Dr. John Gartner is a Baltimore psychologist who has diagnosed Donald T**** as suffering from frontal temporal dementia.
[Source: Thanks to Reg Rea, site visitor.
Transcription may have errors or typos. Richard]
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All of these things are going to get worse. You know, I always say, look at Donald Trump today because that’s the best Donald Trump you’re ever going to see because dementia doesn’t stay the same and it doesn’t get better. It only gets worse. It’s a rock rolling downhill.
What do you think is wrong with President Trump?
Two maybe three major things. The first thing is that he has the most severe personality disorder actually that a human being can have. It’s called malignant narcissism. It was originally introduced by Eric Fromm who escaped the Nazis to explain the psychology of Hitler and other murderous dictators like him. It’s actually not in the DSM. It’s kind of a historically obscure diagnosis, but I happen to have studied with the person who was the world expert on malignant narcissism. And so early on when Trump was running for president in 2015, I recognized that this was essentially a meteor heading towards Earth. Because I knew just how destructive a malignant narcissistic leader can be to a country and I saw it as potentially fatal to our country and unfortunately that seems to be potentially coming true.
So is that that’s your assessment of Tom’s condition?
Yes. And it has four components. Narcissism of course but also psychopathy or what we call antisocial personality disorder. So lying, breaking laws and norms, having no remorse for violating the rights of others, also paranoia, and finally sadism. A lot of what he does is is gleefully destructive and harmful. It actually gives him enormous pleasure to hurt people and to destroy things.
What symptoms in particular are you seeing?
Can you give us some examples? Not obviously, we’ve seen some physical things. The bruising on the hands, the MRI scans that he’s been to. You’re talking more mentally. Well, that’s the psychiatric diagnosis. That’s where he starts. He’s been that way his whole life. What is new are the signs of dementia that have been developing really now for quite some time. I and some physicians wrote some op-eds about this in 2019. And we were actually among the people who goad Ronnie Jackson into giving him the mocha during his first administration. That’s the dementia screening exam.
What’s interesting now, and this has just happened in the last week, is it’s starting to bleed out that his medical team knows he has cognitive problems. That White House report, first of all, they said he had his second annual physical. Well, if you do the math, you can’t have a second annual physical. That would be a semi-annual physical. they clearly wanted to follow up on things that concerned them. we know he took the mocha again, but he revealed that he took cognitive tests plural. So just to be clear, and he took an MRI. So just to be clear, we never, and when I say never, I mean never, ever, ever, give people a battery of cognitive tests or an MRI unless there’s something very serious that we suspect or are trying to rule out. So in other words, this is not by any means normal or routine. this is showing, you know, we’ve been criticized, right, for diagnosing him without examining him. I’m sure you were going to get to that, but the doctors who are examining him are giving him a neuropsychological battery and an MRI, which means that they suspect that he has severe cognitive decline or dementia.
Is there something in his decision-making that you think points to or or perhaps the way he acts at at press conferences that points to this dementia?
Yes, absolutely. So to diagnose dementia, you need to see a deterioration from the person’s baseline. and really not just in language, that’s language is the most obvious one, but language, memory, behavior, and psycho performance. He is showing gross deterioration in all of those areas. But just to pick one that you talked about his recent behavior, impulsivity is a sign of dementia. And I think he was always somewhat impulsive, but he’s becoming more erratically impulsive. And just to give you an example, the Prime Minister of Canada was in the Oval Office to discuss a trade deal. The minister from Ottawa posted a a social media video clip of Ronald Reagan speaking against tariffs. Ronald Reagan was very against tariffs. Donald Trump became so angry that they showed a video that video that he kicked the prime minister of of Canada out of his office. So that’s it. I’m not going to negotiate anymore because you That’s crazy, right? That’s an impulsive. It wasn’t even the prime minister of Canada who posted the video. Plus I you don’t normally cancel international relations over you know social media video and also of course, it was true. But that’s typical Trump because he lies about everything. So that would be an example of you know really he wakes up and you know today I’m going to double the tariffs on China. Tomorrow he says I’m going to…there’s this very erratic, arbitrary quality to his decision-making.
The other way that we see it in plain sight is his language. And this has been the main thing that has really been revealing his dementia. You know, when he was in the 80s he was extremely articulate. People might not believe that but he spoke in polished paragraphs not just sentences. Now he really has difficulty completing a sentence, a thought, and sometimes even a word. He evidences something that we call phonemic paraphasia, that we only see in dementia or other serious organic brain disorders. It’s not when you’re tired or old or drunk that’s andic paraphasia. You use a sound that isn’t an English word but it has a part of an English word in it and you’re struggling to say the word and you can’t get it out. You know we have dozens and dozens of examples of this right before the election. You probably saw a lot of these super cuts where they went from one mispronunciation after another. Well, just this week, everything I’m telling you about is this week. Okay, this week in Trump’s dementia, he tweeted or he put on truth social du du du du. So some people speculated he might have been trying to say South Carolina, but what he wrote was South C a r d. So you rarely see a phonemic paraphasia in writing. [laughter] Usually it’s oral, but here there’s like this is a smoking gun. It’s right there in black and white right before our eyes.
The other thing that we see that shows the dementia and again just this week number one that he was wandering in in Japan. I don’t know if you saw that film, but the prime minister three times had to redirect him. He would stop and have a blank look and look disoriented and she would kind of move him along and then finally he weirdly kind of stops in front of the Japanese flag and salutes it and then he just starts to wander down the line. And he’s about 20 soldiers down the line when they realize it’s kind of like when you take a kid to a department store and like wait what the hell happened to him I took my eyes off him for a second. You know he’s all the way at the other end of the room and a soldier has to come and escort him to where all the other dignitaries are and then she takes over and starts to escort him so this wandering has which is also as you know if anyone’s ever had a relative with dementia is very typical of dementia patients and has been going on for some time he often wanders past his car, wanders past his plane, wanders the wrong side of the dais, wanders around the dais.
So again what people need to understand about dementia is it only gets worse. So this is a sign that this is deteriorating. And finally this week in terms of his language the things that he was saying you know there’s various ways in which he shows dimension his language. One is just the deterioration in the quality of his vocabulary and his thought that people have done studies where they’ve actually looked at you know the vocabulary level of his speech and it started out at 12th grade and it’s down to about 3rd grade now. You know in other words that’s a clear quantitative decline.
We also have the phonemic paraphasia which again is only a sign of dementia. And then what we also have is this tangential thinking where he doesn’t complete a thought and he kind of moves on to another thought. There might be some loose free association involved, but it doesn’t really make sense. So, someone asked him about Harvard. He went on and talked about Harlem and then came back to Harvard. Well, just this week, I have two examples of his speech if you don’t mind. One is short and one is long.
I’ll read you the short one first. He’s speaking before the the troops on the on the on an aircraft carrier on October 28th. He said, “I never like good-looking people. I never admitted that before.” All right. So this is a disinhibition, I guess you know that he’s admitting that maybe you see I’m allowed to say we won in the Supreme Court based on merit. Okay. So what case in the Supreme Court gave him the right now to say he doesn’t like attractive people? You mean the case on merit? Oh no. Then he goes on but you know that’s right. You know that right now everything in this country is based on merit. So wait. So did he win the case on the merits? Is the case about merit and what’s that got to do with liking good-looking people?
Now let me read you a slightly longer example. This is where he was speaking in front of his walk of fame along the rose garden. He’s got pictures of the different presidents. He says “This here is the presidential walk of fame and we have this long wall with half windows because that used to be a swimming pool on the other side of the wall that was the swimming pool where Jackie would say I hear women inside, are there women inside? And the Secret Service said, “No, no, there are no women inside, ma’am. You’ll have to move along, ma’am.” But I hear women inside. No, you’ll have to move along, ma’am. So, that was the famous swimming pool. Now, it’s even worse. It’s been covered over and now it’s for the media. And I think we have a small representative group. I don’t think they allowed the rest of them. I can’t believe it. What happened? They’re all on the other side of the wall because this was supposed to be a private event. But there’s no such thing as a private event in politics. Lindsay, you learned that a long time ago, right? The great Lindsey Graham. You’re up 34 points, Lindsay. That’s not bad. I’ll tell you that’s not bad. So, we did the Presidential Hall of Fame from George Washington to Well, I think we’re going to have to rate him above me. He’s less than great. Less than George Washington. Somebody went there. They said, you’re the third best president. And you know, this was on television. Third best. Who had the first two, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln. I got extremely angry at this man. You know, you can’t it’s going to be it’s going to be tough to beat.”
And so, do you think this is down to his age?
No. I mean, this age, there are some declines that go with age. I’m very aware of them. I’m 67. It happens to me sometimes even in the middle of a podcast. I can’t remember a politician’s name. I go, you know, the guy, the guy from Japan, you know. But I know I’m having trouble finding the word and you’re not the president. And I’m not the president. But in other words, with signs of aging, people can be slower. They can be softer but they don’t have this complete word salad. There’s no connecting ideas. No one even knows what he’s talking about.
There’s this kind of emperor new clothes phenomenon going in our country, you know, where here, imagine a press pool listening to what you and I just heard, right? It’s obvious that the real story is the president is babbling nonsensically. That is the story. But that’s not the story you’ll read in the newspaper or see on TV. They’ll pick some quote where he makes some provocative statement or some policy statement and that’s what they’ll show. And they won’t show you that he’s rambling on and on without any connecting ideas.
Just to give you another example of how his disordered and disabled mind works. back during the campaign, remember he said, “Oh, these immigrants, they’re coming from the insane asylums.” And then he goes, “Anyone seen Silence of the Lambs?” Well, because Silence of the Lambs is a movie about an insane asylum. So he went from immigrants are coming from insane asylums to, “Hey, that reminds me of a movie I saw about insane asylums.” He goes, “Oh, the late great Hannibal Lecter. They don’t like to talk about him anymore.” Well, first of all, Hannibal Lecter is a fictional character. So, what do you mean the late Hannibal Lecter? And then he says they don’t talk about him anymore, implying that, you know, he was really a great guy and they’re not giving him credit. But, of course, he’s a serial killer who eats people and but then again, actually, it tells you something about his psychology and his unconscious, right? That he is actually idealizing Hannibal Lecter. But this is what I mean. You know, I used to say, “Is it going to take him babbling nonsensically from the White House for people to acknowledge that he is has dementia?” Well, guess what? That’s not enough.
Apparently, [laughter] does this tie more into the malignant narcissism that you talked about? Are they linked?
Well, here they’re linked in this regard. These are two independent disorders. But when people develop dementia, whatever personality or personality dis personality problems or personality disorders they have get dramatically worse. And this is what’s really frightening is now he is the worst version of himself as it were. Actually malignant narcissists also get worse when they get power. they become very omnipotent and grandiose and they feel entitled to do very violent destructive things which they get pleasure from and gives them a feeling of power. so you know now he wants to go to war with Venezuela. He’s blowing up boats you know that makes him feel powerful and he he likes to do things like that. So his his judgment which was always terrible now is completely erratic and he he doesn’t really know where he is. He’s talking about making peace between India, between Iran and Pakistan. you know, well, it’s India obviously, you know, and then he starts talking about India and saying, well, they’ve had a lot of changes of of leadership. No, that’s Pakistan. So, it’s he’s not just getting the names wrong. He’s confusing the names, the countries, the facts. And he’s making erratic, impulsive decisions, and there are no guard rails. There’s no one there to stop him say, “No, I don’t think we should go to war with Venezuela this morning because you had a a bad breakfast.” [laughter] so we’re in in a we’re in a hell of a lot of trouble. Us, America, but the world is in a hell of a lot of trouble because the most powerful man in the world is both evil and demented.
Do you think there’s an element that he’s perhaps playing up to this role? You talk about him, his narcissism. is he playing up to a strong man role? If we see there’s Putin and and Kim Jong-un and do you think he’s trying to play up to to them and be a bit more like them and he’s not actually really like this?
No, he’s really like this. He’s not playing. [laughter] You’ve compared him to Hitler in the past. Do you still stand by that? And what stage of Hitler do you think we’re seeing now? Yeah. Well, we’re, you know, we’re we’re well into Hitler’s first year. he’s actually not moving that much more slowly than Hitler did to consolidate power and destroy democracy. I was actually the one of the first people to publicly compare him to Hitler back in 2016. And then I got a lot of push back, as you might imagine, from the press. And they say, “Well, it’s not like he’s going to form concentration camps.” And I said, “Yes, he will. He will form concentration camps for immigrants.” And lo and behold, he had actually built out camps in the desert to hold 250,000 immigrants. Then there was this child separation policy that he really got a lot of flack for and he kind of backed off of that. but just so people understand, there’s a difference between a concentration camp and a death camp. A concentration camp is when we concentrate a group of undesirable people, undesirable because of their ethnicity or their religion or their politics, and we confine them to a space. The Japanese internment camps would be an example. so he is basically already imprisoning, you know, thousands of people in alligator Alcatraz or whatever. And he wants to build out more and more concentration camp capacity, but he’s also gone to the step of death camps. He’s just outsourcing them. So he’s sending people to these third world hell holes where it’s “abandon all hope ye who enter here.” Andrego Garcia who came back from the prison in El Salvador said over and over again the guards would say to them, “You’re going to die here. No one gets out of here alive.” So, he’s just outsourcing the murder. And you touched on this earlier, but what do you say to those who think, well, you’ve never met Trump and you know, you can’t make an assessment of someone you’ve never met? Well, I think you’re referring to the Goldwater rule. And one thing I think is important for people to realize is the Goldwater rule doesn’t say you can’t diagnose a patient you haven’t met. It says you can’t diagnose a public figure you haven’t met. You see the American Psychiatric Association isn’t a guild organization. And what they figured out after the debacle in 1965 when a newspaper wrote an article about Goldwater and said psychiatrists they took a poll. Psychiatrists say Goldwater’s unstable. Goldwater sued them. And he won $75,000. and they were embarrassed. but it’s as a if you’re guarding the profession, you don’t want people in your profession to make statements about public figures because they could retaliate against the profession. For example, recently well, not that recently. Now, it was during the first Trump administration, there was a lot of people in the American Psychiatric who wanted to relax the Goldwater rule. And a colleague of mine and he spoke about this to the New Yorker was in the meeting where they discussed this with the ethics committee and they not only doubled down on maintaining the Goldwater rule but they expanded it to say you can’t make any public statements not just a diagnosis and they said out loud we don’t want to we have to enforce this rule because we don’t want to piss off Trump. He might reduce our third party payments from insurance. So in others, they’re watching out for the guild so it’s not a high-minded ethical principle. I think you would agree that the lesson we learned from World War II is when you see a Hitler rising, being silent is never the most ethical option. Well, I was just going to say as psychologists, we also have another duty. We’re actually what are called mandatory reporters. If we think someone’s at risk, we need to warn that person. Well, having studied malignant narcissism, it was clear to me that the entire nation was at risk and that we had a duty to warn the nation and the world. And I formed an organization called Duty to War and we had thousands of mental health professionals participating in different ways. But the American Psychiatric Association was very effective at keeping a gag on most of the people in the profession and then sort of delegitimized our diagnostic statements because as in this interview people would always say well but isn’t that unethical or aren’t you unable to make that diagnosis?
The other reason that people don’t know we are able to make that diagnosis is because we changed diagnostic systems in the 1980s after the Goldwater rule where now all of our psychiatric diagnoses are based on observable behavioral criteria. So for example I told you that Donald Trump meets criteria for antisocial personality disorder. Well the first criteria is lying frequent lying. Well the Washington Post has documented like 50,000 they stopped counting after like 50,000 lies. He’s the most documented liar. I would argue he’s the most documented liar in all of recorded human history. If you have another one, you know, whip it out cuz I don’t think you’re going to find one. Obviously he breaks laws. He’s convicted felon. Obviously he violates other people’s rights. He’s a convicted sex offender. Obviously he has no remorse or an adjudicated sex offender. Excuse me. It was a civil case. He obviously has no remorse about violating these laws and whatnot. He obviously loves to exploit other people. He’s a con man. So we know this without having to interview him. I don’t need to have him lie to my face to know that he lies. So it just makes sense, right? These diagnostic criteria are all written in very common sense language so that you know an obvious an intelligent educated person can observe whether or not you’re seeing those behaviors. And sort of tying into that how important do you think it is to be honest about the health of the president because I don’t think Trump is the first president that there’s been some secrecy around their real health conditions. It’s not that he’s not dangerous. It’s not that he’s not doing things. He is, he’s doing things very erratically and impulsively. but as he’s becoming more mentally and cognitively disabled, what’s happening is it’s empowering other people in his administration to pursue their agenda underneath while praising him you know like the dear leader overtly.
And going forward, what are some of the signs or symptoms that would indicate Trump’s deteriorating state as you’re describing it?
Well, all of these things are going to get worse. You know, I always say, look at Donald Trump today, cuz that’s the best Donald Trump you’re ever going to see. Cuz dementia doesn’t stay the same and it doesn’t get better. It only gets worse. It’s a rock rolling downhill. The other area, by the way, where we see his dementia is his psycho performance. He actually evidences something we called a “wide-based gate,” which is typical of frontal temporal dementia, which a lot of experts tell me they think that’s the type of dementia. There’s more than one type of dementia. That’s the type they think he has. It makes people very impulsive. He swings his his right leg around in a semicircle. You might have noticed that when he met Putin on the red carpet, he kind of zigzagged around the carpet. You could see it very prominently there that his right leg was swinging like an arc pushing him to the left and then he had to overcorrect.
The other thing is his memory. recently he had a meeting a couple weeks ago. He had a meeting with Schumer and Hakeem Jeff about the shutdown. He said, “I met with Chuck Schumer and a really nice man.” He brought a really nice man with him. He didn’t know who. I’m not talking about forgetting names. He didn’t know who Hakeem Jeff was. Hakeem Jeff is the minority leader of the House. He deals with Hakeem Jeff on a regular basis. He’s not just some obscure congressman, right? He is the top congressman for the Democratic party. And he didn’t even say and I met with a I’m sorry I’m trying to get the name. He’s not forgetting the name. It’s as if he’d never met this person. As if he brought that nice man with him. That’s like you know if you had a relative who was in a nursing home for dementia and you know you bring your sister and she goes, “Oh, who’s that nice person that you brought?” Mom, that’s your other daughter. You know, it’s that level of nonrecognition that we’re talking about. But again, no one in the American press other than the independent media is talking about these things.
And lastly, the room as a whole considers he is going to push for a third term. There’s already Trump 2028 going around, but constitutional matters to one side because that’s obviously a whole other thing. Is it even possible from a health perspective that he could make it that far?
That’s an excellent question. I don’t think he’s going to be able to make it to the end of his term.
