By Kindler (please check out my Substack)
Dr. John Gartner, a former Johns Hopkins University professor of psychiatry, has gathered a boatload of evidence that Donald Trump is currently in the advanced stages of dementia. When you consider the realistic odds that this guy could be put back in charge of our nuclear arsenal, our military, our economy, our foreign policy – our entire government – this reality should terrify voters, be they Democrats, Republicans or independents.
And yet we AREN’T talking much about this very real issue, for the worst of reasons: because Republicans and their propaganda arms have quite deliberately muddied the waters by spreading the lie that President Biden is the one who’s losing it. It’s the insidious approach of pushing the media to downplay Trump’s dangers and pathologies by turning it into yet another boring “both sides” snoozer.
We need to overcome this disinformation campaign by getting the truth out. So kudos to author Jay Kuo, who interviewed Dr. Gartner for his Substack and let him unload the substantial evidence of Trump’s mental decline in detail, which I quote below.
These behavioral clues include: “marked progressive deterioration in 4 areas: memory, ability to use language, behavior, and gross and fine motor skills.”
Watch some old videos of the younger Trump speaking (like, say, this 1998 interview with Oprah Winfrey) – while he most certainly came across as the shyster he is, he was clearly much sharper, using a more varied vocabulary and showing the ability to think about matters calmly and not just babble and rage.
Dr. Gartner quotes an analysis by science writer Sharon Begley all the way back in 2017 about how Trump’s vocabulary has shriveled to an estimated 4th grade level, with a few words like “big”, “beautiful” and “strong” getting a workout but more complex words nowhere in sight. And the decline has clearly accelerated since then.
In terms of memory, it’s important to understand the difference between momentarily forgetting a name (like Biden confusing the name of the president of France) with the kind of extended rants Trump engages in which he states that Barack Obama is still president (at least 8 times so far) or engages in a long riff confusing Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi:
“Nikki Haley, you know they, do you know they destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence, everything, deleted and destroyed all of it. All of it, because of lots of things like Nikki Haley is in charge of security. We offered her 10,000 people, soldiers, National Guard, whatever they want. They turned it down. They don’t want to talk about that. These are very dishonest people,” Trump said.
It’s also the many words that Trump is garbling or making up. The Daily Show did a supercut of many of the non-words coming out of his mouth, from “space capsicule” to “the Yoonayded Nations”. The technical terms Dr. Gartner uses for this symptom of dementia are “phonemic aphasia” for making up new words and “semantic aphasia” for substituting a real word where it doesn’t fit, like “the oranges of the investigation.”
Indeed, calling Trump’s extended rants “rambling”, as the press so politely likes to do, hardly tells the full story. He is increasingly making statements that are literally incomprehensible, like: “They’re weaponizing law enforcement for high-level interference against Joe Biden’s top and only political appointment. A guy named me. A guy named me.”
There are also signs of decline in his motor skills, from how he walks and stands to needing two hands to hold a glass of water. But surely most obvious and most concerning is his growing inability to control his behavior, a problem that all of the judges on his criminal and civil cases are now having to deal with. Imagine having someone in the White House who literally cannot control himself.
And the biggest problem is that all of this will only get worse, as Dr. Gartner explains:
“People need to understand dementia is a progressive illness, which means the Trump you see today is the best Trump you’re ever going to see. It’s all downhill from here. Trump’s rate of decline is accelerating, and if he’s typical, at some point, he will “fall off a cognitive cliff” and become completely disabled.”
“Trump could be found wandering the lawn of the White House in his pajamas confused about where he is. I’m not joking. I honestly believe that will happen if he’s reelected.”
Yet, despite all of this, you don’t see Democrats or the media talking much about the issue – for reasons both obvious and depressing. The right-wing propaganda machine has done such an effective job spreading the lie that Biden is the one going senile that folks fear raising the actual truth of Trump’s dementia will work against them.
In fact, the opposite is true. We just need to shout the truth louder than they scream their lies. Granted, they have a media machine in the form of Fox, etc., that we haven’t been able to match. But we don’t need to persuade everyone – just enough people to allow the Democrats to win.
And – call me a starry-eyed optimist – I have to believe that there are some reasonable Republicans who will reconsider whether they really want to pull the lever for Donald Trump when they hear all the evidence of how badly his mind has degenerated. It is at least a legitimate issue that deserves to be front and center in this year’s campaign.
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