THURSDAY: O'Donnell walked the cognition beat!

THURSDAY, MAY 21, 2026

We're sorry we (almost) missed it: We're sorry we missed Lawrence O'Donnell's presentation on last evening's Last Word. We're going to attribute it to an "On Demand malfunction."

Walking the "possible cognitive decline" beat, O'Donnell recalled a report in the Washington Post from March 2024. Headline included, the Post's report started like this:   

Shadowing Trump’s attacks on mental fitness—his own father’s dementia   

Donald Trump invited his extended family to Mar-a-Lago in the mid-1990s. As the clan gathered at the palatial Florida estate, though, his father was badly struggling, according to Mary L. Trump, Donald’s niece.

Fred Trump Sr., the pugnacious developer then in his late 80s, didn’t recognize two of his children at the party, recalled Mary L. Trump, who attended the gathering. And when he did recognize Donald, the family patriarch approached his son with a picture of a Cadillac that he wanted to buy—as if he needed his son’s permission.

The incident, Mary L. Trump said, left Donald Trump visibly upset at his father’s descent into dementia, which medical records show had been diagnosed several years earlier. Trump reflected his anguish in an interview around that time, with Playboy in 1997 reporting that seeing his father “addled with Alzheimer’s” had left him wondering “out loud about the senselessness of life.”   

“Turning 50 does make you think about mortality, or immortality, or whatever,” Trump, who had recently reached that milestone, told the magazine. “It does hit you.”  

[...]  

Trump’s long fixation on mental fitness followed years of watching his father’s worsening dementia—a formative period that some associates said has been a defining and little-mentioned factor in his life, and which left him with an abiding concern that he might someday inherit the condition. While much remains unknown about Alzheimer’s, experts say there is an increased risk of inheriting a gene associated with the disease from a parent.   

Last night, O'Donnell spent a bit of time discussing the possibility, or perhaps the likelihood, that the sitting president is indeed in the grip of a cognitive decline, not unlike the dementia which afflicted his father. We know of few other topics that are more worth discussing at this point in time, but the people we accept as journalists simply aren't going to do that.  

Nor would they know how to approach the situation if they chose to take the journalistic leap.  

We don't recall seeing the piece, by Michael Kranish, back in 2024. In retrospect, Kranish stumbled a bit out of the gate, throwing shade at Trump's assertions, at that time, that President Biden was experiencing a cognitive decline.  

A few months later, everyone saw the meltdown which occurred during the June 2024 Trump-Biden debate. Even in the wake of that experience, our journalists agree that President Trump's mental health and cognitive state must not be discussed.  

It's intriguing to see Mary Trump cited at the start of the Kranish piece. She has recently said, once again, that her uncle is experiencing an "obvious" cognitive decline, layered atop decades of untreated (and serious) mental health issues.  

Our journos agree that this can't be discussed. We're a young nation saddled with an immature discourse. That isn't going to change.   

To see O'Donnell's brief discussion of this highly significant topic, you can start by clicking here.