U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during an event to sign executive orders related to beef, in the Oval Office of the White House, in Washington, D.C., U.S., September 4, 2026. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
On Tuesday, a widely cited psychologist took to YouTube to raise the alarm regarding “more highly concerning behavior” from President Donald Trump. According to Dr. John Garrison, Trump’s recent actions suggest “steep neurological decline” and a dangerously “manic-like state.”
Garrison began by playing a clip from a recent Fox News interview, in which Trump declared that the price of oil is “going to go down like a rocket.” According to Garrison, “There were two neurological issues in this very short clip, both of them verbal. One is that he's having speech planning issues, saying ‘going down like a rocket.’ Obviously, that's combining phrases. He's having a hard time organizing his thoughts. And second is an involuntary vocalization.” Here Garrison replays the clip, noting an abrupt sound Trump makes, explaining, “The pathways that deal with language are disrupted. We are seeing serious issues with language with President Trump.” What’s more, Garrison asserts that such vocalizations are “relatively new.”
In the interview, Trump begins talking about the midterm elections, saying, “I'm going to campaign like I did for myself and I'm going to hope that people think that I'm on. And if I'm not on, if they don't go out and vote, if they go out and vote, we're going to win easily.” As Garrison notes, “What he's saying makes absolutely no sense. He cannot organize his thoughts. He gets confused and he believes what he's saying is coherent. But it truly makes no sense.” According to Garrison, this struggle with verbal planning can be evidence of underlying “neurological issues.”
Here Garrison points to Trump’s pupils, which have remained dilated throughout the interview. “Trump is in a very bright room for this interview,” says Garrison. “You can see the lights actually reflecting off of his eyes, and what should be happening is that his pupils should be constricting rather than dilating because when there's too much light in a room, your pupils get smaller, not bigger.” According to Garrison, “Dilated pupils like this can be from a wide variety of reasons, but it's not just something that happens,” and likely culprits include medication for something like incontinence, Parkinson’s disease, or seizures.
The White House claims that Trump has no such issues, so Garrison says that if we can take them at their word, there must be some other cause. “One would be stimulants,” he asserts. “They can certainly make your eyes dilate. Another would be if there's some sort of neurological impairment. There are certain types of brain injuries that can disrupt pathways that control pupil dilation. While there may be a number of reasons why his eyes may be dilated like this, they're all going to have to do with the functioning of the brain, whether it's medication or something else.”
Finally, Garrison turns to questions of “grandiosity and poor judgment,” noting Trump’s “absurd” social media posting binge over the weekend. “Right now, his grandiosity is fixated on expansion,” says Garrison, pointing to Trump’s “completely insane” posts about renaming Lake Ontario. “Even if he was doing it just to agitate people, it does show a distinct lack of judgment. It shows his inability to think through the consequences of what he is doing…His behavior on Truth Social has truly gotten strange.”
According to Garrison, Trump’s posting spree was an explosion of “outright mania” indicative of “perseveration,” in which a person repeats something uncontrollably. “The obsession with and the perseveration on everything being his or being America's is only growing by the day,” says Garrison, noting that Trump posted about renaming New Mexico to “New America” seven times within an hour. "Talk about grandiosity, mania, neurological issues,” says Garrison. “This is what it looks like. The grandiosity combined with the perseveration means that he cannot get off of this idea, the idea of expansion. He just cannot neurologically get past this, so it repeats over and over and over again.”
“He is truly hyperfixated on these ideas,” Garrison warns. “And because you lose insight when you have neurological issues, he'll be the last person to know. If you tell him he's doing it too much, if you tell him that this is excessive, it will not compute with him because for him it's not excessive. It's exactly what he wants to do because to him, this feels normal.”
“We're now getting involuntary vocalizations,” concludes Garrison. “We're getting more confusion. He continues to struggle with his verbal skills. And as you can see from his Truth Social posts, he is having some type of episode. We are talking about grandiosity and obsessiveness and perseveration that is off the charts.”