Duty to Warn

By Ebony Emerson –

Forgetting names and dates is normal for people who are aging, like President Joe Biden.

Forgetting the name of the president of France, as Biden has done, isn’t the same as Trump thinking Obama is president or that Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi are one person.

Trump shows an overall cognitive decline, with marked progressive deterioration in four areas: memory, ability to use language, behavior, and gross and fine motor skills. He was once highly articulate, with a sophisticated vocabulary, and spoke in polished paragraphs. Now, his vocabulary is impoverished, he often has difficulty finishing a thought, sentence, or even a word.

Confusing people and generations is a sign of advanced dementia. How many times during the past year has Trump said he is running against Obama? With increasing frequency he degenerates into literal incoherence, where no one can tell what he is trying to say. He uses non-words in place of real words: “crimakle” for criminal, and “space-capsicle” for space capsule.

Trump’s Best Words, from The Daily Show

Any reasonable person can see that something is wrong with Trump’s behavior. Many of us have watched as relatives, friends, and others are afflicted with some type of brain disease related to aging. Trump is disoriented. He doesn’t know who the president is, who he’s running against in the primary, or whether E. Jean Carrol is his wife.

When a patient with a personality disorder becomes demented, everything about their personality-disordered behavior gets exponentially worse. His rate of decline is accelerating—at some point, he will “fall off a cognitive cliff” and become completely disabled. The stress he is currently under is going to hasten Trump’s deterioration. Over the summer we’ll see more displays of cognitive decline more often.

Trump should not be allowed to run for president. He would be nothing more than a figure head with a bad temper, with unknown sources making decisions for him and telling him what he should say and do.

John Gartner, founder of Duty To Warn, a group of mental health professionals who have been raising the alarm about Trump’s increasingly sociopathic behavior since 2017, has posted a petition for licensed mental health professionals to voice their diagnostic impressions. View the petition at www.change.org/p/our-diagnostic-impression-of-trump-is-probable-dementia-for-licensed-professionals-only.

Dr. Gartner is a prominent psychologist and contributor to the bestselling book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.