Struggles to 'even finish a sentence': Behind the obvious signs of Trump's growing dementia

26 May

U.S. President Donald Trump attends the commencement ceremony at West Point Military Academy in West Point, New York, U.S., May 24, 2025.

To ensure that the United States will always be led by a coherent, functioning President, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment provides for the prompt, orderly, and democratic transfer of executive power in the event the president is incapacitated, physically or mentally. Trump’s tariff debacle, where he thrust out his chest, flung economic incoherence at the world, then flip flopped only two days later, was the strongest evidence yet- in a roiling sea of evidence- that he is mentally incapacitated.

Despite inheriting the strongest post-covid economy in the world, Trump keeps insisting that the US economy is broken and in need of saving.He insists global trading partners who sell us more than they buy from us- even countries that are a fraction of our size- are “taking advantage.”

Trump’s tariff drama was so asinine, he’s either self-dealing or insane. Frankly, although they are not mutually exclusive, I’d prefer the former. I only wish that rumors swirling in the media today, suggesting Trump’s tariffs were a hustle, an insider scheme meant to enrich his backers, were true. Trump being a self-dealing crook poses less danger to the world than him making than no sense at all.

Dementia and the Duty to Warn

Leaders of the EU are too intelligent to sneer out loud at Trump’s flip flop on tariffs. Aware of his deranged lust for revenge, they are reluctant to utter the truth about his economic ignorance. But the world is aware, even if Americans aren’t, that our president is deranged.

Because Trump’s administration hasrefused to release his medical records, other mental health professionals have come forward with their own assessments. The emerging consensus is that Trump, showing cognitive decline, is presenting signs of advanced dementia.

Psychotherapist Dr. John Gartner, former Johns Hopkins University Medical School faculty, is so alarmed about Trump’s cognitive impairment that he circulated a petition addressing it among thousands of psychiatrists, psychologists and other credentialed mental health professionals. Gartner wrote last year that Trump shows "progressive deterioration in memory, thinking, ability to use language, behavior, and both gross and fine motor skills," adding that he felt an ethical “obligation to warn the public, and urge the media to cover this national emergency."

Trump struggles to “even finish a sentence,” Gartner explained in an interview with MindSite News, elaborating that, “When we’re diagnosing dementia, what we need to see is a deterioration of someone’s own baseline of functioning. What we see that a lot of people don’t appreciate is that when Donald Trump was younger in the 1980s, he was actually quite articulate. His thoughts were logical and related: now they’re tangential. He goes off on these ramblings where he is confabulating things – weird things in which he’ll talk about Venezuelans and mental hospitals, and then he’ll talk about sharks and batteries or the late, great Hannibal Lector and Silence of the Lambs.”

Dr. Gartner notes how Trump is “losing his capacity for coherent speech,” identifying “dozens and dozens of Trump’s phonemic paraphasias, in which you use sounds in place of an actual word (a hallmark of brain damage and dementia).” Trump will say something like ‘mishiz’ for missiles, or 'Chrishus' for Christmas, because he can’t complete the word. Then we see also a lot of semantic paraphasias, in which he uses a word incorrectly, as in 'the oranges of the situation' because it rhymes with 'the origins of the situation.'”

Mental health professionals, mainstream media, sound the alarm

Main stream media, including the New York Times, have also questioned Trump’s mental state. In October 2024, the NYT reported that Trump now uses more “negative words than positive words compared with 2016, which can be another indicator of cognitive change.” And he curses far more often than he did when he first ran, “a trend that could reflect what experts call disinhibition,” another sign of dementia. They cited a study by health care news outlet, Stat, that reports similar findings.

Newsweek’s article, “Donald Trump Dementia Evidence 'Overwhelming,” cites New York psychologist Suzanne Lachmann. Lackmann describes how Trump "seemingly forgets how sentence began and invents something in the middle" resulting in "an incomprehensible word salad"—a behavior she argues is observed "frequently in patients who have dementia."

The Dementia Society notes that “forgetting names and dates is normal for people who are aging. But "confusing people and generations" is a sign of advanced dementia. During the campaign, Trump confused Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi on eight separate occasions, and said he was running against Obama. He said his father was born in Germany, when it was his grandfather who was born in Germany.

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump

With the assistance of other psychiatrists and credentialled mental health professionals, Dr. Bandy Lee wrote, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President near the conclusion of Trump’s first presidency. In the book, psychiatric experts came forward due to what they saw as their professional moral and civic “duty to warn” America about Trump’s dementia.This duty, they argued, supersedes their competing professional duty of neutrality.

Since then, more than 3000 credentialed mental health professionals have added their signatures to a petition concluding that the president has probable dementia.

They write, “Donald Trump is showing unmistakable signs strongly suggesting dementia, based on his public behavior and informant reports that show progressive deterioration in memory, thinking, ability to use language, behavior, and both gross and fine motor skills…. 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…”

Congress needs to act before Trump gets red-button happy

Trump, who caused global destruction with his mindless tariff wars, now has the sole authority to launch nuclear weapons as the Commander in Chief.

Evidence of his cognitive decline is everywhere. Mental health professionals have sounded the alarm, and met their professional duty to warn the world about Trump’s dementia.

Congress now has a duty to listen to the professionals. Republicans, on the whole, have a duty to act.

Section 4 of the 25th Amendment allows the Vice President and either the Cabinet, or a body approved “by law” formed by Congress, to jointly agree that “the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Democrats need to proceed under this clause, and frightened republicans need to join in before Trump commits another, potentially world annihilating, blunder.

NOW READ: There’s a new dress code in Trump’s DC — and it’s straight out of a dictator’s playbook

Sabrina Haake is a 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense.Her columns are published in Alternet, Chicago Tribune, MSN, Out South Florida, Raw Story,Salon,Smart News and Windy City Times. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.

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