There is now a petition on change.org for medical professionals only to sign and give their opinions on whether Trump has dementia. The petition, as I write this, has 652 signatures, though it’s not certain whether all are medical professionals.
The creator of the petition listed these problems that worry him about Trump:
1) Decline from baseline:
Overall, he shows a shocking decline in verbal fluency from his previous baseline. 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. Typical of dementia patients he perseverates and overuses superlatives and filler words.
People who worked closely with Trump during his administration are reporting a shocking deterioration in just 4 years.
2) Memory:
Forgetting names and dates is normal for people who are aging (like Joe Biden). But the Dementia Care Society says "confusing people and generations" is a sign of advanced dementia. Recently, Trump confused Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi. 8 times he said he was running against Obama. He didn't look like he was joking. An example of confusing generations: Trump said his father was born in Germany, when that was his grandfather. Michael Wolff wrote Trump not infrequently failed to recognize old friends.
3) Language
Trump shows formal signs of disordered speech we typically see only in organically impaired patients. Trump is verbalizing an increasing number of "phonemic paraphasias. Using non-words in place of real words that may include a fragment of the actual word. For example saying "mishuz" instead of missile, or "Chrishus" insead of Christmas. Sometimes he just uses sounds that don't resemble words at all.
Trump evidences ‘semantic aphasia’ where he uses words in the wrong way. For example, "the oranges of the investigation."
Trump evidences "tangential thinking" where he drifts from one unrelated thought to another, and sometimes tries to confabulate them into a story. But the narrative is literally incoherent. With increasing frequency he degenerates into literal incoherence, where no one can tell what he was trying to say.
4) Motor:
Trump shows evidence of a "wide based gait" commonly found among patients with dementia. He swings his right leg in a semi-circle as if it were a dead weight. He also show deterioration in fine motor coordination, for example having difficulty drinking a bottle of water.
5) Behavior:
He is showing marked deterioration in impulse control and judgement.
This represents a unique danger because of Trump's pre-existing Malignant Narcissistic Personality Disorder. As he continues to deteriorate he will become even more erratic, impulsive, paranoid, and aggressive than he already is.
A demented malignant narcissist as president of the United States would have unimaginably catastrophic consequences, and so we feel an ethical obligation to warn the public, and urge the media to cover this national emergency.
One of the opinions:
As a now retired psychotherapist with over 40 years of experience who has written frequently about Trump's dangerous psychopathology since before he was first elected, in the past year I have observed that, in addition to his malignant psychopathic narcissism rendering him unfit to be president, I see the indications of dementia described here. He previously was an example of The Dark Triad, now we add a fourth element, making him a Dark Quadrilateral.
This reminds me of the excellent book by Bandy X. Lee called “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” in which medical professionals evaluated him. (Excellent read, by the way.)
Hopefully, this collection of opinions will wake some people up.
