Trump, Dementia, Collective Pathology

This is an excellent and deeply important article. The mainstream corporate funded media is not informing us in so many crucial ways, including highlighting again and again the truth of this former president's cognitive functioning and dangerous pathology. It cannot be overstated how great the threat and danger to us all is — our country, other nations, and the planet — if there were to be a second Trump presidency. 

To be clear, if I witnessed these same extreme dangers, diminishment, and pathology in Joe Biden, I would also be compelled to repeatedly speak up — which I do regarding Biden's horrifying collusion with and funding of the genocide in Gaza. That said, I am acutely aware that a Trump presidency would be even more brutal in its actions directed at the Palestinian people. And here we even have a man who does not believe in global warming and would cut back all policies that are aimed to address this greatest crisis humanity has ever faced. 

In sharing this article, there is no allegiance to any political party. This is about my commitment to being part of the universal struggle for a more just, sustainable, peaceful, and caring world — and the recognition of the extreme threat to the welfare of us all that Trump poses. — Molly

By Mike Burch / Works at Alpha Omega Consulting Group (company)

Will Trump last until the election? He seems to be deteriorating much faster than Biden.

Trump has been deteriorating rapidly and large numbers of mental health experts have said so. For example… According to psychologist Dr. John Gartner, a professor for 28 years at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, Trump’s mispronunciations of simple words and his inability to formulate complete sentences appear to be signs of growing dementia. And Dr. Gartner is by no means the Lone Ranger:

• A change.org petition for licensed medical professionals had 1,867 signaturesthe last time I checked, with 92 new signatures on 3–27–2024 alone. The signers agree that “From our years of training and experience, we are convinced that, while a definitive diagnosis would require further testing, Donald Trump is showing unmistakable signs strongly suggesting dementia, based on his public behavior and informant reports that show progressive deterioration in memory, thinking, ability to use language, behavior, and both gross and fine motor skills.” The signers agree that:
  • Trump “shows a shocking decline in verbal fluencyfrom his previous baseline.”
  • “People who worked closely with Trump during his administration are reporting a shocking deteriorationin just 4 years.”
  • Trump has repeatedly confused people and generations and the Dementia Care Society says “confusing people and generations” is a sign of advanced dementia. Examples of Trump confusing people, including members of his own family, and generations are provided herein.
• Over 700 mental health expertssubmitted a petition to Congress warning of Trump’s declining mental health.
• The Duty to Warn Coalition is an association of psychiatrists, psychologists and other mental health professionals who have concluded that Trump is psychologically unfit to be president and that they have an ethical responsibility to inform the public of the danger he represents.
• Lance Dodes, a supervising analyst emeritus of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and a retired Harvard Medical School professor, said there is “overwhelming evidence” that Trump is suffering from dementia because he repeatedly shows “confusion about reality.” There are many examples of such confusion herein.
• Justin Frank, a former Professor of Psychiatry at George Washington Medical School and author of Trump on the Couch, told David Pakman that Trump is showing signs of early frontotemporal dementia such as sniffingwhile talking, slurring his words, repeating himself, “word-finding” (hunting for the right word and sometimes not finding it, as when Trump meant to say “three years later” but nonsensically said, “three years lady lady lady”), and shaking his shoulders when he can’t produce the correct word. Such symptoms begin to occur in a dementia patient’s late sixties and seventies, so Trump fits the profile.
• New York psychologist Suzanne Lachmann said Trump will “seemingly forget how the sentence began and invent something in the middle” resulting in “an incomprehensible word salad”—a behavior observed “frequently in patients who have dementia.”
• Vincent Greenwood, executive director of the Washington Center For Cognitive Therapy, says Trump is showing “confusion with increasing regularity.” Greenwood told Salonthat “We all stumble over and mispronounce words occasionally. This is not what is going on with Trump. The incidence of these kinds of mistakes takes him into this realm of phonemic paraphasia, which is a sign of underlying brain damage, not just aging. Even when compared to his speech of a few years ago, you can observe a noticeable difference. When you compare it to his speech as a middle-aged man, the shift is radical and ominous.”
• Amanda Marcotte of Salonsaid, “It’s getting harder by the day to ignore that 77-year-old Donald Trump is decompensating rapidly. He wasn’t all that healthy or coherent to begin with, but lately, watching him speak one has the feel of getting cornered by the weird creep at the nursing home.”
• Harry Segal, a senior lecturer at Cornell University and Weill Cornell Medical School, has recommended that Trump should withdraw from the 2024 election and seek immediate medical help.

In an interview with Chauncey DeVega of Salon, Dr. Gartner observed that Trump is showing “gross signs of dementia” and is “dangerously demented.” It bears noting that dementia is hereditary and Trump’s father, Fred Trump, died with severe dementia unable to identify members of his own family.

Dr. Gartner told DeVega that Joe Biden’s occasional gaffes “are well within the normal limits of aging.” Trump, however, appears to be showing gross signs of dementia. This is what Dr. Gartner told DeVega, verbatim:

I had to speak out now because the 2024 election might turn on this issue of who is cognitively capable: Biden or Trump? It’s a major issue that will affect some people’s votes. 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.

DeVega said Dr. Gartner advised him that, based on Trump’s speech, memory, recall, and other behaviors, he appears to be “hypomanic” and “cognitively deteriorating at a rapid rate.”

Dr. Gartner also told DeVega that “the diagnostic signs are not subtle” and would be obvious to laypeople.

Dr. Gartner has noted that during his speeches Trump appears to be spiraling into “phonemic paraphasias” which means “the substitution of non-words for words that sound similar.” Such symptoms “are not normally seen until a patient enters the moderate to severe stages of Alzheimer’s.”

Dr. Gartner told John Iadarola of The Damage Report that phonemic paraphasias is always evidence of brain damage. ALWAYS.

In an interview on the David Pakman Show, Dr. Gartner said that he consulted other mental health experts and they all agreed that no one commits such “phonemic paraphrases” without brain damage. When he asked other experts if they had ever seen such non-word pronunciations in people without brain damage, “They said ‘no.’”

Dr. Gartner called Trump’s inability to pronounce simple words or to complete coherent sentences a “neurological smoking gun” and a “real breakdown in the capacity to think and use language.”

Such symptoms, according to Dr. Gartner, are “formal evidence of dementia.”

In his interview with Pakman, Dr. Gartner called what Trump is experiencing a “basic breakdown” in his ability to use language to express his thoughts.

Dr. Gartner also described “enormous regression” in Trump’s ability to express himself. He furthermore noted that Trump’s repeated used of superlatives is a sign of dementia, an indication of his “impoverished vocabulary.” Rather than finding more appropriate adjectives, Trump’s malfunctioning brain keeps coming up with “wonderful” and “beautiful” even when such terms are completely inappropriate. For instance, Trump called Vladimir Putin’s excuse for invading Ukraine and mass-murdering Ukrainian children and their mothers “wonderful.”

This is how Dr. Gartner described what happens when Trump can’t remember a simple word:

When Trump can’t find a word his whole demeanor changes. It’s almost like someone pulled the metaphorical plug. Trump looks blank, stops in mid-sentence (or mid-word), his jaw goes a little slack, and when he starts to talk again, he slurs, speaks haltingly, and often looks confused. Trying to get the word out, he shifts to a non-word that is easier to pronounce. When people are losing their ability to use language they use non-words. They start with the stem of the real word, and then they improvise from there.

Dr. Gartner noted that Trump also exhibits “semantic paraphasia” which involves choosing the incorrect words, such as Trump saying, “I hope they now go and take a look at the oranges of that investigation.”

Another sign of dementia goes beyond forgetting and mixing up names, to mixing up “generations.” The Dementia Care Society says “mixing up people and generations” is a sign of dementia.

We have seen this repeatedly with Trump:

• When Trump said there were “airports” during the Revolutionary War.
• When Trump said we are in danger of entering World War II.
• When Trump said homelessness is “a phenomenon that started two years ago.”
• When Trump said his father was born in Germany but it was his grandfather. No member of Trump’s family has lived in Germany since 1904.
• Michael Wolff observed that Trump frequently didn’t recognize old friends of his. That is a far cry from just forgetting or confusing their names. When my elderly mother suffered with dementia, at one point she didn’t recognize me, her eldest son. That was a flooring realization for me, a hammer blow. In my opinion, while being a layperson in this regard, the single biggest sign of dementia is not forgetting or confusing names, but having a loved one or close acquaintance replaced by a blank. And there are many such blanks in Trump’s rapidly deteriorating brain.
• When Trump forgot his anti-immigrant agenda and told a Wisconsin audience, “If illegal aliens invade your home, we will deport you!”
• When Trump gave great credit to Joe Biden by telling the same Wisconsin audience, “Three years ago we were a great nation.” Apparently Trump has forgotten when he left office, since Joe Biden is in the fourth year of his presidency.
• When Trump gave great credit to Barack Obama by saying the problem with illegal immigrants entering the US was fixed in 2016. Apparently Trump has also forgotten that he became president in 2017. And of course no one has “fixed” the problem.
• When Trump said the Twin Towers were attacked on “7-11” confusing the convenience store chain with 9-11.
• When Trump said during a rally in Dayton that Joe Biden ran against and defeated Barack Obama: “Joe Biden won against Barack Hussein Obama, has anyone ever heard of him? Every swing state, Biden beat Obama, but in every other state, he got killed.” This isn’t just confusing two people, this is Trump’s brain making up nonsense. And quite obviously, if Biden won only the swing states he would have lost the election in a landslide. So the whole spiel is deranged.
• When Trump said at least eight timesthat he ran against Barack Obama in 2016, or is running against him in 2024. And when he said Putin doesn’t respect Obama and is starting to talk “nuclear” as a Virginia audience fell silent in disbelief. While Trump claims such gaffes are “intentional,” we know he’s lying because during a speech in North Carolina on 3/2/2024, Trump caught his mistake and corrected it. After saying he beat Obama in 2016, in “an election that everyone said couldn’t be won,” Trump paused, then provided the correct name, saying, “We beat Hillary Clinton.” Thus his claim to be “intentionally” using the wrong name is just another Trumpian lie. I suspect Trump’s handlers have cautioned him about such slips, but he remembered too late in the NC speech.
• When Trump said four timesthat Nikki Haley was in charge of security on Jan 6., although she had never been in charge of any kind of security outside South Carolina when she was governor there nearly a decade ago. Nor had Nancy Pelosi ever been in charge of Capitol Hill security, if that was who Trump meant. Apparently, Trump has forgotten that he was still president on Jan 6., and was thus in charge of all branches of the U.S. military, including the National Guard.
• Trump has said, more that once, that he is running against the person who was in charge of security at the Capitol. But he is running against Nikki Haley and Joe Biden, neither of whom were in charge of the Capitol on Jan. 6. Nor was Nancy Pelosi. It is very hard to understand what is going on inside Trump’s confused and deteriorating brain. He hasn’t just confused names, and hasn’t just confused people and generations, but has confused his own lies with reality, creating “alternate” people who never really existed, like an insane person claiming to have had married Jessica Rabbit.

As Dr. Gartner pointed out to The Damage Report, a person not knowing the identity of the current president is a sign of dementia or extreme disorientation. If you were in an emergency room and couldn’t identify the current president, that would be a “very serious indicator” that something was wrong with your brain.

Please go here to continue this article: https://kenmcgoogan.com/2024/05/17/trump-dementia-collective-pathology/