At least one psychologist is convinced that President Donald Trump has dementia. Dr. John Gartner told The Daily Beast Podcast’s Joanna Coles that he has observed a “major deterioration” in Trump’s language skills, motor skills, and impulse control. The former Johns Hopkins professor and co-host of the podcast Shrinking Trump explained how he arrived at a diagnosis of dementia for the president, telling The Daily Beast that doing so involves assessing someone’s against their own baseline.
“We have to see a major deterioration in functioning in language and thinking and psychomotor performance and impulse control and a whole variety of areas… what a lot of people don’t realize is that Donald Trump used to be a very articulate person.”
“He used to speak with a high level of vocabulary in very polished paragraphs. Now what we see is not only has his vocabulary gone down, but… there are times when he’s really unable to complete a thought. Sometimes he’s unable to complete a word,” Gartner continued.
Gartner also cited Trump’s tendency to go on tangents in the middle of his own sentences, using a tangent about Hannibal Lecter as an example.
“He was lying and saying that they’re sending all these immigrants from insane asylums, right? And then he goes, ‘Silence of the Lambs. Anyone seen Silence of the Lambs?’ Well, Silence of the Lambs is a movie about insane asylums. Okay, so now we’ve moved from immigrants to has anyone seen this movie?“
“And then he goes, ‘The late great Hannibal Lecter. Nobody likes to talk about him anymore.‘ Well, first of all, he’s not dead, he’s a fictional character, so he can’t be the late Hannibal Lecter,” Gartner explained.
Gartner went on to tell The Daily Beast Podcast that he believes Trump to be a malignant narcissist, which, when combined with the deterioration in his functioning, is a “worst case scenario”.
“So that’s what we started out [with] as a baseline, but now what we have is this chronic organic deterioration from his own baseline. So we have in a sense the worst of both worlds because his judgment was always bad, he was always impulsive, he was always a liar, but now he really is losing his ability to think clearly, to plan, to understand things and to inhibit his speech and his behavior,” Gartner said.
In addition to a deterioration in his language skills and impulse control, Gartner, and other medial professionals, have observed a decline in his psychomotor performance.
“One of the dementia experts that I’ve consulted with is convinced he has frontotemporal dementia because of this symptom alone, which is it’s called a wide-based gait. If you look at his right leg, sometimes he just swings it like a dead weight in a semicircle… the expert that I consulted with said this is what we call patho-pneumonic. You don’t see this in anyone unless they have frontotemporal dementia,” Gartner explained.
Gartner also referenced the president’s diagnosis of chronic venous insufficiency and reports of his ‘droopy face‘ at a memorial event on September 11, which made waves after footage of the event was posted online.
“That’s not something that comes with age. It really is suggestive of some kind of potential mini stroke. So all of these things could be related,” he added.
“The circulatory problems could be related to the deterioration in his brain. They could even be causal. Or he could just have both dementia and some chronic medical problems. We don’t know. This is really an area where we’re really not sure. But he’s clearly deteriorating mentally and physically.”
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