Thread by @duty2warn

1/ "Trump's Brain is not ok: An Experts View on Trump's Slide into Dementia" from George Takai's Substack: The Big Picture. Q&A with Dr. John Gartner.
thinkbigpicture.substack.com/p/john-gartner…

Q: You have been sounding the alarm about Trump’s declining mental state for some time now. Can you give us a sense of the history of that effort

A: When Duty to Warn began in 2017, our mission as mental health professionals was to warn the world that Trump was dangerously unfit and a malignant narcissist. Practically conventional wisdom today among anyone who’s not in the cult. After Biden won, I took off my uniform and went home. We all did.

A: The last thing—truly the very last thing—I wanted to do, was re-enter politics. But I couldn’t believe my eyes. Day after day the press was gaslighting the American people: Pathologizing Biden’s normal signs of aging, such as forgetting names, and normalizing Trump’s flagrant signs of dementia. That false narrative was having real impact on the polls, and no one with the right letters after their name was stepping in to correct the record.

Q: Why are you sounding the alarm about Trump, but not about Biden?
A: I call it the “double lie.” Pathologizing Biden’s normal aging is the first lie. Normalizing Trump’s dementia is the second. The sorts of small lapses we’ve seen in Biden are part and parcel of normal aging.

A: Joe Biden’s calling the current president of France by the old president of France’s name is like me calling my youngest daughter by my oldest daughter’s name, which I do all the time. That’s not the same as thinking Obama is president or that Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi are one person. Can we introduce a sense of proportion and some common sense here? “Combining people and generations” is a sign of advanced dementia.

A: You can intuit how Trump’s demented thought process works. There’s an archetype in his head of a hated powerful female politician who he’s fighting. Fragments of Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi stick to this miasma, and combine to form a new person, the hated, “Nikki-Pelosi woman.

A: 8 times he’s said he’s running against Obama. Trump has combined Obama and Biden into one imaginary hated Joe-Obama person. Trump’s molten brain has fused the two Democratic presidents who humiliated him into one imaginary super-villain.

A: The evidence for Trump’s dementia is this: Trump shows an overall decline from his own cognitive baseline, with marked progressive deterioration in 4 areas: memory, ability to use language, behavior, and gross and fine motor skills.

A: Overall, he shows a shocking decline in verbal fluency from his previous baseline. Trump was once highly articulate. He spoke in polished paragraphs with a sophisticated vocabulary. Now, his vocabulary is impoverished, and he often can’t finish a sentence or even a word. Typical of dementia patients, he repeats himself and overuses superlatives and filler words.

A: In 2017, a group of psychiatrists and psychologists were asked to compare Trump’s 2017 speeches his speech decades ago: “They all agreed there had been a deterioration that could reflect changes in the health of Trump’s brain.”

A: The Trump campaign is trying to spin it as if Trump was either joking or suggesting Biden is an Obama puppet, or some such thing. Nice try. Trump said it plainly, over and over. He didn’t look like he was joking (does he ever?) and said literally nothing to suggest he was referring to some Biden-Obama cabal.

A: “phonemic aphasia:”
Trump uses non-words in place of real words, that usually include a fragment of the actual word. For example saying “mishuz” instead of missile, or “Chrishus” instead of Christmas. You can look at supercut reels assembled by Ron Filipkowski on Twitter, The Daily Show, and now by the Democratic House Judiciary Committee, as well. Both Chairman Nadler and Rep. Swalwell showed their own supercuts of Trump’s cognitive decline at the Hur hearings, to counteract Hur’s partisan slur about Biden’s “poor memory.”

To demonstrate how pervasive these errors are, I present this long but far from exhaustive list of Trump’s phonemic aphasias:
“President U-licious S Grant” (For Ulysses S. Grant)
“space-capsicle” (for space capsule)
“combat infantroopen”(for combat infantry)
“sahhven country”(for sovereign country)
“renoversh” (For renovations)

“Anonmmiss” (for anonymous).
“transpants” (for transplants)
“lawmarkers” (for lawmakers)
“supply churn” (for supply chain)
“Rusher” (for Russia)
“raydoh” (for radio)
“Liberal-ation (for liberation”)
“benefishers” (for benificiaries)
“con-ducking” (for conducting)
“stat-tics, suh-tic-six” (for statistics)

“crimakle” (for criminal)
“armed forsiva” (for armed forces)
“internate” (for Internet)
“transjija” (for transition)
“stanktuary” (for sanctuary)

In recent rallies in GA, NC, and VA over the course of just a few days Trump evidenced more examples of phonemic aphasia:
“We have becrumb a nation”
“All comp-ply-ments” to Joe Biden.
“I know Poten.”
“He can’t cam-pay. He can’t campaign.”
“We will expel the wald-mongers.”

Some have argued that Trump’s impaired speech could be an articulation problem, but Trump commits these aphasic errors in writingas well, proving it’s a brain problem:
“Joe Buden DISINFORMATES AND MISINFORMATES”

Trump evidences “tangential thinking” where he drifts from one unrelated thought fragment to another, and sometimes tries to “confabulate” them into a story. But the narrative is literally incoherent. When the press describes Trump’s speeches as “rambling,” they are gaslighting us with a euphemistic word that normalizes the grossly abnormal. Trump regularly degenerates into incomprehensible strings of words.

A: Incoherent and incomprehensible means that even if I put a gun to your head, you couldn’t tell me what Trump is saying:
“We are an institute in a powerful death penalty. We will put this on.”

Another example” “I could tell you about aircraft carriers, where they use electric catapults. They couldn’t go to the steam, which works better for about 1/100th the price, you know? The electric catapult, you know that story? I could tell you about the elevators on a tremendous carrier, the Gerald Ford, and they decided not to use hydraulic like the John Deere tractor, they decided to use magnets, ‘we’re gonna use magnets!’ to lift up the elevators with seven planes.”

Just recently outside a New York courtroom, Trump declared:
“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.”

Some of his utterances are incomprehensible for a different reason. They suggest Trump is so disoriented he’s occupying a different reality than everyone else. For example:
“Biden beat Barack Hussein Obama. Ever heard of him?” Biden never beat Obama.

When a confused patient is evaluated in an emergency room, a standard psychiatric question to determine if the patient is disoriented is: “Who is president of the United States?” If they get that wrong, the most probable explanations are dementia, psychosis or drug toxicity, and most probably they would be admitted for observation.

Motor Performance:
Elisabeth Zoffmann, assistant professor of Forensic Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia, told Salon that Trump evidences a “wide-based gate, commonly found among patients with dementia. Video online shows that he swings his right leg in a semi-circle as if it were dragging a dead weight. He has also shown deterioration in his fine motor coordination, for example having difficulty drinking a bottle or a glass of water without two hands.

Q: What are the real risks to our nation of a president who is exhibiting signs of dementia? I
A: It’s an axiom that when a patient with a personality disorder becomes demented, everything about their personality disordered behavior gets exponentially worse. Trump will become more horribly Trumpian, if you can believe it. Everything evil and destructive about him will become even more exaggerated, in an even more erratic way, till he is nothing but rageful id, with no controls or inhibitions. It would be pure chaos.

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. At the rate that he’s deteriorating I don’t believe it would be possible for him to get through the next 4 and a half years without becoming incapacitated while in office.

In the Middle Ages they said: “A bad king is better than no king. And no king is better than a child king.” That’s what we would have: a king (because he’ll be a dictator from “day one”) who, while always a child temperamentally, will have becomes a child mentally, as well.

Q: You’re not alone in your concerns about Trump,
A: I put a petition for licensed medical and mental health professionals online that states in part:
“Our diagnostic impression of Trump is probable dementia. 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.”

We have over 500 valid signatures and that number is growing. However, to me, more persuasive are the comments by the signers explaining their professional reasoning and the symptoms of dementia they see in Trump.

I put those comments together in one tweet thread and pinned it to the top of my Duty To Warn account. I’m grateful that 1.8 million people have had a chance to read it. The collective voices of these professionals
are powerful.

A: We’ve met plenty of resistance but more and more we’re starting to be heard. The funny thing is that every time a journalist writes about us, they’re shocked by the magnitude of the public response. We’ve been covered by Salon, The Hill, and my hometown paper, the Baltimore Sun. In each case, the article sat on their respective publication’s leaderboards as the #1 most read article for days.

Dan Rodricks who wrote a column about our movement in he Baltimore Sun column told me the last article that got that many views was “Ravens make the playoffs.” People are hungry for reality and objective truth. They want to know the medical truth about both Biden and Trump’s cognitive health, and learn it from credible sources they can trust. If you can’t trust doctors, when we’re talking about a medicine, then who can you trust?