A conservative commentator and one of America’s top psychiatrists agree that President Donald Trump’s recent interview with NBC News’ Kristen Welker raises serious concerns about his mental fitness.
Jonathan V. Last, a conservative commentator for The Bulwark, noted that Trump is turning 80 next week, frequently falls asleep in public and has consistent physical symptoms of decline including severe bruising on both hands, swollen legs and a neck rash. After adding that Trump’s physicians consistently misrepresent his health and therefore cannot be trusted, Last analyzed three statements Trump made to Welker that he viewed as alarming.
First, when Trump was asked if America is at war with Iran, the president replied by saying “Well, they’ve been largely decapitated. And I call it a military exercise because people would rather have it called that. It’s not a big war for us. It’s not. We have the most powerful military in the world. I built it, frankly. I built it in my first four years. And I’m using it a little bit in my second four years.”
He added, “Their navy is gone. Their air force is gone. Their anti-aircraft is gone. They might’ve built it up a little bit over the last four weeks during this little ceasefire that we did at the request of some very good people, very, very fine people from — actually from numerous places, as you know. You know, there are a lot of people involved. But from Pakistan in particular, the field marshal and the prime minister. And we’re very close to having a deal. And if we don’t have a deal, we’ll do it one way or the other. Either way, we win.”
Last observed that, while it is obvious that Trump avoided answering the question directly, he also seemed to struggle to make any kind of coherent point.
According to Last, Trump “wants to say that we’re not at war; that there’s still a ceasefire in place; and that it was the leadership of Pakistan who requested the ceasefire. But he can’t find those words, so his mind vamps about the size of the ceasefire, and the ‘very fine people’ who wanted it from ‘numerous places’ until the word ‘Pakistan’ drops into place for him.”
Psychiatrist Dr. Henry Abraham, formerly of Tufts University, has repeatedly raised the alarm about Trump’s declining mental state, even writing a public letter to Trump’s doctor last month. When AlterNet shared both Trump’s answer and Last’s analysis with Abraham, he offered a different take than Last as to what it represents — although he also shared Last’s concern that Trump is unfit to be president.
“Sadly, I don't want to take steam out of your argument here, but everything he's saying makes sense from his point of view,” Abraham told AlterNet. “His point of view is distorted, erroneous, grandiose, and self-serving — but that's who he is. That's not necessarily an abnormal mental status exam beyond the typical and longstanding grandiosity and self-importance that he injects into every discussion.”
Last also drew attention to Trump answering a Welker question about the new Supreme Leader of Iran, claiming that the president seemed unable to remember the leader’s name “Mojtaba Khamenei.”
“Well, I don’t want to go into names,” Trump told Welker when asked who is leading Iran. “But you know who they are. They’re leaders. They’re respected, respected by the people that have to respect them. They are calling the shots. We know that because we see it through various tests that we’ve given. It’s a little bit strange because you have leaders that have been there for a long time, and they get wiped out. Then you have leaders that you also know, the second tier, and they get wiped out. All of a sudden, we’re dealing with different people.”
When Welker tried to give Trump a hint by referring to Mojtaba Khamenei as the son of the previous Supreme Leader, Trump merely said “he’s a part of it” before digressing further about how the Iranian people “pay homage” to their leader. Welker also asked Trump if he knows Khamenei’s current physical whereabouts or health, and Trump replied “I don’t want to say whether or not I know where he is. But there’s a good probability that I do.”
According to Last, “everything about this exchange is odd. Trump hasn’t been able to say who the leadership of Iran is. Trump never manages to actually speak the name of the person he’s talking about, but Welker offers him another way to identify Khamenei and Trump immediately latches onto it and insists that ‘he’s part of it.’ He then represents that he knows something about this person — that people ‘pay homage to him.’ What a strange expression.”
He added, “And then, pressed on where this person is and what his physical condition is, Trump evades, but then smudges this evasion with another bizarre phrase. If you read this exchange as a man trying to fake his way through a series of questions he doesn’t fully understand . . . well, suddenly it makes a lot of sense.”
When AlterNet asked Abraham about Last’s analysis, he mostly concurred with it.
“We all know politicians bob and weave," Abraham told AlterNet. "This is Trump's version of bobbing and weaving. The problem is that it's bobbing and weaving in a way that is illogical and doesn't make sense. It does not pass muster of a normal mental status exam.”
He added, “Any patient giving that answer to that question — the answer which is quite clear — would say something like: ‘Yes, I know how he's doing, but it's top secret. I can't talk about it,’ or ‘We're not in touch, and I hope he does well because we'd like to talk to him sometime.’ Those are normal answers. What he gave was a total non-sequitur, not a politician's bob and weave.”
After giving Trump the benefit of the doubt insofar as “the functional leader is a different and more sophisticated question," he contextualized that observation by adding that it is troubling that Trump seemed to struggle even to name him.
“I don't think the president knows it either, which is either extremely poor foreign policy or an inability to retain a complex Arabic name,” Abraham told AlterNet.
Finally Last critiqued Trump’s answer to Welker’s question about Trump promising no new wars and then reneging on that by invading Venezuela and Iran. He began by saying that he doubted the war was unpopular, claiming the polls revealing otherwise are "all fake polls anyway," insisted he has "good judgment" and claimed that he "didn’t promise anything. I don’t like these endless wars. This is not an endless war. We’ve been doing this for three months. Much of it has been under the form — a pretty good form of ceasefire. The blockade has been amazing. Our Navy is amazing. Our military’s the best in the world.”
Trump added, “Hey, we took over a very powerful country, Venezuela. Lot of soldiers. Big, strong military. We took over Venezuela in a matter of minutes. We destroyed the capability of Iran in a matter of days. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it. Now I’m going to finish it. But remember, you were in Vietnam nineteen years because of stupid people. You were in so many different countries. Every war, you were in for years. Look at Iraq." He then repeated his claim that if he had not attacked Iran, they would have tried to "blow up" America with a nuclear weapon.
According to Last, one can interpret this answer as either “just Trump being Trump” or as rambling with “the insecure ravings of a flustered eldercare patient. Trump has been mildly challenged. He can’t lay his hands on the response he’s looking for. He grasps around desperately, coming up with some familiar words — one of the striking aspects of the interview is the sheer amount of repetition. Trump mentions Vietnam five times, and repeats the 'nineteen years' talking point four times. He brings up his election. He insists that his judgment is good. He conjures grandiose scenarios to justify his actions.”
Abraham argued to AlterNet that, whereas Last distinguishes between “Trump being Trump” and cognitive decline, it may be a distinction without any meaningful difference.
“Oh God, that's garden-variety Trump stream of consciousness — concrete thinking, inability or unwillingness to answer questions directly, a lack of true knowledgeability of the problem at his fingertips, and certainly a lack of historical understanding,” Abraham told AlterNet. “Does this add up to mental illness? I'm not so sure. Does it add up to profound ignorance of history and of tactical and strategic value? Yes. Is he espousing any plan to extricate the country from this war of choice? No — there's not a scintilla of evidence that that's going on in his mind. That's not an abnormal mental status exam, as much as — I hate to use this phrase — a low-IQ president.”
This may not mean Trump is “crazy,” Abraham said, “but what is flagrant is this: he talks about, essentially, ‘I can end this very quickly.’ Well, how? What he's implying — and I believe he is implying this — is that he's thinking about the option of using nuclear weapons. We can't second-guess him, but the probability of that kind of thinking, even if it's in the single-digit percentages, is absolutely mind-boggling. And essentially — and if I were writing this, I would work hard to get exactly the right word — it is certainly disqualifying of him as president.”
Last month, Abraham led a group of 36 top physicians and mental health experts who warned in a letter to Congress that Trump shows signs of cognitive decline which put the world in danger, given his access to the planet’s most powerful military. Referring back to a statement they issued earlier that month, the group argued in its statement that Trump’s “mental instability, coupled with his sole, unchecked authority to launch nuclear weapons, makes him a clear and present danger to the safety of all Americans.” To explain their concern, they pointed to Trump’s “bizarre and impulsive behavior, rambling digressions, factual confusions, unexplained sudden changes of course in strategic matters, both national and international, and his deeply impaired judgment.”
In a subsequent letter to Congress they added that Trump “has exhibited more signs of grandiosity, e.g., posting images of himself on social media shaking hands with God, acting like Jesus, and dressing as a Pope. And he has continued nocturnal bingeing on social media posts that are filled with accusations of multiple conspiracies against him, as often as 150 times a night. Most worrisome are his outbursts of extreme, seemingly uncontrollable rage, such as his threat to destroy Iran, saying, ‘A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.’”
Speaking to AlterNet at the time about that letter, Abraham said that “there has been a frightening progression of symptoms. These include grandiosity without moral safeguards, paranoia, impulsivity, vindictiveness, easy misperception of being harmed, moments of omnipotence, uncontrolled rage and sole control over the use of nuclear weapons in a time of war. As a psychiatrist reviewing these, I can only say 'Yikes!'”
Abraham then argued that “the solutions have to be political. They include invoking the 25th amendment, impeachment, or convincing him to resign as Nixon did. None of these are an easy lift, especially with a loyalist cabinet and Congress. But the irony is that our leaders don’t lead as much as they follow. A recent poll by the Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos group found a majority of [Americans] do not believe the president is physically or mentally able to discharge his duties. The public is waking up to these dangers. As they do, the political landscape may shift towards removal of a defective and dangerous leader.”