more severe. The breaking point is here. We are watching it unfold before our eyes.”