President Donald Trump is displaying alarming signs of cognitive decline throughout his recent speeches, according to two expert journalists who have covered him in depth.
"You wrote about how much more profane, rude, crass the president is in public remarks," CNN anchor Jake Tapper asked The New York Times' Dylan Freedman over a recent article he co-authored with Peter Baker on Monday. "Here is part of what the president told a reporter last Friday after being asked a rather innocuous question. I mean, it was a pretty simple question and also a sympathetic one: 'Are you feeling okay?' How does an interaction like that differ from what we might have seen from him 10 years ago?”
Freedman replied, “Yeah, I mean, if you listen to Trump 10 years ago, it’s almost amazing how much more sort of normal, less coarse he sounds. And we found that he’s using swear words almost three times as much as he was then, which, you know, we’re not doctors, but some medical experts point to that as a sign of age-related disinhibition.”
The two then pivoted to discussing Trump's recent fixation on men's appearances, such as complimenting the backside of Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH).
“I mean, again, this is in public during a midterm election season where voters are really worried about being able to put food on the table," Tapper told Freedman. "What do you take away from this?”
Freedman told Tapper, “That’s right. I mean, we see sort of all these issues that are on American’s minds like affordability and we found he almost as often is talking about men’s posterior specifically, which is just absurd to think, you know, from a sitting president. Even some fellow members of the Republican Party are sort of saying this is a step too far. And we’ve even heard Vance admit that, you know, we’ve been talking a lot about the male body lately in the White House these days.”
On Monday AlterNet spoke to Dr. Henry Abraham, a psychiatrist formerly of Tufts University who was the lead author of a May letter to Congress signed by three dozen top health professionals asking government officials to invoke the 25th Amendment, which allows a president to be forcibly removed from office if they are mentally incompetent.
"When you put grandiosity into the picture, or as Peter Baker put it so brilliantly in a recent article, essentially counting up the number of times that Trump has gone off the rails, you have to conclude that, yeah, this guy really has major psychiatric illness," Abraham told AlterNet on Monday. "It is certainly consistent with evolving dementia. It may also be very much tied to a mood disorder. The cause of that mood disorder, we don’t know. But this is not a good picture when you put together grandiosity, rage attacks, rambling conversations or granding speeches, and you haven’t added other signs and symptoms of neurocognitive decline, such as his paraphagia, where he just can’t say words and he can’t remember the words."
