President Donald Trump’s lack of judgment as he ages is jeopardizing global peace efforts, one psychologist says.
Dr. John Gartner, a former Johns Hopkins professor who said months ago that Trump was showing “clinical signs of dementia,” told The Daily Beast Podcast that the 79-year-old commander in chief’s lack of impulse control doesn’t bode well for the increasingly tenuous world order.
“It’s such a terrible combination, because we have a constitutional crisis of sorts, right, where a president has really disregarded all of the checks and balances,” Gartner told host Joanna Coles. “But we have someone with a brain disorder, OK? A deteriorating brain disorder, so they have no internal controls or judgment.”
“Donald Trump’s id is now sort of in control of the world, because he has no frontal lobes,” Gartner claimed. “He has no advisors. We have no Constitution. We have no checks and balances. It’s like everything just radiates from his id, and there’s not a single thing to sort of stop an impulse in his disturbed brain from becoming a war.”
Gartner pointed to some of Trump’s comments at the first gathering of his “Board of Peace” on Thursday as another sign of his proclivity to make momentous decisions—like about military action against Iran—“in an arbitrary, confused and paranoid way.”
Trump told those gathered what may happen next after the U.S. struck Iran’s nuclear facilities last summer: “So now we may have to take it a step further, or maybe not. Maybe we’re going to make a deal. You’re going to be finding out over the next, probably, 10 days.”
“So in other words,” Gartner translated, “we might go to war, we might not, we’ll let you know. We’re not even telling you on what basis we’re going to war, or when we’ll go to war, or what criteria would make us not go to war. You’ll find out. If we can’t make a deal and we feel like it’s wrong, we’re going to bomb.”
Trump, according to an Axios report published earlier this week, wasn’t seeing enough progress with negotiations and was ready to begin military action.
“The boss is getting fed up. Some people around him warn him against going to war with Iran, but I think there is a 90 percent chance we see kinetic action in the next few weeks,” one presidential adviser told the publication, as U.S. military ships and aircraft have moved closer to the country.
When reached for comment, the White House criticized Gartner while touting Trump’s health, which the Daily Beast has long been covering.
“President Trump is the sharpest, most accessible, and energetic president in American history,” spokesperson Davis Ingle said in a statement. “While the deranged and failing Daily Beast has their lightweight, glue-sniffing interns push baseless conspiracy theories from a disgraced doctor—President Trump is putting the American people first.”
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