A man speaking while a woman sits and listens attentively in a room with yellow curtains.

Truth about your daddy


By Nancy Ford

Dear Ivanka,

Uncomfortable as this is for both of us, I’m writing to you to share some truth about your daddy. I know you love him, and you want what’s best for him. This isn’t about love. This is about reality. Your daddy is a sick, sick man.

I’m no doctor, but I truly believe he has either dementia or Alzheimer’s Disease, or both, like almost six million other Americans.

It’s a horrific disease. It took both of my parents. Their symptoms manifested slowly at first — when the were in their mid seventies. It advanced with alarming speed. About ten years later, they both had the mental capacity of children.

Venerable right-wing columnist George Will recently opined that America now has a child president. God help me, I’m now agreeing with George Freaking Will, formerly considered to be the most conservative white man to ever put pen to paper. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that George Will now agrees with me, which is even more maniacal.

Yes, your daddy took that test that measures cognitive ability, and he accurately identified a camel and cow. I promise you, my father could have taken the same test a month before he passed on and not only have identified the cow, but also could have told you if it was a Guernsey or a Holstein cow. He also swore the current president is Dwight Eisenhower. Ironically, that’s the era your daddy is trying to revert our country to. But I digress.

An early warning sign of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease is when someone repeats stories again and again at inappropriate times. Like the time he won the electoral college? And how he’s going to build the wall? And how he’s a stable genius?

We’ve all had instances when we walk into a room to do something and forget what it is we intended to do. But your daddy, in front of media and an audience gathered to witness him signing an executive order, has walked out of the room without signing it. Repeatedly.

Another warning sign: repeatedly wearing the same clothes, day after day. Is your daddy’s red tie a red flag?

Your daddy looks straight into the camera and insists to the world, with a straight face, that he didn’t say something that he was filmed saying just a day earlier. Maybe he really believes his own contradictions. More likely, he flat out doesn’t remember what he said, and is making it all up as he goes along. That’s part of this disease.

One of the hardest things my family had to do was take the car keys from our parents before they hurt themselves or someone else, or got lost and jumped by someone preying on their weakness and dumped along the side of the road. True, your daddy doesn’t drive anything other than his golf cart. In his case, you have to take the nuclear launch codes away from him before we’re all lost.

My father insisted he had to drive because, other wise, who would make the daily three-mile journey to the nearest town to pick up the paper and a dozen doughnuts for breakfast? Needless to say, my family loves our doughnuts, but you can imagine how many doughnuts were piled up on their kitchen counter in just a week’s time? How many Big Mac box are currently hidden behind the drapes in the East Room, attracting ants.

Same thing for credit cards. The afflicted elderly are every sleazy salesperson’s dream. You daddy’s already run up the national debt to over $1 trillion in just the short time he’s been in office. Take those “cards†away from him before you end up with a brand new, top-of-the-line John Deere tractor in your garage with the snow and leaf blower attachments that he has no idea how to operate.

Completely averse to their true nature, my parents became cruel as their disease progressed. You can’t deny that your daddy’s cruelty has increased. Stupid schoolyard jabs at Rosie O’Donnell have escalated to “protecting our borders†by locking up babies in cages. And there’s the Pocahontas thing. And the transgenders in the military thing. And building his base with religious extremists who want to execute gay people. Cruelty doesn’t make America great again. It makes us bullies.

You are the only one who can help him, Ivanka. The people in your daddy’s administration don’t care about his or his well-being. They only care about manipulating his power, just like the telemarketers and reverse mortgage brokers and others who took advantage of my parents in their time of weakness. You need to have a sit-down with all of your siblings — yes, Tiffany, too — and make some hard decisions.

My family knew we had to act when fires in the microwave became a not-infrequent occurrence. Please step in before your father sets fire to the world.

Please, Ivanka. Do something.

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