'Gross signs of dementia': Medical experts troubled by Trump’s increasingly 'erratic' speeches

07 March 2024

Right-have media outlets have been obsessed with 81-year-old President Joe Biden's age, often conflating his gaffes with mental impairment while portraying 77-year-old Donald Trump as youthful and energetic — and either ignoring or downplaying Trump's verbal difficulties, such as confusing former South Carolina Nikki Haley with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) during a recent speech.

Salon's Chauncey DeVega makes a Biden/Trump comparison in an article published on March 7 and reports that Trump's problems, according to medical experts, are much worse.

"Whatever one may think of Donald Trump the political leader, and all of the evil and vile things he has done in that capacity, he is a human being who appears to be in crisis," DeVega warns. "Moreover, that Donald Trump is leading President Biden in the polls and has a real chance of becoming the next president of the United States should be a source of great alarm for anyone who claims to care about the wellbeing of the country and its future."

One of the Salon interviewees quoted in DeVega's report is Dr. John Gartner, a psychologist and former professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Gartner told Salon, "Not enough people are sounding the alarm that based on his behavior, and in my opinion, Donald Trump is dangerously demented. In fact, we are seeing the opposite among too many in the news media, the political leaders and among the public. There is also this focus on Biden's gaffes or other things that are well within the normal limits of aging. By comparison, Trump appears to be showing gross signs of dementia. This is a tale of two brains: Biden's brain is aging, Trump's brain is dementing."

Harry Segal of Cornell University and Weill Cornell Medical School notes that Trump's campaign speeches have been increasingly "erratic."

Segal told Salon, "In the past six months, Trump's rallies are filled with strange lapses of logic. He has confused Biden with (Barack) Obama, spoke of World War 2, and has lapsed into bewildering digressions that are hard to follow. Only this weekend, he said, 'We have languages coming into our country that no one can speak' — a strange grasping for meaning, bordering on neologism. At other times, he seems to get lost in the middle of a sentence."

Vincent Greenwood, executive director of the Washington Center For Cognitive Therapy, argues that Trump is showing "confusion with increasing regularity."

Greenwood told Salon, "We all stumble over and mispronounce words occasionally. This is not what is going on with Trump. The incidence of these kinds of mistakes takes him into this realm of phonemic paraphasia, which is a sign of underlying brain damage, not just aging. Even when compared to his speech of a few years ago, you can observe a noticeable difference. When you compare it to his speech as a middle-aged man, the shift is radical and ominous."

Read Chauncey DeVega's full report for Salon at this link.

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