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Evidence that Trump Has Dementia is 'Overwhelming': Experts

The group of psychiatrists and doctors that first warned about the “unmistakable” signs of Donald Trump’s mental instability in the first
year of his presidency has continued its effort to sound the alarm right
up to the last day before the momentous election that could return him to office. This time, they are also warning signs that Trump has dementia.

“We are a group of medical and mental health professionals with expertise
in aging, mental fitness, and how these relate to the capacity for
leadership and ensuring our national security,” the World Mental Health Coalition wrote in a statement on X (formerly Twitter) on Monday Nov. 4.
“We feel an obligation to express concerns about the manifestations of
poor cognitive function in former President Donald J. Trump.”

This group, led by forensic psychiatrist Bandy Lee, first came together
in 2017 to publish The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists
and Mental Health Experts Assess a President,* which Lee edited, and then
to organize a conference at the Yale School of Medicine and Yale Law
School about the dangers of Trump’s mental instability and potential to
unleash violence.

But the book and the conference received a chilly response from the
American Psychiatric Association, which issued a statement reaffirming
its stance that psychiatrists were ethically barred from publicly
diagnosing mental conditions of public figures without an in-person
evaluation and the consent of the public figure. The APA policy, known as
the Goldwater rule, was created in 1973 after a number of psychiatrists
were interviewed about the mental fitness of former Senator Barry
Goldwater, the 1964 Republican presidential candidate.

The APA’s criticism appeared to deter further press coverage and
effectively derailed the quest by Lee and her colleagues to widely
publicize what they viewed as Trump’s dangerous instability, aggression
and mental illness.

In a 2017 interview with Slate magazine, Lee asserted that the APA
changed the Goldwater rule into what she and many others felt was
essentially a gag order. APA leadership “reinterpreted the Goldwater rule
in a way that it was never written to be and never was in the past,” she
said. “They said that the Goldwater rule does not just involve diagnosis,
it involves any comment of any kind on a public figure, no matter how
dangerous the situation is. And that actually is very alarming.”

The controversy escalated as Trump’s term wore on. In a press release on
Jan. 9, 2018, the APA called for an end to “armchair psychiatry” and
assured readers that Trump was about to undergo his annual medical exam.
The association’s statement at the time expressed certainty that if there
were any concerning mental health issues, Trump’s physician would consult
with “an experienced psychiatrist who would approach the consultation
with objectivity and within the physician-patient confidential
relationship.”

Trump’s White House physician at the time, Ronny Jackson, declared the president to be in “excellent” physical health and said he “had
absolutely no concerns about his cognitive ability,” asserting that Trump
had scored 30 out of 30 on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test. But
Trump, who is about three years younger than President Joe Biden, never released any doctors’ records of either his physical or mental health.

Jackson went on to be elected to Congress as a Texas Republican in 2020,
with Trump’s support. In July 2022, he was demoted by the Navy from
admiral to captain, after a military investigation found he had behaved inappropriately as White House physician, including berating subordinates
and inappropriate use of alcohol and Ambien.

In its 2018 statement, the American Psychiatric Association volunteered
to recommend a psychiatrist to evaluate the president and suggested that
mental health experts who publicly expressed concerns about Trump’s
mental stability were “using psychiatry for political or self-
aggrandizing purposes.” Representatives of the Trump campaign and the APA
did not respond to requests for comment.
Former President Donald Trump speaks to press before the start of civil
fraud trial brought by NYS Attorney General Letitia James at NYS court in
New York on October 2, 2023 (Lev Radin/Shutterstock)

While the mainstream media was laser-focused on Joe Biden’s age, seeming frailty and public gaffes during his campaign this year, it was largely
silent on Trump’s increasing incoherence during his rallies – with some
notable exceptions.

In February, Salon.com did a story quoting psychologist John Gartner, a
former Yale professor, on Trump’s alarming signs of dementia. In March, Newsweek published an article that interviewed Gartner and prominent psychiatrist and retired Harvard Medical School professor Dr. Lance
Dodes, who said there was “overwhelming” evidence that Trump has
dementia.

“Unlike normal aging, which is characterized by forgetting names or
words, Trump repeatedly shows something very different: confusion about reality,” Dodes told Newsweek.

“If he were to become president, he would have to be immediately removed
from office via the 25th Amendment as dangerously unable to fulfill the responsibilities of office,” Dodes said, referring to a constitutional amendment passed in 1967 that outlined a process for presidential
succession and for removing a president from office due to disability.
(Such action would have to be initiated by the vice president and
supported by a majority of Trump’s own cabinet or another body “as
Congress may by law provide.”)

“Unlike normal aging, which is characterized by forgetting names or
words, Trump repeatedly shows something very different: confusion about reality.”
Psychiatrist Lance Dodes, Formerly of Harvard


Lee and her colleagues in the World Mental Health Coalition, which they
had founded in 2017, continued to warn the public and government about
Trump’s instability and held a related conference at the National Press
Club in September 2024. The coalition also issued a new public warning of Trump’s dementia and cognitive decline, which was signed by 50 prominent
mental health professionals and neuroscientists. Over the last few
months, more stories about Trump’s mental decline have appeared in the
media, including PBS, The Guardian, The Atlantic,, the San Francisco
Chronicle, the Seattle Times and USA Today.

Gartner, who contributed to The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, recently started a Change.org petition called “Our Diagnostic Impression of Trump
is Probable Dementia: For Licensed Professionals Only,” which has been
signed by nearly 3,000 clinicians. While the petition says that a
definitive diagnosis would require further testing, Gartner says he is
seeing “unmistakable signs” that suggest Trump has dementia, including
ongoing deterioration in memory, thinking, behavior and motor skills.

‘A shocking deterioration’

The petition notes that forgetting names and dates is a sign of normal
aging, while confusing people and generations “is a sign of advanced
dementia.” Not only has Trump confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi, he
has said eight times that he is running against Obama, according to the petition and news reports. Gartner also notes Trump said his father was
born in Germany, though it was actually his grandfather who was born
there.

In a section of the petition labeled “overall decline,” Gartner writes
that Trump “shows a shocking decline in verbal fluency from his previous baseline. He was once highly articulate… 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.”Gartner notes Trump’s frequent use of disordered speech that is typically seen only in organically impaired patients. Forgetting a name
or place is a sign of normal aging, he says, but creating non-words is
not.

“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,” such as “mishuz” for missile, or “Chrishus” for Christmas –
or “just uses sounds that don’t resemble words at all,” Gartner’s
petition states. As an example, he points to Trump saying at a March
2024 rally “Saudi Arabia and Russia will…. bluh-ub-bll…”.

“Trump evidences ‘tangential thinking’ where he drifts from one unrelated thought to another, and sometimes tries to confabulate them into a
story,” Gartner declares in the petition. “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.”

As examples, Gartner points to Trump’s speeches that include the
fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter, along with worries about sharks, batteries and electrocution in the ocean. In a recent Pennsylvania rally
in which a few people fainted in the audience, interrupting his speech,
Trump announced he was turning the rally “into a music.” He then swayed silently onstage to a soundtrack for a painful 39 minutes.

Trump’s probable dementia ‘a national emergency’

Gartner posits that Trump has three mental disorders: dementia, hyper-
manic temperament, and malignant narcissistic personality disorder,
which is not an official psychiatric diagnosis but is considered a
syndrome that blends malignant narcissism with antisocial behavior,
sadism, an excessive need for admiration, a lack of empathy for others
and deep paranoia.

“His hyper-manic temperament is where his anger comes to the fore,”
Gartner told the Irish Times. “The 40 tweets in one night…even on
holidays. His tweets are always filled with rage, constantly labeling
people as losers. Trump is up at 3 am on a holiday, ranting about how
anyone who doesn’t idolize him is a loser.”

Gartner notes in his petition that Trump also shows “marked
deterioration in impulse control and judgment” and predicts that over
time, “he will become even more erratic, impulsive, paranoid, and
aggressive than he already is.” And that, he says, is the most
frightening aspect: “A demented malignant narcissist as president of the
United States would have unimaginably catastrophic consequences.”

“We feel an ethical obligation to warn the public, and urge the media to
cover this national emergency,” he concludes.

*The book was republished in 2019 as The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump:
37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.

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