Call him “Patient 1”: An individual in Washington, D.C., who presents with symptoms of mental decline, including a bizarre inability to remember where his own father was born.
Bandy Lee, a psychiatrist on the faculty at the Yale School of Medicine, has some insights to share, which we will get to in a moment.
On Tuesday, at a meeting with the secretary-general of NATO, President Trump launched into an impromptu riff on one of his favorite topics, the reluctance of America’s wealthy European allies to pay more toward their own defense. Then, in what might have been a clumsy effort to show no hard feelings, he
expressed his love for Germany, the ancestral home of the Trump (or, originally,
Drumpf) family:
“My father is German, right? Was German. And born in a very wonderful place in Germany, so I have a great feeling for Germany.”
Trump’s father, Frederick,
was born in 1905 in the Bronx, approximately 4,000 miles from Germany, as the accompanying map shows. Trump’s grandfather was born in Germany, but was living in the United States with his wife when Frederick was born.
Frederick Trump's birth certificate from the state of New York, borough of the Bronx.
Of all Trump’s many misstatements, exaggerations, empty boasts and slips of the tongue, this one — which Trump has made at least twice before — stands out for its sheer inexplicability. Ordinarily, when Trump says something ridiculous, it’s for an obvious purpose. He has been on
an unhinged rant recently about windmills, whose
function in the electrical grid he misunderstands and whose sound he says causes cancer.
