While for many it’s obvious how serious Trump’s declining mental capacity has become, for too many Americans that reality has not yet broken through. The media continues to treat Trump like a normal candidate; many Americans have baked Trump’s bizarre behavior into their perceptions of him; and many take right-wing lies about Joe Biden’s mental fitness at face value.
Given this, we wanted to hear from John Gartner, founder of Duty To Warn, a group of mental health professionals who have been raising the alarm about Trump’s increasingly sociopathic behavior since 2017. Now in 2024, Gartner has an even more dire warning about Trump: that there are increasing signs the former president is heading fast down the road toward dementia.
Here’s the thing - Trump has always been a high extroversion, low agreeableness, reward-seeking narcissist (that article is from 2016). Here’s magician Penn Jillette talking about his experience with Trump on 2 seasons of Celebrity Apprentice (in 2012) and why he thinks Trump’s personality makes him a terrible choice for President (definitely watch it, it’s 90 seconds of Penn slaying Trump). So sometimes it’s hard to tell if Trump is being combative and illogical because he’s progressing towards dementia or if it’s just his personality which has been awful for as long as it’s been recorded. He’s the real-world embodiment of the quote by Douglas Adams:
I believe the tell is in the degradation of his speech, both written and verbal.