UPDATE 8:09 E — because so many mental health professionals have made comments on this diary, I’ve added a poll specifically for them because I am curious what opinions they might have.
This idea was inspired in part by a comment from Otteray Scribe, which reads:
I am getting a bit tired of armchair diagnosticians assessing folks they never met, and never will meet. This is not to say profiling is not possible. A good example of how a good profiler works, take a look at the report on Hitler generated by psychologist Dr. Henry Murray of Harvard. Murray researched Hitler for the Office of Strategic Services (later became the CIA).
Dr. Murray’s 241 page report, Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler: With Predictions of his Future Behavior and Suggestions for Dealing with Him Now and After Germany's Surrender* is an example of the proper way to do it, despite the fact it was written in 1943. When it was first written, it was classified at the highest levels of Top Secret.
Anything less than the quality of work by Murray and his colleagues is suspect.
*Link is to PDF of the original 241 page report in the OSS archives.
Now unfortunately you don’t have CIA funding or a team, doctors, but obviously there are techniques based on observation of public behaviour, accounts of private behaviour, public utterances, writings, etc. [Added after reading 36 pages of the above-linked 1943 report: yes, it is thorough, but considering its analysis is premised on such notions as the Oedipus complex and masochism being an innate characteristic of femaleness, I’ll assume profiling techniques have been updated.] If you are willing to exercise them, please vote in the poll, because I’m sure many are curious what your opinion is.
Supplemental Update
Speaking of the CIA and profiling, this seems timely (h/t to Old Uncle Dave in the comments):
Trump’s mental state is deteriorating dangerously due to impeachment with potentially ‘catastrophic outcomes’, psychiatrists urgently warn Congress
[Dec. 4, 2019]
www.independent.co.uk/...
The three doctors who led this petition to Congress include a CIA profiler. They talk about Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) rather than dementia, but they agree with the psychologist quoted in my original post below that some of what are usually portrayed as Trump’s lies are actually delusions, i.e. he believes them.
H/T to CleverNickname in a diary containing just the following tweet. It does make perfect sense if you understand the logic of malignant NPD, one of whose traits is ceaseless projection. Throw in the mindless desire to lash out at someone in pure impeachment-induced terror and rage and then I think you’ve got the whole picture.
One thing required to understand a malignant narcissist at war is that, to him, other people do not have an independent and valued existence. He doesn’t care in the slightest how many he kills or what nationality they are.
Original Post
Tom Joseph is an American technology/finance entrepreneur and dementia expert despite not being a neurologist. His expertise is hard-won:
-My mother and sister died from Huntington's Disease.
-My father died from Frontotemporal Dementia- PSP.
I've been:
-In the Legal Guardian role...
-Researcher in the dementia field for most of my life.
-Personally "at risk" to acquire Huntington's for decades- a 50% chance of inheriting it, until a genetic test cleared me.
Most of my life, from my teens till the early 2000’s, has involved looking for early signs of Huntington's Disease- in myself & people close to me… It was every day, multiple times per day… I have a trained eye for the “microscopic tells” to spot dementia early... I spotted it in my sister 3 years before her diagnosis. In my father, 4 years before his diagnosis.
In 2015, he writes, he began spotting signs of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) in Donald J. Trump, and began tweeting about it in February 2017. He uses videos to demonstrate. The pic above is from the starkest example I’ve seen, shown in the tweet below. Put it on full screen, sound on, and watch/listen carefully at 6 seconds.
Transcript: “And let me begin by wishing you a beauti-fuel-a-look you remember this, do you remember they were trying to take Christmas out...” The stumble doesn’t just interrupt the sentence but changes the subject. In the same moment the words fail, his shoulders jerk up, his eyes squinch shut, his head twitches and his arms spasm into the familiar “accordion” gesture.
If you stop mid-spasm and examine frame by frame you’ll see a momentary expression of agony on his face, as his brain malfunctions and his body knows something is very wrong.
Then he goes right on as if nothing happened—completely unaware that anything did.
I’m sure people who’ve read my diaries and comments consider me to be firmly in the Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) camp when it comes to amateur diagnosis of the Oval Office occupier. That would be fair, and I still am. When I first heard suspicions of dementia, I put it down to NPD because NPD can be disorganized and produce word salads too.
But NPD does not produce physical symptoms.
He’s actually responding to the music, showing some rhythm, but it is stiff and awkward. He is so stiff at the waist that Joseph thinks he wears a body-brace to keep himself from pitching backward.
Other videos show a lot of dragging of his right foot, other full-body twitches, and of course the famous two-handed drinking technique.
NPD can make people groom themselves oddly but so can FTD, even more oddly…
No one in his family does anything because everyone in his family is permanently terrified of him. (Joseph understands FTD better than he does NPD.)
It’s not that his having FTD means he doesn’t have NPD. He has both.
A psychologist concurs. Read her whole thread… note her points on his lies sometimes not being conscious lies, but absurdities he genuinely believes because a disease is killing his brain cells.
Another doctor Joseph recommends following [h/t to OwossoHarpist in the comments]:
This offers a fairly solid explanation for some baffling things, doesn’t it? The blanking on words and names, the drunk-sounding slurring, the increasingly-nonsensical tweets and speeches, the refusal to listen to sense, Dr “Candyman” Ronny’s glowing description of his health being so childishly, obviously fictional, the additional overcompensations of “very stable genius” and claims of vast expertise. The mysterious visit to Walter Reed. This:
The prognosis is dark.
NPD is chronic, a steady state with its onset in early adulthood, meaning Trump has likely had it running his life for 50 years. In and of itself it won’t worsen even if it appears to as the dementia takes the filters off. FTD, however, is degenerative and follows an unstoppable timeline.
FTD is incurable. Whatever drugs Trump is on, because I don’t doubt he is on some, are only there to mask symptoms enough to keep him going. If Tom Joseph’s long-trained instincts are correct, we know what will kill Trump and even roughly when, unless a heart attack, stroke or some other fatal disease happens first. Notice that Joseph estimates Trump’s years with the disease as approximately 2012-2024, but doesn’t take this predictive table —
Year / Est
<19 Behavior, concentration, speech, memory
19 Disorientation, rage, paranoia
20 Balance, non-communicative
21 Wheelchair
22 Aspiration
23 Bedridden, 24/7 care
— to 2024. He’s too polite and kind to say “24... Death”. He also knows he might be wrong and it might happen later. But if he is right, Trump will be too incapacitated to be politically relevant by then for sure, or much sooner.
What are the implications?
What Joseph has predicted all along is that, as the condition worsens, people will eventually not be able to help notice, despite their extreme emotional stake in denial.
The fact is, everyone close to Trump already knows — family, White House staff, criminal cronies. There is no way they can’t. They are supporting him in his attempts to conceal it, so as to prop up the emperor despite his lack of clothes and thus hang on to their own power as long as they can. Congressional Republicans know it, through private GOP lines of communication, and pretend it’s not happening so as to hang on to their power.
The media knows it, but mostly refuses to acknowledge it publicly, as Eric Boehlert pointed out:
What does it mean for the most powerful leader in the free world to be acting in a bizarre and often seemingly schizophrenic fashion? And how is every administration official who appears on television not immediately and repeatedly asked whether Trump is mentally fit to hold office, and whether he poses a danger to this country? [...] The fact that a sitting president has unleashed so many bizarre public performances, punctuated by so many incomprehensible non sequiturs, means his stability and capacity ought to be questioned—and it ought to be a constant news story.
Nikki Martinez points out something amazing: the media is actually covering for Trump by saying he’s lying rather than demented…! (In American politics, it seems, lying and Narcissistic Personality Disorder are relatively normal and sane in a politician, and therefore relatively acceptable, while dementia is unthinkable.) Read this whole thread for multiple examples:
Nancy Pelosi knows it. Because of course she does. But she is not being loudly public about it. She is playing for time because when a degenerative disease is being covered up, time is on the side of truth. She wants the public to notice for ourselves so that accusations of partisanship against her will ring false.
It can only be covered up for so long. Obvious spasms like the one captured in this diary’s illustration are preserved forever on video, for minute examination. The tweets and rally speeches are getting more disconnected with reality each day. The corporate media, increasingly, are talking about it, as they are foot-draggingly realizing they have to.
There will be a tipping point, as when the child famously cries out that the emperor is naked.
Maybe notification will come from an actual person, a White House whistleblower who can’t stand it any longer, who finally decides to put country and world before party and self.
Or maybe the true start of the tipping point will be a literal, physical tipping point. If Joseph is right, don’t be surprised if Trump starts using a cane and his mouthpieces spout a tale of a golf injury. Falls, Joseph says, are often what forces an FTD-sufferer’s family to face up to the truth.
Or maybe it will simply be a critical mass of mental “clicks,” enough bursts of realization like splashes of cold water in the faces of enough people thinking, “OMG—the President of the United States, who has the launch codes, really is a mental invalid who will keep getting worse.”
What to do?
Help the tipping point happen in the public discourse as soon as humanly possible.
So let’s talk about it bluntly, seriously and purposefully here; corporate media have been known to pick up Daily Kos stories on occasion.
Urge media to stop helping with the coverup, tell the truth, interview experts, and call for a neurological examination in their op-eds.
Contact your Representative (202-225-3121, http://www.house.gov/) and Senators (202-224-3121, http://www.senate.gov/) to urge them to openly ask questions, express concern, consult with neurologists, call for a neurological examination.
Stop only making fun of it — that’s a kind of half-acceptance. (Unless you’re a late-night comedian, because in that case making fun of it to help us, your audience, stay sane is your job.) Take it as seriously as it warrants and urge others to do the same.
It can be done without rancour and without partisanship, as Steven Beschloss tweeted above. “He’s demented” will just be ignored as an idle insult. “He has clear symptoms of frontotemporal or possibly some other kind of dementia—look at this video and these tweets” is sharing necessary information.
Treat it as the emergency it is. This worsening mental invalid is making decisions that affect billions of lives.
If you feel angry that consignment to dementia might cause Trump not to be held accountable for his crimes, consider your priorities coldly. He. Has. The. Launch. Codes. Whether he ends up in jail or palliative care, history will remember his crimes anyway, which is the worst possible punishment for a narcissist. We—all 7 billion of us—just need to get him the hell out of there. That tipping point needs to happen NOW.
Let’s look at the positives.
1) It could force his resignation. If his dementia becomes common knowledge and accepted as reality, he loses all credibility and all perceived power in the public eye. At that point, the Republican powers that be will tell him to resign or be convicted and removed in an impeachment trial, as they did Nixon, or removed by Article 25. They’ll have no choice.
2) It will tank his support. Why? Because his dementia is not his fault, or the fault of his supporters, so for them, resistance against cognitive dissonance isn’t in play. Because it’s not his fault, they don’t have to blame themselves either for supporting him before or withdrawing their support because of it. They can canonize him all they like for being a great and God-ordained president until he became unfit, but still opine that he should be removed without feeling guilty.
3) It is the absolute most terrifying thing for him, worse than being caught in crimes, revealing his taxes, being criticized for his venality (something I suspect he actually relishes, because he can play the victim) — even being impeached. Because it renders him irrelevant and unimportant, makes him no longer matter. It pushes him aside and denies him the attention that is his only emotional sustenance. Which is THE most soul-destroying thing for a narcissist. Insignificance feels to them like death.
4) Thus, just mentioning it disempowers him and empowers us.
We are the public. Let’s get behind it.
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