Thomas Kika, Alternet

Mary Trump on Monday escalated her accusations that her uncle, President Donald Trump, is suffering from dementia, citing the “same look of confusion” she witnessed in her grandfather.

As Trump took to the 2024 campaign trail and eventually returned to the White House, scrutiny of his potentially deteriorating mental state came to the foreground, with critics noting things like his often slurred speech, difficulty pronouncing certain words, and tendency to ramble during speeches. Some highlighted the fact that his father, Fred Trump Sr., suffered from dementia when he was roughly the same age as the president, suggesting a likelihood that his son might be grappling with the same condition.

Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist and one of the few critics of the president to emerge from his own family, has frequently alleged that her 79-year-old uncle is also suffering from dementia. During a recent interview with The Daily Beast Podcast, she cited certain key similarities between her grandfather in his final years and her uncle currently to back up her claims.

“There are times I look at him and I see my grandfather,” Mary said. “I see that same look of confusion. I see that he does not always seem to be oriented to time and place. His short-term memory seems to be deteriorating.”

She further described a similar “deer in the headlights” look she’s witnessed in both men as another key parallel.

“I see this look in his eyes sometimes, like he can’t believe he said this," Mary Trump added. "He can’t believe he admitted this thing. He doesn’t know who he’s talking to. He doesn’t know where he is.”

President Trump and his administration have repeatedly denied rumors of his deteriorating mental state, despite concerns raised after he received an MRI scan last month for reasons that he was not aware of.

Click here to listen to Mary Trump's full interview with the Daily Beast.

The Trump administration’s moves to push for regime change in Venezuela have been far from discreet, and one former CIA official warns that this approach and the overall operation are liable to blow up in the president's face.

Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump and his administration have pushed heavily for regime change in Venezuela, pressuring President Nicolás Maduro to resign from office. This push has involved a heavy increase in military and defense posturing, including the authorization of covert operations in the South American nation, the buildup of aircraft carriers off of its northern shore and the prospect of ground deployments in the near future.

Speaking with CNN on Monday afternoon, Kevin Carroll, a former CIA case officer and official with the Department of Homeland Security, said that the administration should “be quiet” with its handling of Venezuela and warned that any sort of military operation in the country could go poorly in a number of ways.

“The very first thing the administration should do is be quiet in public,” Carroll said. “You know, they've been discussing covert action, it’s more like overt action at this point."

"I think they shouldn't undermine whoever comes next there [after Maduro] by making them look like an American puppet by so publicly discussing the CIA’s involvement," Carroll added.

Carroll also warned that despite the history of successful U.S.-backed regime changes, there’s no guarantee that things won’t go sideways in Venezuela and noted such a move could have negative reverberations.

“The U.S. has demonstrated repeatedly that we're capable of forcing regime change from the air, as in Libya in 2011 or in Afghanistan in 2001, with air power and just some special operations forces," Carroll said. "But that doesn't mean that you can control what happens next. We obviously weren't able to get a government to our liking in power in [Libya], and it took a massive investment of U.S. forces to try, ultimately unsuccessfully, to keep a government that we favored in power in [Afghanistan]. So I think the reverberations could be could be really poor."

“You could have some sort of civil war situation develop with competing factions and within Venezuela. Another thing is that for historical reasons, Latin Americans are sensitive about gunboat diplomacy and so forth by the United States. And so going down there and so obviously forcing regime change is going to raise the hackles of nationalists throughout Latin America.”