Thread by @duty2warn

1/40 "Does Trump have dementia?"
Allison Gill interviews Dr. John Gartner on her podcast, The Daily Beans
An edited transcript of their conversation can only be found in this thread.
the-daily-beans.simplecast.com/episodes/boebe…

Gill: Donald Trump is unfit for office. That’s widely known. But this issue of his cognitive health is flying under the radar. Talk to me a little bit about why this isn't being addressed and what the Goldwater rule is.

Gartner: The Goldwater rule forbids psychiatrists from commenting on public figures. The reasons I started a petition for health professionals was to give them a platform to warn the public about Trump's signs of dementia. But in a matter of national security, if you see something, you say something. As professionals, we’re seeing signs of a rapidly progressing dementia.
chng.it/bsvqccGgPz

We have about 500 licensed professionals who have signed the petition, but please go to our pinned tweet at Duty2Warn. It’s a long thread of the signers verbatim comments, explaining their medical rationale. It’s very persuasive.

Gartner: You can say I'm unethical for sharing the signs of Trump's dementia with the public. That doesn't mean I'm inaccurate. They're two different things.
But if we've learned anything from the Holocaust, it's that saying nothing is never the more ethical option.

Gill: The press focuses on Biden tripping over a sandbag on stage or falling over on his bicycle in clipless pedals. By the way, if you've ever ridden clipless, you fall no matter how old you are.
Gartner: I have many times. That’s why I stopped using them.

Gill: The media is telling us that Biden and Trump are both the same. What separates their behaviors?
Gartner: We're being gaslit by a double lie. They're pathologizing Biden's normal signs of aging, like forgetting names--which me and all the people my age do all the time, while they're normalizing Trump's gross signs of dementia.

Gartner: Trump shows a dramatic decline in four areas: memory, language, motor ability and behavior. He used to be a very articulate. If you look at interviews of him from the 1980s, he had a rich vocabulary and spoke not only in complete sentences, but polished paragraphs. Now he can barely complete a sentence. Sometimes he can't complete a word. This is a change.

Gartner: Sharon Begley, a science writer for STAT, actually did a small study where she had a group of neuropsychologists compare tapes of him speaking in the 1980’s to tapes of him speaking in 2015. The specialists noticed a marked decline, which they thought most likely suggested organic brain damage.
statnews.com/2017/05/23/don…

Gartner: A Boston Globe study found that the former Ivy league grad spoke at a 4th grade level in 2015, far below the other candidates. bostonglobe.com/news/politics/…

Gartner: Let's start with memory: They're pillorying Biden because he called the current president of France by the old president of France's name. Well, guess what? I call my younger daughter by my older daughter's name all the time. So what? When I get together with people my age, we laugh about those kinds of memory problems.

Gartner: We senior citizens might move more slowly and forget a name or a date, but don’t call us incompetent. That’s age-ism! The Dr. Gartner of 2024 has wisdom and judgment that the callow narcissistic young Dr. Gartner lacked.

Gartner: Biden also has wisdom and judgment, and has performed very well at his job. Why are we mocking his deficits? Most cultures revere their elders. We devalue ours, to our detriment.

The Dementia care society says a sign of advanced dementia is when you start “combining people and combining generations.” So when Trump talks about Nikki Haley as if she were Nancy Pelosi, he’s displaying a textbook sign of dementia

Gartner: “He's disoriented about basic facts. Recently he said Biden beat “Biden beat Barack Obama.”
Gill: “there are many examples: Taking over the airports during the civil war, forgetting we already had World War II, things like that. Trump thinks he's running against Barack Obama. But then, yeah, right he says he's kidding, that he's just joking.

Gartner: He said it eight times in public. God knows how often he thinks Barak Obama is still president in private when he’s sundowning. He always says he's joking in the rare instances when even he recognizes he needs to pull something back. Go back to the videotape. He doesn't look like he’s joking. And come on, since when does Trump “joke?”

Gartner: Trump said: “Whenever I sarcastically insert the name Obama for Biden as an indication that others may actually be having a very big influence in running our Country."
Really?

Gartner: "Last month Trump told Sean Hannity that Obama is "going to end up being indicted when he leaves office." That sounds pretty concrete. Precisely whose habeas corpus is ending up in the clink? Obama or the current president when he leaves office?

Gartner: I think he's doing with Obama and Biden what he did with Pelosi and Haley. He's thinks there's one combined person: Joe Obama,
Gill: He's combining people. Right.

Gartner: He also combined generations. He said his father was born in Germany. That's a mash-up of his father and grandfather. His grandfather was born in Germany. When my Uncle Bruce was in a dementia care facility, he became agitated and demanded they “call John! He’s a lawyer he’ll know what to do. My dad was a lawyer.

Gartner: Michael Wolf, who shadowed Trump for his authorized book, said Trump frequently didn't recognize people he'd known for years. I don’t just mean he forgot their names.
Gill: In his deposition for the E. Jean Carroll case, he looked at a photo of E. Jean Carroll and said it was Marla Maples, his ex-wife.

Gill: There was that moment when he was talking about Syria and Saudi Arabia and just froze and his eyes went blank. Then it was almost like he woke up and realized: oh, I'm giving a speech, and then just continued on. He just seemed to check out for a minute
Gartner: As you said, in that moment, his demeanor changes. He goes utterly blank and he was simply speechless. We're seeing this kind of degeneration

With increasing frequency Trump is evidencing “phonemic aphasia:" using a non-word, that has a fragment of the intended real word. Again, a textbook sign of dementia of examples, you know, saying “mishizz” instead of missiles and “Chrishus” instead of Christmas.

Gartner: The Daily Show, Ron Filipkowski, and Democrats on the Judiciary Committee during the Hur hearings have shown super cuts where you can see dozens of these examples in a row:

Gartner: Some have argued that Trump’s pronunciation could be an articulation problem, but he frequently evidences phonemic aphasia in written social media posts, showing this is a brain problem:
“Joe Buden DISINFORMATES and MISINFORMATES.”

He shows semantic aphasias, which is to use a real English word, but not according to its meaning, like “the oranges of the investigation.” And he's deteriorating to the point where he doesn’t use words at all just uses sounds. Recently he said, “Gang, boom. I hear bing.”

Trump evidences “tangential speech” where he goes on these rants that are literally incomprehensible. I'm glad some journalists are finally starting to label him incoherent. But most call it “rambling,” which is very normalizing euphemism
theguardian.com/us-news/2024/a…

Gartner: In front of a New York courtroom Trump said last week: “We can't have an election in the middle of a political season. We just had Super Tuesday and we had a Tuesday after Tuesday already”.

Gill: Yeah, no, he lost me. And I will say, I've been covering Donald Trump and politics for a while now. And back in the day, 2016, 2017, he would go on these interesting rants, but I was usually able to sort of understand what he was getting at. I could put it together. But more recently, I haven't been able to put it together. What is he trying to say?

Gartner: That's because dementia is a deteriorating illness. I always say: look at Donald Trump right now, because that's the best Donald Trump you're ever going to see.

Gartner: When we first started documenting his cognitive decline in op-eds in 2018 and 2019 we were comparing tapes from the 1980s to 2015. But now his decline is moving more rapidly.

Gill: I was gonna ask about that. It seemed exponential to me.usatoday.com/story/opinion/…

People in the former Trump administration are saying he's not the same man he was four years ago. That's because the nature of the illness is that the rate of deterioration begins to accelerate.
msn.com/en-us/news/pol…

Gill: The other thing I wanted you to comment on quickly is motor skills. We've got a lot of right leg dragging and grabbing the water with two hands. Do motor skills go hand in hand with dementia or are they a separate situation?

Gartner: Dementia expert Dr. Elizabeth Zoffman, told Salon that Trump has something called a “wide -based gait.” If you look at films of him, it doesn't always show, but sometimes it's very blatant, where he's swings his right leg like it's a dead weight in a semicircular motion. That's a very specific type of neurodegeneration specific to dementia.
salon.com/2024/03/25/for…

Gill: Trump always talks about the fact that he was given a mental acuity test. I don't think that's given to everyone. I think that's given to people who need to take it to rule out a serious illness. And I wanted you as a doctor to comment on that.

Gartner: You need to have advanced dementia to fail the MoCa screening test Trump took. They show the subject a picture of four animals and ask “Can you show me the lion?” So when Trump brags about “acing” the MoCa, it’s a joke. Was he just the absolute best at picking out the lion? This is a test that every kindergartener can pass.

Gill: All right, but do you think he was administered this test because there were medical professionals that thought there might be an issue? Or do you think that he asked for a test he could pass to prove his acuity?

Gartner: I know the history because I organized a group of mental health professionals to send a letter to Ronnie Jackson demanding that they give Trump a cognitive screening because of the signs of dementia he was showing. We got 77 doctors to sign it and wrote an op-e, sent it to every paper, and it became a big story.
“Doctors demand Trump take a cognitive screening.”

Gartner: We kind of dared them to do it and they did it, But then Trump can’t stop talking about it like he passed the Mensa exam. He’s never gotten over how angry he is that we made him take it. [Laughs]
nydailynews.com/2018/01/16/why…

Gill: So he was pushed into taking the MoCa. All right then. Good job! Go to duty to warn, go to change .org to look at this petition. And we'll catch up again.

Gill: The other thing I wanted you to comment on quickly is motor skills. We've got a lot of right leg dragging and grabbing the water with two hands. Do motor skills go hand in hand with dementia or are they a separate situation?

Gartner: Dementia expert Dr. Elizabeth Zoffman, told Salon that Trump has something called a “wide -based gait.” If you look at films of him, it doesn't always show, but sometimes it's very blatant, where he's swings his right leg like it's a dead weight in a semicircular motion. That's a very specific type of neurodegeneration specific to dementia.
salon.com/2024/03/25/for…

Gill: Trump always talks about the fact that he was given a mental acuity test. I don't think that's given to everyone. I think that's given to people who need to take it to rule out a serious illness. And I wanted you as a doctor to comment on that.

You need to have advanced dementia to fail the MoCa. They show the subject a picture of four animals and ask “Can you show me the lion?” So when Trump brags about “acing” the MoCa, it’s a joke. Was he just the absolute best at picking out the lion? This is a test that every kindergartener can pass.

Gill: All right, but do you think he was administered this test because there were medical professionals that thought there might be an issue? Or do you think that he asked for a test he could pass to prove his acuity?

Gartner: I know the history because I organized a group of mental health professionals to send a letter to Ronnie Jackson demanding that they give Trump a cognitive screening because of the signs of dementia he was showing. We got 77 doctors to sign it and wrote an op-e, sent it to every paper, and it became a big story.
“Doctors demand Trump take a cognitive screening.”

Gartner: We kind of dared them to do it and they did it, But then Trump can’t stop talking about it like he passed the Mensa exam. He’s never gotten over how angry he is that we made him take it. [Laughs]
nydailynews.com/2018/01/16/why…

Gill: So he was pushed into taking the MoCa. All right then. Good job! Go to duty to warn, go to change .org to look at this petition. And we'll catch up again.

threadreaderapp.com/thread/1777669…