Not Seeing the Forest for the Trees
I came across an excellent story yesterday, but one that overlaps with my article that I'd posted earlier in the morning, so my first thought was to let it pass. However, it overlaps so much -- at times almost quoting what I wrote -- that I couldn’t ignore writing about it. Especially since the person at the center is a major expert who actually knows professionally what he’s talking about, and I only quote such people. (He also happens to be someone I’ve quoted very often in the past, so the overlap isn’t totally shocking. But the timing of it coming the very next day is what leaped out to me.)
By way of reminder, in my article yesterday about a half-dozen truly bizarre events by Trump the past week – most of them not even the past week, but this week – I ended it by writing:
“And all this will keep getting worse. Because Trump's dementia, which is degenerative, will keep getting worse. And because he's not surrounded by anyone able, willing or competent enough to stop him.
“And all this keeps getting reported as individual events. But it's not individual, it's who Trump is, especially now, as the dementia that expert psychologists have long said he has keeps getting worse...because dementia is degenerative. These are not random, separate actions. These are each part of a whole.
“And all this has just happened within days. This isn't a look at Trump's nine months in office. This is Trump's past week!”
When a tree keeps losing its leaves unexpectedly over time, that may not be standalone events at all, but rather is connected to a much greater problem.
Which brings us to what happened next.
After posting my article in the morning, I went on social media and promoted it with links to the piece. And then came across an article from Politico.
And there leaping out, was a headline that clearly caught my attention --
To the shock of no one who reads these pages, I immediately checked out the article. And to absence of shock for me, the psychologist in question was Dr. John Gartner, a former professor at Johns Hopkins, who I’ve extensively quoted here. Dr. Gartner has long-written and spoken extensively since early in Trump’s first administration that Trump has shown signs of early dementia (which is dementia where the person is still functioning), and also has “malignant narcissism” -- a specific medical disorder he has studied for years completely different from mere narcissism.
(I first came across mention of the condition in a 2017 article in Psychology Today by Rhonda Freeman, PhD. She wrote, "A person with malignant narcissism has the potential to destroy families, communities, nations, and work environments. Later adding. "However, they process information in ways that can hurt society in general, but also the people who love or depend on them.)
The article I read yesterday was about the Sunday episode of the Daily Beast’s regular podcast, on which Dr. Gartner was a guest. Gartner discussed signs that he, as a psychologist, has seen of Trump’s cognitive decline, which most people assume is just normal, including something I’ve referenced extensively here, how Trump totally makes up words when the ones he is looking for are left incomplete and then finished with a nonsense ending. To the press and most people, this is simply dismissed as “Trump glitching,” but to psychologists they have a medical term for it: phonemic paraphasia. Dr. Gartner explained how this and the 79-year-old’s nonsensical speeches and repeated confusion are flashing signs of his “immense cognitive failure.”
“People don’t make those kinds of phonemic paraphasias if they’re tired or if they’re aging,” Gartner said. “It’s something very specific that is linked to dementia and organic, cognitive decline.”
But the part that leaped out to me was the overlap with yesterday’s article. That Dr. Gartner didn’t view recent bizarre moments by Trump as individual events, just another weird action, but saw all of it together as a single piece, connected evidence of Trump’s dementia. And also how recent and numerous the episodes have become. Even though the episodes might not seem that way to the public who see such things as ordinary and there often get dismissed..
However, Dr. Gartner warned that Trump’s "impulsive and erratic behavior," which he sees as a psychologist, are not only symptoms of Trump’s dementia, but could get worse. And that is the danger, because dementia is generative.
The most notable recent example Gartner pointed to was Trump’s address to top military brass last month, showing how “disordered” Trump thinking is – that while to many people it was just typical Trump rambling, to a psychologist it displayed a similarity to dementia patients who “pick up on one concrete physical detail” and then “free-associate” away from the original topic.
Dr. Gartner pointed to the moment when Trump suddenly switched from talking about the morale of Marines to “Biden’s autopen,” before then focusing at length on the topic of “gorgeous paper.”
“We’re seeing a stone skipping along the water” Gartner said. “He’s going from one association to another, but it doesn’t make any linear sense.”
Even more recently – moving things to the “and only last week” dynamic I addressed -- Gartner noted that Trump had claimed stopping a “nuclear” war between Iran and Pakistan – but kept mixing up India with Pakistan. “It’s one thing to get a name wrong, maybe even to reverse it,” Gartner said. “But he’s actually confusing the countries themselves.” Repeatedly.
Dr. Gartner added that Trump insisted he had “solved” a non-existent war between Cambodia and Armenia – which are actually 4,000 miles apart -- only days after having bragged he had stopped a war between Azerbaijan and Albania, confusing it again with another country, Armenia.
Gartner described Trump’s “clearly demented memory loss” as being evident when he forgot House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ name only one a day after having met with Jeffries about stopping the government shutdown.
“This is like when you go to visit your mother in the nursing home and you bring your sister and she goes, ‘Who’s that nice lady that you brought with you?’... I mean, it’s that level of non-recognition that we’re talking about.”
Gartner said that “because of his cognitive decline, [Trump] is focusing on things like the [White House] ballroom and the paper that he writes things on.” In fact, on Tuesday, press secretary Leavitt -- thinking she was describing a happy positive -- said that Trump’s entire focus was “on the ballroom.” Ignoring that in a government shutdown, one would think his focus would be on ending the shutdown.
Gartner singled out, as well, the eighth boat strike, at the time of Sunday's podcast, among those that the U.S. military has recently undertaken. That these have killed at least 37 people without any evidence of who was on board, all serve as a sign of how Trump's condition has degenerated.
And "It's going to get worse."
(By the way, it already has. There have now been 10 deadly boat strikes.)
While most people see the brutality, whether they support the action or not, it fits into what the psychologist brought up as Trump displaying the aforementioned “malignant narcissism,” a severe personality disorder marked by paranoia and sadism. It’s a condition that The Daily Beast notes has been used to describe dictators such as Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and Saddam Hussein.
In fact, pointing to Trump declaring recently that “I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them,” Gartner explained that this relates directly with how, only this past weekend, Trump posted the sickening AI video showing him wearing a crown while bombing “No Kings” protesters with a massive stream of excrement.
“The idea that he really just wants to s--t on everyone who disagrees with him, that’s literally how he feels because of the personality disorder,” Gartner said, explaining that with dementia, a sufferer’s personality disorders tend to get “more disinhibited, more grossly raw.”
Dr. Gartner predicted that as Trump gets older, he would use the power of his office in ways that are more “irrational” and “destructive.”
“It is so impulsive and erratic,” he said. “This is really someone who could wake up and—in a state of complete confusion and erratic irritation—do something catastrophic. And no one is going to stop him.”
These are not separate episodes. They are not normal acts of Trump just being Trump. They are all, to Dr. Gartner, evidence of a larger whole, which is dementia. That is degenerative.
For those interested, here is the full podcast
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