Trump behavior raises mental health questions during Obama rant

Trump is testing the limits of presidential power. Obama did, too; Donald Trump and Barack Obama (Image via Wikimedia Commons)

President Donald Trump again raised questions about his mental fitness through a public rant about one of his predecessors, former President Barack Obama, that was described as "incoherent."

The "incoherent attack on Obama," as The Daily Beast reported on Tuesday, “And here’s what I love, because if you’ve ever heard of Barack Hussein Obama, who’s a rotten president, by the way, he’s gonna be testifying for Mohammed,” Trump told a political rally on Monday.

“He’s gonna be testifying, or I guess, I think he will probably end up being testifying, I don’t know," Trump added. "Whatever the hell he’s doing, but I guess he’s going up to Michigan, a state that I won also very nicely. Thank you very much. I love Michigan. I don’t believe that Michigan values are gonna allow this guy to get in. He’s an arrogant guy. But Barack Hussein Obama is going up there to help him campaign.”

This is not the first recent occasion when Trump, who is 80-years-old, behaved in ways that drew attention to his advancing age and potential mental unfitness. Also on Tuesday, Trump raised alarms when he was seen wandering across the White House helipad and interacting with a non-existent audience. Even though no one was there, Trump persisted for roughly 30 seconds in waving and saluting to the supposed people.

Speaking with AlterNet in October, psychiatrist Dr. Henry Abraham — a former professor at Tufts University who was the lead author of an open letter to Congress with three dozen expert signatories saying Trump is not cognitively fit to be president — compared the situation with Trump to that of a person behaving erratically in a supermarket.

"I like to use the metaphor here of a man in a supermarket," Abraham told AlterNet at the time. "He's getting in line in a supermarket, and he has a basket full of food, and he smashes it into the woman in front of him, because she has more food than he does and it's going to take a long time and he's in a rush — and what's she doing buying so much food, and get out of the way, and she's a terrible person, and I'm really in a rush and I'm far more important than she is."

He added, "And he pushes it, and he really shoves her with the shopping cart. Now, if you saw that, you would say — well, you'd probably call the police, because it's really a bizarre kind of thing. But that's the whole point. It's a bizarre kind of thing. It's crazy. It's a red flag."

Writing for The New Republic on Monday, journalist Timothy Noah said that doctors observing Trump's public behavior from a distance have also noticed a decline.

"This is of course the principal area of concern. I reviewed serious reasons for worry in some detail last month ('Why Trump May Not Serve Out His Presidency')," Noah observed. "To summarize: STAT News reported nine years ago that neurolinguistics and cognition experts comparing old videos of Trump with more recent ones observed deterioration in the complexity of Trump’s unscripted public utterances."

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