Dementia

Clinical psychologist John Gartner pulls out his Ph.D. to tell the world what ought to be obvious. Donald J. Trump has fairly advanced and rapidly progressing dementia. Believe me, I know what dementia looks like and I don't need a degree in psychology to tell you, but for some inexplicable reason the world wants to turn a blind eye. The New York Times ran at least one story every day for a couple of months (maybe a slight exaggeration, but also maybe not) telling us that Joe Biden is old, and the next day that he's still old, and the next day that he's still old . . .  Every time he forgot a name or got a date wrong it was a front page story.

 

Meanwhile, the Republican candidate is continually spewing gibberish, mixing up Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi, thinking that Barack Obama is president, and -- oh heck, here are a few excerpts:

 

When Duty to Warn began in 2017, our mission as mental health professionals was to warn the world that Trump was dangerously unfit and a malignant narcissist. Practically conventional wisdom today among anyone who’s not in the cult.  . . .After Biden won, I took off my uniform and went home. . . .But I couldn’t believe my eyes. Day after day the press was gaslighting the American people: Pathologizing Biden’s normal signs of aging, such as forgetting names, and normalizing Trump’s flagrant signs of dementia. That false narrative was having a real impact on the polls, and no one with the right letters after their name was stepping in to correct the record. . . .

 

I call it the “double lie.” Pathologizing Biden’s normal aging is the first lie. Normalizing Trump’s dementia is the second.  . . . Forgetting the name of the president of France isn’t the same as thinking Obama is president or that Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi are one person. Can we introduce a sense of proportion and some common sense here?

 

Overall, [Trump] shows a shocking decline in verbal fluency from his previous baseline.  . . .Now, his vocabulary is impoverished, and he often can’t finish a sentence or even a word. Typical of dementia patients, he repeats himself and overuses superlatives and filler words. . . .Not only will Trump continue to get worse and worse, his rate of decline is accelerating, and if he is typical, he will fall off what they call the “cognitive cliff” relatively soon.

 

Recently, Trump confused Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi. You can kind of intuit how the demented thought process works in Trump’s mind to combine people. There’s an archetype in his head of a hated powerful female politician he is fighting. Fragments of Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi stick to this miasma of ill-defined thought and feeling, and combine in his imagination to form a new combined person who doesn’t really exist: Bad, bad, Nikki-Pelosi woman. Me hate her. 8 times he’s said he’s running against Obama. How often does he say and think it in private? I think this suggests that Trump has also combined Obama and Biden into one imaginary hated Joe-Obama person.

 

Trump shows formal signs of disordered speech we typically see only in organically impaired dementia patients: A) “phonemic aphasia” Trump uses non-words in place of real words, that usually include a fragment of the actual word. For example saying “mishuz” instead of missile, or “Chrishus” instead of Christmas. You can look at supercut reels assembled by Ron Filipkowski on Twitter, The Daily Show, and now by the Democratic House Judiciary Committee, as well. Both Chairman Nadler and Rep. Swalwell showed their own supercuts of Trump’s cognitive decline at the Hur hearings, to counteract Hur’s partisan slur about Biden’s “poor memory.”

 

Trump evidences “tangential thinking” where he drifts from one unrelated thought fragment to another, and sometimes tries to “confabulate” them into a story. But the narrative is literally incoherent. When the press describes Trump’s speeches as “rambling,” they are gaslighting us with a euphemistic word that normalizes the grossly abnormal. Trump regularly degenerates into incomprehensible strings of words.

Just recently outside a New York courtroom, Trump declared:

“We can’t have an election in the middle of a political season. We just had Super Tuesday. And we had a Tuesday after Tuesday already.”

Some of his utterances are incomprehensible for a different reason. They suggest Trump is so disoriented he’s occupying a different reality than everyone else. 

For example:

“They’re weaponizing law enforcement for high-level interference against Joe Biden’s top and only political appointment. A guy named me. A guy named me.”

At a recent rally, he said: 

“Biden beat Barack Hussein Obama. Ever heard of him?”

 

The fact is it's accelerating and he's no longer presentable in public. But the New York Times pretends not to notice.