A top psychologist has warned that 79-year-old Donald Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior likely points toward a personality disorder being rapidly worsened by dementia.
“When people develop dementia, they become the worst versions of themselves,” Dr. John Gartner—a therapist, activist, author, and former professor at Johns Hopkins—told Joanna Coles Sunday on the latest episode of The Daily Beast Podcast.
Gartner has previously shared with the show how he sees the aging president’s verbal gaffes, growing confusion, and frequent memory lapses as “clinical signs of dementia,” which have in turn exacerbated what he believes to be Trump’s underlying “malignant narcissism.”
“Whatever personality issues or problems [people with dementia] have begin to deteriorate and they become even more crude, disorganized, aggressive, confused versions of that personality disorder,” Gartner added.
Gartner also previously identified the president’s “wide-based gait,” the diagnosis of chronic venous insufficiency, and a September incident where he was photographed with a ‘droopy face’ as “signs of psychomotor deterioration.” Gartner told Coles this week that Trump’s physical appearance at a Veterans’ Day event was also indicative of more serious issues.
“You do see he’s having difficulty raising his hand to salute,” Gartner explained. “And part of dementia and or stroke, because it really could be either or both of those, because it appears like it is on the right side of his body that he had the droop with the face. It’s also on the right side of his body that he has the wide-based gait, where he swings his leg in kind of a semicircle. These are signs.”
Earlier in January, Trump became the oldest person in U.S. history to assume the presidency. A growing raft of highly public flubs—including routinely confusing the names of countries, opponents, and foreign leaders, as well as falling asleep during high-profile meetings—fueled rampant speculation as to the state of his cognitive wellbeing in the months since.
Trump’s mental health has been firmly in the spotlight this week after he snapped at a reporter aboard Air Force One who’d asked him about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, telling her: “Quiet, piggy.”
Gartner says the stress of that scandal, which has seen Trump facing intense scrutiny over his historic relationship with the late pedophile and convicted sex trafficker, would “grind anyone down.” But the clinical psychologist adds that the shocking nature of the president’s retort to the reporter provides perhaps the clearest evidence to date of a mind in crisis.
“He’s a malignant narcissist. Anything which doesn’t affirm his grandiosity and his omnipotence, because his grandiosity has gotten to almost psychotic degrees at this point, is a mortal threat,” Gartner told the podcast. “So the fact that he’s perpetually being bombarded by waves and waves of these threats, it is going to take a toll.”
Another key study in how the president has become increasingly “disinhibited and impulsive,” Gartner says, is that Trump called off trade negotiations with Canada after taking a dislike to a viral video posted by Doug Ford, the Premier of Ottawa, featuring Ronald Reagan speaking out against tariffs.
Trump has imposed extensive levies on trading partners since assuming office for a second time, claiming the penalties will help balance what he sees as unfair treatment by foreign nations in global markets.
“He got so irritated by that video that he called off the trade negotiations. I mean, who does that?” Gartner said. “Who calls off a high-level meeting with the head of state because you got p—d off about something you saw on social media over your corn flakes that morning? I mean, that’s the kind of level of impulsivity we’re talking about.”
Gartner is not the only guest on the show to have raised the alarm over possible signs of dementia from the president. Only last week, Trump’s niece Mary Trump, 60, warned that when she watched his public appearances, she could see the same symptoms his father, Fred Trump Sr., exhibited during the early stages of Alzheimer’s.
“Well, of course, Alzheimer’s is genetic, so he very much has it in his family,” Gartner reflected Sunday. “He may have Alzheimer’s. He may have frontotemporal dementia. The symptoms, actually, there’s more than one kind of dementia, but his symptoms seem to point more towards frontotemporal dementia.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment on this story.
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