Trump’s Cognitive Decline More Obvious Every Day

But my logic was if we have a duty to warn one victim, don’t we have a duty to warn hundreds of millions of victims? Because as mental health professionals, we understood how dire a predictor these kinds of traits were—whether you use the term malignant narcissism or not, people who with this kind of sadism and psychopathy and mental instability, we knew that this would be someone who would be very destructive to the people. And so we felt a moral responsibility to warn them. So I say I feel like I’ve been the psychiatric Paul Revere, except I haven’t been able to get off my horse for 10 years.

But the thing is that he said, what was embarrassing to us was that these psychiatrists were making statements that really weren’t based on science or fact. And so he said, I’ve said this, and he’s also said this, Alan Dyer is his name. He’s still alive, he’s still writing. We adopted a diagnostic system. He never meant this to, he said, to be a gag order on psychiatrists. He just didn’t want them making irresponsible public statements.

Well, in the 1980s, we adopted a new diagnostic system, the DSM-3, where all diagnostic criteria are based on observable behavioral criteria. So if you can observe someone’s behavior reliably, then you can actually kick off the boxes for the diagnostic criteria. For example, I mentioned that Donald Trump has antisocial personality disorder as one of his disorders. Well, the first diagnostic criteria is frequently lies. Well, the Washington Post has documented that he is actually the most documented liar in human history and I don’t think there’s even a close second.

They stopped counting at 30,000 lies. I think we can literally say, “We’ve observed this, it’s verified, and we can check that box and we go down the list.” Breaks laws and norms. Well, he’s convicted of 34 felonies. We know he’s guilty of much more and much worse. Breaks norms obviously and violates the right of others. Well, he is an adjudicated sex offender, so I guess we can say he violates the rights of others and a lack of guilt or anxiety about it.

So look, I mean, this isn’t rocket science. We know that these behaviors are part of diagnostic syndromes that are very, very dangerous and it’s right there in front of our eyes. And really the media has been sort of gaslighting us by acting as if this is somehow some either unknowable thing or only irresponsible, unethical psychologists would be making these wild statements when actually it’s as simple as the nose on our face.

We have eyes and ears. Even if you’re not a professional, you can see that these are incredibly destructive and damaging behaviors. And anyway, that’s the history of Duty to Warn. Now, what we’re seeing though is a collision of his personality disorder with his ongoing, I think very clear signs of dementia. And when people develop dementia, if they have any kind of personality disorder or personality problem, they become dramatically worse. Whatever their personality disorder is, it becomes dramatically worse. It becomes more aggressive, more impulsive, more disinhibited, more disorganized, more primitive and more erratic. And that’s what we’re seeing here. He’s still the same sick, destructive person, but now it’s becoming completely impulsive, confused, disoriented.

We can go down the list, but basically to diagnose dementia, we have to see deterioration from someone’s baseline in four basic areas, language, memory, psychomotor performance and behavior. We’re seeing all of these in Donald Trump. People don’t realize this, but Donald Trump used to be very articulate. He’s actually not stupid or he wasn’t stupid. If you look at tapes of him speaking in the 1980s, he was very articulate and he spoke in polished paragraphs. Now he can barely complete a sentence. Sometimes he can’t even complete a word, and we actually have a name for that. It’s called phonemic paraphasia, and it is a very diagnostic sign of dementia. All of his words he can’t pronounce. That is really a sign of disorganization.

But worse than that, his thinking has become so tangential. There’s really no, he doesn’t understand the question. He responds to some random thought and then he just has his own sort of chain of loose associations to it. The example I like to give is when he was on the USS Washington, he said, “I never like good looking people. I never admitted that before, but you see, I’m allowed to because we won in the Supreme Court based on merit. You know about that. Right now, everything in this country is based on merit.”

Now, how did any of those ideas go together? First of all, it’s sort of disinhibited that he’s saying, I’d never liked good-looking people. But then he’s saying, I can say that now because we won on the Supreme Court based on merit. I mean, his thoughts are gummed together, and we see him kind of talking about the irrelevant details going on for 15 minutes about the kind of paint that was used or the grass that was used. So we’re seeing it in language. We’re also seeing it in memory. When he met with Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries to negotiate over the shutdown, he said that Chuck Schumer had come with a very nice man. He brought a very nice man with him as if he’d never met him before, as he had no idea who he was. This is the minority leader of the house. He knows who he is. This is the kind of level of memory loss we’re talking about where you don’t recognize someone that you’ve known for years.

Right? That’s not just forgetting a name or have you. And his behavior is more disinhibited. He’s become all of this cursing and calling people “piggy” and calling everyone stupid and lashing out. It’s a sign of disinhibition and also the erratic way that he’ll have a bad morning and he’ll say, that’s it. 200 percent tariffs on China, where he cut off trade negotiations with Canada because he got annoyed that morning because Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, published a tweet about Ronald Reagan being against tariffs.

And finally there’s a psychomotor, if you notice, he’s got, we call a wide-based gait that’s very diagnostic frontotemporal dementia. He swings his right leg around as if it’s a dead weight in kind of a semicircle. I’ve been noticing this for we’ve been talking about this for almost a year now, but it got dramatically worse recently, perhaps just because the dementia’s worsening or perhaps because he had a stroke. I think it could be both. But if you saw that videotape of him and his grandchild, he’s practically limping, but he’s using that wide-based gait that I’m talking about. So in all of these areas, we see the classic signs of dementia and deterioration, but in someone that has a monstrous personality in an administration where there are no guardrails, what could go wrong? (Chuckles)

That’s talking about, look, if you’ve ever had a relative who had dementia, then you notice sometimes they just pass out. It’s not like the way an older person might take a nap or even fall asleep in a movie or late at night after they’ve had some wine and turkey and people are talking around them. This is really just in the middle of the day with cameras rolling, with your life on the line, just passing out. And he’s doing it over and over again, and now he even knows he’s being criticized for it, but he still can’t stop doing it because it’s completely, he’s losing control of his basic biological functions.

And it’s making him look weak, which he hates. So he threatened the New York Times and said that they were publishing this article about his falling asleep and his decline was the equivalent of treason. He said, anyone who says that about me, it’s treasonous. Well, of course I’m one of those people who are saying that about him. So now I guess I’m going to be in the Justice Department’s sites for treason.