Thread by @duty2warn

1/23 “George Conway amplifies Maryland Psychologist’s warnings about Trump”—Baltimore Sun
Entire article in this 🧵 (to circumvent paywall)

baltimoresun.com/2024/08/08/rod…

The unpleasant act of comparing Donald Trump’s age and mental fitness with Joe Biden’s became moot on the Sunday afternoon when the 81-year-old president ended his reelection campaign. Now the 78-year-old Trump stands alone for examination on age and mental fitness, a specimen like no other in the history of American elections.

But before we go there again — and to Trump antagonist George Conway’s campaign to present the Republican former president as psychologically impaired — I must ask John Gartner about Biden.

Gartner is the sharp-witted, Towson-based psychologist who first sounded alarms about Trump seven years ago and, more recently, enlisted hundreds of other psychologists and psychiatrists to go public with their opinions.

But, before we leave Biden behind, a question: Did Gartner’s view of the president’s fitness change on the night of his disastrous June debate with Trump?

The reason I ask: Three months before the debate, when I interviewed Gartner for a column about his Duty To Warn campaign, he insisted there was a major difference between Biden’s mental health and Trump’s. “Biden’s brain is aging,” he said, “but Trump’s brain is dementing.”

At the time, more than 400 licensed medical professionals agreed with him. They had signed Gartner’s online statement that Trump was “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.”

An additional 100 medical professionals have concurred with that statement since then.
But what about Biden? Did Gartner’s view of the president change? Short answer: “No. I don’t think he shows any signs of dementia.”

A psychotherapist who was an assistant professor for 28 years at the Johns Hopkins University Medical School, Gartner believes Biden’s lifelong struggles with stuttering became more acute as he aged; that could explain his disfluency and confusion during the debate.

An expert in stuttering presented this hypothesis during an episode of “Shrinking Trump,” a weekly podcast that Gartner now hosts with Harry Segal, a senior lecturer in psychology at Cornell.

Gartner notes that Biden’s able handling of the July 11 news conference following the NATO summit and his other public appearances work against a dementia suspicion.

Trump, on the other hand, already has provided plenty of evidence of cognitive decline — slurred speech, nonsensical ramblings, mixing up people across generations — and Gartner insists the suspicions of his professional colleagues are credible, though neither he nor they have personally examined the former president.

When I first met Gartner, at the outset of the Duty To Warn campaign, he declared Trump a malignant narcissist, a man with a severe antisocial personality disorder and a danger to the republic.

Once Biden was elected, the Duty To Warn camp went quiet. But, as Trump started to mount his comeback, Gartner went back into action. His X account has nearly 450,000 followers. His March 15 post laying out the case for Trump’s dementia has had more than 2 million views, and his podcast with Segal logs thousands of listeners and viewers each week.

Conway, the anti-Trump activist and ex-husband of former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, was a recent guest to promote his new campaign to do what he says mainstream media has failed to do — call out Trump as psychologically dangerous.
“This country,” he says, “is too wonderful and important to be turned back over to a madman.”

Last month, Conway put up more than $300,000 of his own money to establish the Anti-Psychopath Political Action Committee to pay for billboards, videos and commercials deriding Trump as deranged.

Gartner takes gleeful delight in the Anti-Psychopath PAC and sees it as “Duty To Warn if Duty To Warn had a million dollars,” led by a man with a personal Trump history.

“George knows he can get under Trump’s skin because he’s a real person in Trump’s life,” says Gartner. “He’s not just a random person with a Twitter handle.”

Conway has been sounding the same alarm about Trump for at least five years, after he left the Republican Party and became a regular Trump critic on cable shows.

It was an absurd conversation with the then-president at a wedding reception in 2017 that got Conway thinking “there’s something wrong with the guy.”

He started researching personality disorders, eventually settling on the same diagnosis that Gartner uses to describe Trump. Conway’s essay in The Atlantic in 2019 argued that Trump’s severe narcissism made it impossible for him to serve the nation as president.
Now he wants to broadcast that message to the nation, explaining the diagnosis and why it’s dangerous.

While the main goal is laudable — to bring Conway’s warning and that of allied health professionals like Gartner and Segal to voters, especially those in swing states — a secondary goal is to trigger Trump.
Conway’s strategy, as he described it on the Gartner-Segal podcast, includes targeting commercials on FOX, ESPN and the Golf Channel in cable markets that encompass Trump’s mansion in Florida and his golf club in New Jersey. The hope, says Conway, is that Trump will see the commercials and be provoked into irrational public behavior that would further expose his psychological unfitness.

“One of his missions,” says Gartner, “is to get inside Trump’s head and literally drive him crazy.”
Nobody asked me, and I’m no clinician, but should you need to drive Trump crazy if you have evidence he’s already reached that destination?