Donald Trump's 'Ability to Communicate Has Deteriorated': Mary Trump

Donald Trump's niece has said his recent public slipups were a sign that "his ability to communicate has deteriorated in recent years," as she defended similar verbal gaffes on the part of President Joe Biden.

Writing on her Substack blog Monday, Mary Trump said that when the former president was younger, he was "reasonably adept at getting his point across." And she described his court appearances in the 1980s and 1990s as "arrogant but measured and restrained."

She went on to say that her uncle's recent speeches on the campaign trail had signs of "mental confusion," adding, "It's not simply that Donald makes gaffes and misstatements—it's the degree to which his ability to communicate has deteriorated in recent years."

The age of the likely 2024 presidential election candidates has become a central theme of the campaign. A Monmouth University poll of 737 registered voters in October, for example, found 48 percent thought Trump was too old to run again, and 76 percent thought the same of Biden.

Newsweek contacted the Trump campaign via email for comment Tuesday outside of normal working hours.

The niece of the former president—who is related to Donald Trump via her late father, his brother Fred Trump Jr.—has been highly critical of her uncle. In 2020, she sued family members, including Donald Trump, over an inheritance. The case was later dismissed.

That year, she published Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man, an unauthorized biography of her uncle, which sold almost a million copies on its first day of release, its publisher said at the time.

Since he announced his 2024 presidential run, Mary Trump has often publicly disparaged the former president, commenting regularly on his legal battles.

Recently, she told MSNBC that Donald Trump had an "untreated psychiatric disorder."

In her blog Monday, Mary Trump cited speeches the 77-year-old made over the weekend, in which he appeared to say "wall mongers" instead of "warmongers" and seemed to confuse the current president and a former one when he said Russian President Vladimir Putin "has so little respect for Obama."

The slipups come as Biden, Donald Trump's likely presidential rival in November, has faced ongoing concerns about his age and mental acuity over a number of public gaffes, which Republicans have used to imply Biden is unfit to continue as president for another term.

Already the oldest U.S. president in history, Biden would turn 82 years old weeks after Election Day; and if elected, he would be 86 by the end of his second term. But the president has brushed off queries about his physical and mental health, telling a news conference in February that his "memory is fine" and "I know what the hell I'm doing."

Mary Trump said Biden had long suffered from a stutter and that he had described himself as a "gaffe machine" in 2018.

She also referenced an October interview with Gen. Mark Milley, a former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Trump appointee, in which he told NBC News that while he would not comment on either presidents' mental health, Biden was "alert, sound, does his homework" and is "very, very engaged in issues of very serious matters of war and peace and life and death."