Biographer Says Trump ‘Has Severe Memory Issues’ And ‘He Couldn’t Even Remember Me’
An author who interviewed Donald Trump six times for his upcoming book Apprentice in Wonderland, about the show that transformed Trump the businessman into a reality TV star on his way to the White House, says the former president has “severe memory issues” and “he couldn’t remember things, he couldn’t even remember me.”
In an interview Monday morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Ramin Setoodeh, a co-editor-in-chief at Variety, said that he “really got to know Donald Trump post-presidency and I got to see what he was like.”
Setoodeh noted that Trump, in a weekend speech, suggested that President Biden should take a cognitive test to determine his fitness for office—but the writer says it’s Trump who displayed “severe memory issues” during interviews for the book. “As the journalist who spent the most time with him, I have to say he couldn’t remember things—he couldn’t even remember me.”
Setoodeh said he spent an hour with Trump in 2021, and he visited again with the former president a few months later for an interview at Trump Tower. “He had this vacant look on his face and I said ‘you remember me?’ and he said no, he had no recollection of our lengthy interview.”
The author, whose book comes out Tuesday, said “I think the American public needs to see this portrait of Donald Trump because this shows what he is like, and who he is, and who he has always been.”
The Trump campaign has responded to Setoodeh’s book, dismissing the suggestion that Trump has memory problems. “President Trump was aware of who this individual was throughout the interview process, but this ‘writer’ is a nobody and insignificant so of course he never made an impression,” said Trump communications director Steven Cheung in a statement.
“After recognizing the importance of The Apprentice and its significant cultural impact on a global scale, this ‘writer’ has now chosen to allow Trump Derangement Syndrome to rot his brain like so many other losers whose entire existence revolves around President Trump.”
Setoodeh argues in his book that The Apprentice was the key to Trump’s ultimate victory in the 2016 presidential election, taking a failed businessman and rebranding him as a titan of industry with the talent and no-nonsense style to lead the country.
“This is the reason why Donald Trump became president of the United States,” he told MSNBC. “This is the reason why he is now the nominee and could become president of the United States again.”
“Trump’s mental temperament after the White House, his fixation on revenge—Joe, he’s still fixated on you. He spoke in detail about an interview you did in 2015,” he said to Morning Joe co-host Joe Scarborough. “Most presidents post-presidency are thinking of happier thoughts, moving on with their lives, but he was remembering every negative thing anyone said.”
Mark Joyella is a five-time Emmy Award-winning reporter and news anchor for television stations in Miami, Orlando, Tampa and New York City. He's worked in cable news at CNN and Fox and his writing has appeared in Adweek, the New York Post, the Orlando Sentinel, The Dallas Morning News and Men's Health.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.