Psychologist John Gartner, founder of Duty to Warn, has a new weekly YouTube show called “Shrinking Trump.” Two full episodes have already aired.
The hour-long show is worth a watch, but I will do my best to summarize.
The “Goldwater Rule” is outdated. (For those who don’t know, they explain that a few angry psychiatrists impugned Barry Goldwater, leading psychiatry to create a rule barring professionals from opining on people that had not personally interviewed. At that time psychiatry was the gold standard, and the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) did not exist. According to the DSM, observation can form the basis for many diagnoses, including symptoms of dementia.
There are criteria for observing the symptoms of a normally aging brain and a brain with symptoms of dementia. Guest clinician Vince Greenwood has analyzed both Donald Trump and Joe Biden using videos from the 80s through the present, and has discovered that Joe Biden has experienced an increase in symptoms of an aging brain. This is normal and common, and has no effect on his ability to acquire and process new information, deal with complex tasks, etc.
In contrast, Trump does not have the symptoms of an aging brain. Unfortunately for him (and us), Trump increasingly exhibits symptoms of dementia. His current diagnosis is mild cognitive impairment, based on observation. There are only two stages of diagnosis for cognitive impairment, mild and severe, and when the impairment is caused by aging (as opposed to something that might happen to a young person, such as a brain injury) the progress to severe symptoms is inevitable.
Trump has had a big increase in symptoms of dementia, while Biden remains free of these symptoms. Because the average person does not know the difference between signs of normal aging and dementia, right wing media and the Trump campaign have managed to spin Biden’s normal aging to cause many to believe Biden is losing it. It’s classic projection.
The show goes through some specific examples of Trump exhibiting symptoms. Another episode goes into a disturbing (and relatively unknown) recent Hugh Hewitt interview of Trump. The interview is in the morning (generally a good time of day for dementia sufferers) and the questions are all softballs, but Trump is at times completely confused and incoherent.
Hugh Hewitt: When you became friends with Nixon in New York, did you ever talk presidential politics, how he ended up resigning, how he won so big in ‘72? Did you ever discuss it with him?
Donald Trump: His life, to me, was very sad. It was a very sad life. You know, I got to know him really, more, when he was out. He watched me on the, his wife watched me on the Phil Donahue show, and she wrote a letter, which I have. She wrote a letter, which he gave to me, saying that, he wrote me a letter saying that my wife, Pat, who he really loved, by the way, really loved, but that you know, he sort of had very few friends. You know, she was his friend. But he wrote a letter, my wife, Pat, said that someday, if you wanted to be, you’ll be president of the United States. It’s become somewhat of a famous letter. It’s from him explaining she watched me on the Phil Donahue show. Remember that one?
Of course Trump doesn’t actually answer the question. Not only that, but he can’t keep his story straight about who wrote a letter and how he received it. The experts speculate that this is a made up story and that he is now struggling to tell lies that make sense. The bit about the Hugh Hewitt interview starts at 19:30 and the section about Nixon starts at 23:48. A transcript is also available on the YouTube page.
The experts also go into how Trump’s dementia symptoms interact with his other psychological problems. None of it is very pretty but it is all extremely important. I am at a loss here. What should we be doing to get out this important information? The mainstream media has done some ignorant “both sides” reporting on the age-related gaffes of both Biden and Trump, but right now the only one literally losing his mind is Trump. It is scientifically verifiable and they are mainly ignoring it (except for some good coverage on MSNBC.) Voters deserve to know these facts.