Since at least 2016, a brave, determined, and stalwart group of psychologists and other mental health professionals have been trying to warn the public about Donald Trump’s obvious unwellness and pathological behavior. Based on mountains of public evidence of Trump’s behavior and what he has encouraged in others, these mental health experts concluded that the corrupt twice-impeached ex-president, a sexual assaulter as confirmed by a court of law, aspiring dictator, and defendant who is now facing hundreds of years in prison appears to be a sociopath if not a full-on psychopath.
In following through on their ethical obligations, the “duty to warn” the public about a uniquely powerful and dangerous person such as Donald Trump, these mental health professionals risked their careers, reputations, and yes, even personal safety. If members of Congress, then President Trump’s cabinet officials, senior law enforcement, and others with the power to contain the dangerous ex-president had listened to them and acted accordingly, the country would not be on the precipice of Trump's return to power where he will, as threatened and promised, become America’s first dictator.
As seen in the last few weeks and months, Donald Trump’s dangerousness is rapidly escalating. At his rallies and other events, Donald Trump is exhibiting obvious and repeated examples of challenges in his speech, language, and memory. In a widely read series of conversations here at Salon, Dr. John Gartner, who is a prominent psychologist and contributor to the bestselling book "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President," has been warning that Trump is apparently suffering from dementia or some other type of brain disease.
Gartner summarizes this as: “Not enough people are sounding the alarm, that based on his behavior, and in my opinion, Donald Trump is dangerously demented. In fact, we are seeing the opposite among too many in the news media, the political leaders and among the public. There is also this focus on Biden's gaffes or other things that are well within the normal limits of aging. By comparison, Trump appears to be showing gross signs of dementia. This is a tale of two brains. Biden's brain is aging. Trump's brain is dementing.”
One of Dr. Gartner’s colleagues, Dr. Harry Segal, who is a senior lecturer at Cornell University and Weill Cornell Medical School, has gone so far as to suggest that Donald Trump should withdraw from the 2024 Election and seek immediate medical help.
Dr. Gartner is far from alone in his concerns and warnings.
In attempt to raise public awareness, Dr. Gartner has created a new petition at Change.org.: “We diagnose Trump with probable dementia: A petition for licensed professionals only.”
At the time of this writing, hundreds of verified mental health and other medical professionals have signed the petition. This group includes some of the leading experts in their respective disciplines. Some of these signers have also offered detailed comments about what they have concluded, based on the obvious evidence, is Donald Trump’s increasing cognitive difficulties, and why he is therefore unfit for office.
In this, our third conversation about Donald Trump’s apparent cognitive problems, Dr. Gartner continues to document the ex-president’s behavior, explains the importance of the growing consensus by medical professionals that Trump is apparently experiencing cognitive challenges, and warns that the ex-president should not be given access to classified information because he is untrustworthy and easily manipulated by malign actors.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Several weeks ago, we began our series of conversations here about Trump’s obvious cognitive challenges and how they appear to be getting worse at a rapid pace. It is all unfolding as you predicted.
Our conversations are starting to feel like a weekly dementia round-up. Trump keeps proving my point. This week’s lowlights include more phonemic aphasias. Here are a few examples I have noted. “We have becrumb a nation.” “All comp-ply-ments” to Joe Biden. “I know Poten.” "He can’t cam-pay." He can’t campaign. “We will expel the wald-mongers.”
We had more examples where Trump couldn’t complete a sentence and strung the fragments together incoherently. It’s worth noting that his demeanor changes dramatically at these moments. At one point, Trump was making nonsense sounds, struggling to form even a single word. At one of his events, he said “We’ll re-ve-du. Ohhhh..” At that moment, Trump took a long-defeated sigh, and looked up at the ceiling blankly, looking confused and de-energized. Finally, Trump is sometimes reduced to simply vocalizing nonsense sounds that are not words at all like an infant. For example, at a recent rally Trump said "Gang, boom. This is me. I hear bing". Trump is literally babbling nonsensically and his followers at these rallies, or interviewers on right-wing media, are nodding their heads in appreciation like he makes sense. This is deeply disturbing.
I am continuing to catalogue examples of what to me, clearly appear to be his cognitive decline. I just gave you some examples from last week, but there are more. Ron Filipkowski has a super-cut reel on Twitter that shows 30 examples of gross cognitive slippage from the last week alone. 30! How much more evidence do we need before the mainstream media starts asking the question: Is Trump showing signs of dementia?
You have started a petition at Change.org where medical professionals can sign and offer a comment if they have come to the preliminary conclusion that Donald Trump is exhibiting signs of apparent cognitive decline. Why did you take this step? What has the response been like?
I knew medical and mental health professionals were seeing what I was seeing: flagrant and increasingly frequent signs of dementia, signs that really can't be that easily confused with anything else, and signs that aren't subtle. We're seeing them week after week, and they are getting worse and worse. And no one is saying anything! I had to find a vehicle to give other medical and mental health professionals a chance to express their professional opinions and have a voice. That was the purpose of the petition. At this point, the petition has over 300 verified signatures. Those numbers are going to grow because the petition has only been available for about a week, or so. These licensed professionals, many of them experts in this subspecialty, are making the medical case, point by point with concrete behavioral examples, that Trump's behavior strongly suggests dementia.
The petition includes signers from the faculties of the country’s best medical schools. These are people who know what they’re talking about.
These experts are desperate to warn the public, because they see the signs of Trump’s cognitive decline through the eyes of years of training and experience.
They know better than anyone the alarming implications of what we are all seeing with our own eyes. It’s maddening to them that no one with the right letters after their name is sounding the alarm. The licensed professional experts who signed this petition are medical whistleblowers, risking their reputations and their livelihoods to warn the country of looming catastrophe. Lots of my good colleagues begged off signing this petition, admitting to men that they were afraid of potential reprisals, both professional and personal. These signers are heroes in my book.
Why do you think the American mainstream news media, for the most part, is staying away from this issue of Trump’s obvious aberrant behavior? Why are they not talking in clear and explicit terms about what all of us can see?
I really don't know what their motivation is. Sometimes I'm very cynical, and I just think that these media outlets are owned by huge corporations that are inherently conservative and right-wing. Sometimes I just think they're cautious. In Jennifer Rubin's column in the Washington Post, she called out her colleagues in the media for harping on Biden’s age and while remaining silent about Trump's increasingly obvious cognitive decline. She mentioned our conversations here as a model for how the story should be reported. But Rubin is an outlier. I want to shame the American news media into covering Trump's readily apparent cognitive decline. We are imperiled as a country and a people. I want to make enough noise so the media can’t keep ducking the question.
The press has flogged the non-story of Biden’s age to death. Yes, Biden’s old. So am I. He forgets names and dates. So do I, and so do most of the people in my age cohort. So what? To say we’re less able because of these blips is just plain ageism, pure and simple. News flash: We senior citizens have something you young whippersnappers don’t: the wisdom and judgment that comes from experience. Most societies revere their elders but we ridicule ours.
Meanwhile, the press edits out the most disordered parts of Trump’s speeches or normalizes his behavior with innocuous euphemistic words, like “rambling” The press is pathologizing the normal in the case of Biden and normalizing the pathological in the case of Trump. It’s perverse.
How do you rebut the obvious, and at this point tedious, pushback that you and your colleagues are violating the so-called Goldwater Rule?
It has become a type of blanket denial, this hiding behind the Goldwater Rule. Apparently, no matter what symptoms we are seeing, no matter how much evidence there is, and no matter how many people with direct contact with Trump say that there is a serious problem with his precipitous decline, medical and mental health professionals are supposed to ignore it and treat the whole matter as some type of unknowable thing—because we didn’t meet personally with Trump. Does that make sense to you? Obviously, Donald Trump is not going to submit himself to a psychiatric examination from neutral parties who are real experts and then give them permission to report their findings to the public. Ultimately, the people who have the expertise to explain what appears to be happening with Trump's mind and brain are forbidden from commenting on it.
We are the only medical specialty or profession of any kind under a permanent gag order, and all because Barry Goldwater embarrassed the American Psychiatric Association when he sued a magazine in 1964 for some ill-advised psychiatric opinions they quoted. And if a mental health professional has the courage to speak the truth, they're told that what they have to say is entirely invalid because of this antiquated ethical precept. First of all, we really should make a distinction between invalid and unethical.
If you want to argue that I'm being unethical for diagnosing Donald Trump, well that’s one argument we can have. But that doesn't mean that I'm not accurate in my diagnosis. Looking at the petition, these are very serious and expert people, real professionals with decades of experience, who have reached the conclusion based on the available evidence — which is overwhelming — that Donald Trump appears to be showing signs of probable dementia. One can potentially argue that they shouldn't be speaking publicly about this, but one cannot reasonably deny their expertise or the evidence. So, in the end, who are you going to believe? Medical experts with years of experience, making fact-based arguments based on observable data who are literally risking their careers to warn the public or the MAGA apologists and propagandists?
What is the consensus that has been reached by the medical professionals who have signed your Change.org petition?
Trump’s a classic case of dementia. He ticks all the boxes. He’s shown a precipitous decline from his baseline—He once had a rich vocabulary and spoke in polished paragraphs. And he shows the classic disturbances in memory, language, behavior, and motor performance that we see in dementia patients. If Trump were their patient or my family member, they would urgently refer him for an emergency neuropsychiatric evaluation. And under no circumstances would a patient showing this level or organic cognitive decline be capable of being president.
Donald Trump commands the support of tens of millions of people. His most diehard followers exhibit the behavior of being in a cult. Trump exalts in being a de facto cult leader. In terms of the leader-follower dynamic, what will happen to our society if Trump, given his apparent cognitive and emotional and intellectual difficulties, were to become president again?
It is a national emergency. If Trump were to take back the White House, the American people would be living in what would be the equivalent of an insane asylum. The leader would be like a mad king, and everything would make no sense. The country would be ruled by the chaos emanating from President Donald Trump. Most people cannot imagine how bad it is going to be when Donald Trump has absolute power. The American people are going to have a collective nervous breakdown if Trump takes back power.
If Donald Trump is in fact suffering from some type of cognitive deterioration as you and your colleagues have initially concluded, how would this impact his impulse control? The ability to self-censor his thoughts and speech for example? To behave responsibly and self-regulate?
There's a lack of awareness about his own behavior from Trump. Many of the experts who signed the petition made that observation. Trump makes these gross verbal errors, talking in gibberish and nonsense, but he has such confidence that he keeps going. He just barrels through without embarrassment or being self-conscious about his obvious problems. Because of his severe personality disorder, he's always lacked a capacity for self-awareness and critical self-reflection about hideous behavior. But now, he’s oblivious to the fact that his mind appears to be rapidly deteriorating before our eyes.
Donald Trump does not have a moral core. He has demonstrated that repeatedly through his decades of life. But now it appears that Trump is having problems with self-regulation. That is a horrible combination, one that results in chaotic random evil behavior. In the end, Trump's apparent inability to self-regulate is just an aggravating factor that magnifies all the other pathologies that we've seen thus far.
Donald Trump, because of his status as the de facto Republican presidential nominee, is poised to begin receiving classified intelligence briefings. Should Trump have access to this information?
We know that Trump will sell the information to the highest bidder. Given Trump's character, that would be the case excluding any neurological problems. Trump has no loyalty to the United States. He is only loyal to his own self-interest — and based on his behavior perhaps Vladimir Putin too. If someone is charged with multiple indictments for stealing classified documents, you probably shouldn’t give them more classified documents.
To that point. Trump just met with the autocratic leader Viktor Orban of Hungary. Trump openly admires Putin and other political gangsters, thugs, and tyrants. Given your conclusion, how easy would it be to manipulate Donald Trump?
Very easy. We're not talking about a demented Ronald Reagan, who still loved America, and in the end wanted to do right for the country. Donald Trump has shown himself to be a traitor who will do anything he can to hurt the country for his own benefit. That is Trump's default position. Were Trump to become president again, how hard would it really be for our foreign adversaries to manipulate a president who can already be won over with simple ego-stroking and bribes, but is now also experiencing obvious cognitive decline?
Donald Trump, because he’s fundamentally corrupt at his core, attracts confidence men, de facto psychopaths, and swindlers into his inner circle. In a vulnerable demented state, there are going to be lots of people working for Trump who are being paid by foreign governments and other hostile interests to manipulate him to do things that are favorable for them and not America.
Do you believe that President Biden should directly engage these questions about Trump's mental and emotional health? If one of his advisors or some Democratic Party campaign consultant reached out to you, what would you tell them?
President Biden has always done better when he's gotten more aggressive. The State of the Union speech was a great example of this. Why wouldn’t Biden and the Democrats not inveigh against the real dangers presented by Trump’s severe cognitive decline? I would argue they’re obligated to. It’s the truth! And people need to know.
Otherwise, the Republicans control the false narrative, focusing on Biden’s age when we should be focusing on Trump’s dementia.
Beyond any clinical observations or evaluations, as a human being, how are you feeling watching Trump behave like this?
It's terrifying. This is a nightmare scenario. I have been speaking to my colleagues and also those medical professionals who have contributed to the petition and they are telling me that they are scared too. They're all saying that this person is uniquely incapable of being president because on top of his malignantly narcissistic personality, he now appears to be losing his cognitive abilities. Can you imagine a worse combination? I'm learning to be more spiritual and to give more trust to the universe. That's the only way I'm surviving. We must continue to sound the alarm. Those of us who can see what is going on with Trump's obvious cognitive challenges must not let ourselves be gaslit into thinking that this is all somehow normal. We are not hallucinating or imagining things. Donald Trump is dangerous and becoming even more so. That’s obvious to anyone paying attention.
