US President Donald Trump’s droopy face and rambling speech, especially during Charlie Kirk’s memorial, have prompted skeptics to doubt the President’s mental and physical health. Now, a psychologist has come forward claiming that Trump was indeed showing signs of dementia.
According to Dr. John Gartner, a former Johns Hopkins professor, the US President was displaying a “major deterioration” in language, motor skills, and impulse control. Dr Gartner told The Daily Beast that he arrived at the diagnosis by “ assessing someone against their own baseline.”
Dr Gartner’s diagnosis comes amid many cast doubts about Trump’s speech during the Charlie Kirk memorial, wherein he veered off topic, from memorialising his close ally to suddenly, before suddenly launching into a soliloquy on tariffs, “radical left maniacs,” and the Make America Healthy Again movement.
Dr Gartner said Trump used to be a very articulate person, and there is now a major deterioration in functioning in language, thinking, psychomotor performance, impulse control, and a whole variety of areas. “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 added.
The psychologist also referred to Trump’s tendency to go on tangents in the middle of his own sentences, pointing to the President’s earlier remarks wherein he began talking about immigrants before ending up with a movie on ‘The Silence of the Lambs’.
Gartner believes that Trump is a malignant narcissist, and his deterioration in his functioning would be a malicious combo. “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,” Dr Gartner said adding that what they had now was “worst of both worlds”, because Trump “was always bad, always impulsive, 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.”
There is also a shrinkage in his psychomotor performance, which indicates frontotemporal dementia, pointing to Trump’s “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 pathognomonic. You don’t see this in anyone unless they have frontotemporal dementia,” Gartner explained.
Donald Trump shows ‘major deterioration’ in language, motor skills: Psychologist details US President’s cognitive decline
