Live with Thom Hartmann

[Transcript edited for clarity, flow]

Mary Trump: I spent some time talking with the great Thom Hartmann about Donald’s very uplifting Easter post and what the mess in Iran entails. We also discussed Donald’s cognitive, physical, and psychological decline and what that might mean for all of us. Plus, we got into the firing of Pam Bondi and whether that’s about misogyny or simply the fact that there is no such thing as being sycophantic enough for the most insecure loser who has ever lived. I hope you enjoy it.

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Thom Hartmann: Mary, welcome back to the program. It’s so nice having you with us.

Mary Trump: Anytime. It’s always wonderful to hang out with you, even during these apocalyptic times—or maybe especially during these apocalyptic times.

Thom Hartmann: Yeah, it’s when we all need to support each other, I think. I’m curious about your thoughts on your uncle’s unhinged, obscene, blasphemous tweet.

Mary Trump: Yeah, there’s nothing like threatening war crimes on the highest holy day of the religion he was allegedly celebrating.

Thom Hartmann: And dropping the F-bomb.

Mary Trump: Dropping the F-bomb and being Islamophobic— all of it. It was a trifecta of awfulness. I think what worries me about it more than anything else—because we have no right anymore to be surprised or shocked by his indecency, his depravity, his cruelty, his profanity—is the fact that there’s a team of people who either felt they couldn’t control him, couldn’t convince him not to post this, as you said, blasphemous and obscene tweet, or didn’t think they should.

Thom Hartmann: Yeah.

Mary Trump: So I think we need to understand where we are. So many people continue to enable him past the point of sanity. Everything that’s happening right now is happening with an army of people either turning a blind eye or actively supporting everything he does. And that’s why he continues to have such a negative—and profoundly negative—impact not just on this country, but on the world.

Thom Hartmann: I used to work for an international relief organization based out of Germany. In 1980, I went into Uganda at the tail end of the civil war. The Tanzanians had come in and ejected Idi Amin, who fled with 10,000 of his soldiers to Saudi Arabia, where he lived as a king with his many wives for the rest of his life.

We took over a region where people were dying every day of starvation. We were burying bodies with bulldozers. I met several government officials, and I asked one of them, “How could you have put up with Idi Amin?”

His response was, “We were all terrified of him.”

Do you think people in the Trump White House are starting to feel like that?

Mary Trump: I think a lot of them have felt like that all along. I think many, if not all, elected Republicans have felt that way all along—but it’s a difference of degree.

People living under Idi Amin were at risk of torture, murder, their families being murdered. What Republicans enabling Donald are afraid of now is a mean post on his failing social media site, a threatened primary, or maybe having the DOJ sicced on them. That is not an excuse.

If everybody had stood together against him at the very beginning, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. That applies not just to individuals, but to corporations, institutions of higher learning, law firms—everyone.

These people have nobody to blame but themselves. And to continue doubling and quadrupling down on their sycophancy suggests they either don’t understand the stakes or they don’t care. Which is why, at some point, they need to be held accountable in a very real way.

Thom Hartmann: Yeah, for sure. I’m curious about your thoughts, as a licensed clinical psychologist, on what some are calling “sundowning syndrome”—that as the day progresses, Donald seems to lose more impulse control.

And then there’s the suggestion from Dr. John Gartner that what we’re seeing is actual dementia—deterioration in the frontal lobes affecting impulse control.

What’s your sense of where he is right now, and where he’ll be over the next few years?

Mary Trump: The rapidity of his decline—across physical, neurological, and psychological health—is quite alarming.

I’m not a neuropsychologist, but I am familiar with cognitive testing, and the fact that he keeps being asked to take basic cognitive assessments multiple times is not a good sign.

My grandfather had Alzheimer’s starting in his mid to late 70s. Donald is now in that same age range, and I see similarities. He often seems disoriented to time and place, has short-term memory issues, and is experiencing hypersomnia—falling asleep during the day—which is an indicator of serious issues.

Thom Hartmann: Yeah, he’s nodding off.

Mary Trump: Exactly. And his increasing lack of impulse control and inability to understand what is appropriate is also concerning.

I’m equally worried about his psychological deterioration. I’ve never formally diagnosed him, but he increasingly meets many criteria on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist.

Psychiatric disorders don’t improve on their own. Combined with poor physical health, cognitive decline, and extreme stress, we are heading toward one of two outcomes:

Either he becomes incapacitated—which, frankly, would be the better outcome—or he continues down this extremely dangerous path, putting the country and the world at risk to protect his ego.

That’s where we are. It’s a perfect storm of potential horror.

Thom Hartmann: We’re talking with Mary Trump, who publishes the newsletter The Good in Us on Substack.

I was reading Earl Stephens’ Substack, and he wrote that beyond the psychology, Trump is simply a racist, a woman abuser, a convicted felon, a liar, a thief, and more—essentially calling him the most dangerous person on earth. What do you think?

Mary Trump: All of that is true—but it’s always been true. His racism and misogyny aren’t getting worse; they’ve always been there.

What’s troubling is how normalized those traits have become. We were told repeatedly that it was “baked in” and that voters didn’t care. And unfortunately, tens of millions of Americans don’t care.

But here’s the issue: if, alongside legal analysis, we had consistently explained his psychological unfitness—his impulsivity, his nihilism, his inability to improve—people might have understood the real danger.

Instead, many people thought, “He may be flawed, but he’ll help us economically.”

If they had understood that he is fundamentally unstable and dangerous—and always will be—maybe the conversation would have been different.

Thom Hartmann: That’s important. And quickly—your thoughts on Pam Bondi. Do you think gender played a role?

Mary Trump: It plays some role, and we’ll likely see another woman targeted next.

But more importantly, Bondi could not have been more sycophantic. The issue is that even maximum loyalty isn’t enough. She ran into the limits of a system that still, to some degree, functions.

What Donald and his allies don’t understand is that no amount of sycophancy can protect him—or us—from himself.

Thom Hartmann: And that’s the real danger—for the country and the world.

Mary Trump: Exactly.