Back in May, a group of 36 health professionals wrote an open letter to Congress warning that President Donald Trump is in a state of cognitive decline. Even though the medical and political communities were willing to call out President Joe Biden's apparent decline during the 2024 election, Trump has received an inexplicable and inexcusable pass for his own obvious infirmities. Individuals are willing to sound the alarm, of course, but nothing has occurred on a systematic level to alert the American people to the fact that their president is psychologically unwell.

Below is AlterNet's exclusive interview with psychiatrist Dr. Henry Abraham, formerly of Tufts University, who said that Trump is literally a "maniac" because he displays manic traits like posting on social media late into the night. He also broke down Trump's tendency to ramble, his grandiosity and his obsession with his predecessor, President Barack Obama.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity, context and length.

Proof that Trump is in decline.

ROZSA: Can you describe, as a clinician, the symptoms you've observed of Trump experiencing seeming decline?

ABRAHAM: Oh, sure. There's a bunch off the top of my head. I'm sure I can do it.

Let me start off: The real question here is, what is baseline and what is decline? Those kinds of questions, of course, are very difficult to pin down. But having observed him for a long time, and also talking to people who have also observed him professionally in the same room with him, which I've done, I can come up with a certain number — 10 or 11 — psychiatric symptoms that are, for me, red flags. And you don't have to be a rocket scientist to recognize a red flag.

I like to use the metaphor here of a man in a supermarket. 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. 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.

Now, those kinds of red flags are obvious to you because you're in the supermarket and people usually don't behave that way. And to a clinician, it's obviously a red flag. In fact, we can begin to think about various psychiatric disorders which might explain that behavior. And that's the interesting challenge here, because we really can't make a diagnosis without looking at all the facts and, of course, having the patient in some form cooperate with the examination. So we can't come away with a diagnosis, but we can come away with, "Geez, this is a symptom which is a red flag to us, and we should pursue it and we should note it and we should not forget about it."

And that's the situation that nearly all of us in the medical profession are in with respect to Donald Trump. We see red flags, we know what causes those red flags, but we don't know the specific proximate cause of the red flag. So that's the preamble.

The red flags that really jump out at me — there are a bunch. First and foremost is he falls asleep at really inopportune times. He seems to be doing it virtually every day. And yet he's up all night in a very disordered frame of mind. So how do you explain those kinds of things? Well, there are any number of explanations. We don't really have good explanations, but we do know they're red flags.

No one stays up half the night tweeting 50 or 75 or 150 times and has a normal mental status examination. If a patient comes in to me and says, "Oh, I've been up all night and I've tweeted a hundred times," I would say, "Oh, okay, that's a red flag. That's a manic behavior." There are many causes of manic behavior, and nearly all of them are treatable with proper treatment. But also manic behavior is invariably self-defeating and in many situations absolutely dangerous. So that's the first red flag: This guy is up all night, he's manic, and he's out of gas during the day and he falls asleep.

And what is the explanation for that? Well, there are a number of explanations. He could be hyped up on stimulant drugs at night. He might have a sleep disorder which prevents him from sleeping when he's pacing the halls with his laptop and says, "Oh, I can't stop thinking about Letitia James."

But actually that merges into another red flag. It's not simply that he can't sleep, or that he's awake or supercharged by some medical explanation like stimulant drugs or coffee or too much Diet Coke — I mean, any number of explanations here. But he's pathologically hyped up and manic. In fact, the noun for this is maniac. He's a maniac at night, but he's not a maniac during the day, generally. So it's a nocturnal form of mania which remains to be explained.

Let's move on, because a lot of this stuff is at night. Another red flag is his inability to control his rage. And this is pretty dangerous stuff. If he's alone at night and he's in one of these rageful states — well, he has sole access to nuclear weapons. He could, on his own, launch a nuclear attack against whatever enemy he chooses, and he has a few, but Iran comes to mind, since he's started a war with Iran. That's a very dangerous thing. In fact, that's probably the most dangerous. That probably goes at the top of my list of abnormalities of mental function which threaten literally hundreds of millions of people.

That was just number one.

ROZSA: That's number one?

ABRAHAM: That's number one. So mania, plus rage, plus access to nuclear weapons is not a healthy combination.

Other aspects that worry me, besides those worries, are that periodically he seems to be disoriented. He doesn't know where to walk. He needs to be literally led by the arm by world leaders, who have to treat him like the demented grandfather that he probably is. I mean, dementia per se has many different causes. You can say, "Oh, he has Alzheimer's disease" — probably not; at least he doesn't have a flagrant, advanced and undeniable Alzheimer's disease. If we saw his MRI, we'd say, "Oh, well, he has cortical atrophy," or he has various other radiologic evidence that he has developing dementia with organic features that actually are visible. That would be confirmatory. But we don't have that.

We also don't have the actual results of his mental state screens, the so-called MoCA examinations — the Montreal Cognitive Assessment test. It's a test which is administered in 10 minutes, and anyone can be trained to give it, and it doesn't require great expertise to give or to add up the score. It takes some skill to understand what you're looking at. Ordinarily, the MoCA is a test that we give just once — this person is coming in, how are things going? We don't do serial MoCAs, usually. If we have a need to follow someone's mental status, we don't necessarily just use a MoCA, any more than if someone came in and took their temperature and we said, "Oh, you have a fever" — we're not going to take the temperature every day. We're going to find out what the cause of the fever is.

If we're doing it on a regular basis, like once a year, well, that's a routine physical exam. If we're doing it every three months, we're looking for fever. And the same thing is true with the MoCA. If we're repeating the MoCA frequently — which we've done, I think, now four times since he's been in public office — we're obviously tracking a number. And that number could be mild cognitive impairment. It could be a significant cognitive impairment in someone who has a dementia, which is my greatest worry here.

And you can have a guy who puts a proposal together for a press conference, or reads a teleprompter and delivers a speech. But then, in the middle or at the end of his reading of the teleprompter, he has an aside or a discursive kind of discussion, and he's talking about things that just literally don't track with what he's supposed to be talking about. He's off in outer space. Or he's not in outer space, he's just in the wrong space. He's talking about Tesla, or electric vehicles, and then he's talking about electric boats, and he's talking about falling in the water, and he's talking about being attacked by sharks or maybe he'll die from electrocution — which would he prefer? And what was the topic again?

This is another red flag, and this is called tangentiality. He's tangential. He's not always tangential, but he's tangential enough to say he's tangential. He has a symptom. It's a red flag. Someone is tangential and comes into the office and exhibits that, you write it down. You don't ignore it. And you see it fits with other aspects of mental illness.

And so there he is in a press conference, and he's annoyed by someone who's questioning him, and he says, "Quiet, piggy." Now, that's really interesting. I mean, besides being offensive — we all know it's offensive — to a clinician, it's interesting, because this is someone who is in the middle of a professional kind of exchange, and he has his feelings about it, and that's fair. But he can't stop himself from the thought that pops into his head. He can't control it. In fact, he can't inhibit — the inhibitory circuits that we all walk around with, so we don't walk around telling fat people "Quiet, piggy," they're broken down.

He has another red flag here, and that red flag is disinhibition. He can't hold himself back from what he thinks is either mirthful or hurtful, or in some way it expresses a deep-seated emotion which he doesn't understand is not a socially acceptable way to engage people. It's not that he necessarily has to be like some spook from the State Department who never says anything ever until they retire. We're not talking about that. We're talking about ordinary conversation, where he loses control of an emotion that he's having.

The other day, when he was in the Oval Office — it was a home game — he was receiving the astronauts from the Artemis expedition. They were standing there, and the head of NASA was there; he was proud of his guys. And Trump was not, as far as I could tell, using a teleprompter. He was being cordial, and he was in a good mood. They're his guys. And they'd just come back from the moon, and it was a feather in everyone's cap. He was very proud. He was very pleased with what was going on. And he was doing a good job. He was being Mr. President, and he was being congratulatory, and he even was a little patronizing to one of the members of the press, when he admitted he hadn't read a certain document — which he certainly did. And I certainly knew about it, because it was a terribly important decision by the Supreme Court which had come down. And: "I don't know about it; maybe you can explain it to me." That was a little patronizing, but okay, big deal.

So he goes through the press conference and he's doing a great job. And then all of a sudden, he starts talking about the ears of the head of NASA. He says, "Oh yes, look at those ears, they're really big ears, you know?" He does have big ears, that's true. But who says such a thing? He can't keep himself from that loss of control. He can't do what other people do in ordinary circumstances.And so that's a red flag. That's disinhibition. He can't control his impulses. Pretty soon we can put it together: He's tangential, he has rage attacks, he can't control his emotions, and he has his finger on the button. These things begin to snowball in a way that's quite worrisome.

Other red flags:

ABRAHAM: One of his other red flags is that he is grandiose. Now, he's always been grandiose. And so one of the questions that I asked my friend who has been following him for some time as a journalist, a member of the White House press corps — I asked this person, who will remain anonymous: "I'm going to give you a dozen or so symptoms, and I'd like you to go through them all and tell me if any of them are the same or have gotten better or have gotten worse in the last year." And the report that I got from the person who sees him every day is that half of them have definitely gotten worse, and they're the ones that I am most interested in tracking.

One of them that has gotten particularly worse is grandiosity. He always had a grandiose side to him. He always exaggerated his sexual prowess, or talked about how intelligent he was, and he's always the smartest person in the room, and all this kind of stuff — which has very interesting psychological roots to it, which we speculate about. But regardless of the speculation — set speculation aside and see what's in front of us. And what's in front of us is the guy who dresses himself up like the Pope.

He can say, "Well, I'm just joking." I don't think so, because in another image of himself that he put on Truth Social, he was healing the sick, like Christ. And a third, which is my favorite of this whole bunch that he's put out, is Donald Trump shaking hands with God. Now, if I were to make this up, you'd say, "Well, this crazy idea — he couldn't sell this idea as a piece of fiction to my agent." That would not be a sellable concept. But it's real. He actually did this. He shook hands with God. He photographed himself shaking hands with God, and he posted it to his millions of followers.

Well, okay, what does this say? One of my colleagues, a Catholic, saw the image of him as Pope, and he was incensed by it, of course. He said, "This is blasphemous." He's not a psychiatrist, by the way. And I said to myself: blasphemy, yes, but psychopathology, yes, squared. This is more than blasphemy. This is a meaningful clinical presentation of a symptom, a red flag that we need to pay attention to. And so my friend in the press corps said to me, "The grandiosity has definitely gotten worse in the last year."

Okay, let's go back to the drawing board. Your question was, are there signs that this person is mentally deteriorating? Well, we know that the grandiosity is a pathological symptom, and now we have a report by someone who sees him every day that yes, it's gotten worse. So we tick that box in terms of progressive mental illness, and then we try to fit it in as a piece of the puzzle with other pieces of the puzzle. So he's disinhibited, he has rage, he's sometimes disoriented, so he has trouble getting around.

There are other pieces of the story. One of them is that sometimes he just doesn't make sense. It's not like he's following a tangent and going off in outer space; he's just speaking incoherently. He seems to be trying to make a point, but the points come in fragments, and you say, "Oh, this is a guy who's not able to speak logically." That's a red flag. So we put that down on the list of things, and his illogicality has been increasing as well.

So we have disinhibition, we have poor logic, we have tangential speech, we have disorientation. Now, let's talk about the 2020 election. If someone comes in and complains of a belief that they have, that they've had for a while, that doesn't change — it's fixed — and, most importantly, it's false, it's disproven by overwhelming and contradictory evidence, you have to say, at the very least, this is a fixed idea, as we say in the trade. But more likely than not, it's a delusion. And so if he truly believes that he won the 2020 election, despite overwhelming contradictory evidence, he's deluded. This may be dementia, but it can also be consistent with psychosis. So this is a big, big red flag.

Now, you could argue that, well, maybe this is an enduring political lie, the kinds of lies that most of the world's dictators and despots have told in order to build their base of power. And it's a possibility; it's consistent. But there's no evidence that he comes off the podium and says, on a hot mic, or to one of his staffers and someone else overhears, "Well, I really put one over there. I know I lost the 2020 vote." No, he doesn't say that at all.

If we take him at his word and he believes he won the election, he's deluded, and that's not a good sign. And there are many other things that he says: COVID will be gone in a week. If you just treated it with sunlight, that'll be the best treatment. There are other kinds of things which he seems to believe, but they don't necessarily rise to the occasion of anything that has the delusional power that the belief about that 2020 election does.

So his grip on reality either is stock in trade, or he's putting one over on everyone, or he's putting one over on himself, and that's the scariest possible explanation.

So what else about this guy is interesting to me? His memory is not good. He doesn't hang on to words and language the way he used to. There are people who have studied his language 40 years ago. His command of the language has become less competent over time. There was a very nice clip of speech of his, several decades old, where he could insert a dependent clause in the middle of a paragraph that he was speaking and then come back to the independent clause in a really expeditious way. He doesn't do that anymore. If he comes up with a dependent clause, he's lost. And this is not a good sign. It also is a benchmark of a deterioration in cognitive function.

Let me say that there are any number of medical explanations for the signs and symptoms of his deterioration. We don't know what they are. They could be as benign as simple aging, or they could be as serious as untreated neurosyphilis. We don't know the answer to those questions because of a lack of transparency by his caregivers. And I think that is a huge problem for the governance of the country.

Trump is intimidated by Obama.

ROZSA: When I interviewed Governor Chris Christie in 2019, he told me about Trump, "Every negotiation can't be a test of manhood. Every negotiation can't be a beat-down." Do you have a sense of why Trump treats every negotiation like a test of manhood and like a beat-down?

ABRAHAM: Well, actually, I have a slightly different take on that. I believe that much of what he's been doing as president is tearing down the legacy of Barack Obama. And I think the heart of that is because Trump is many things, but one of the things is he's a racist. And I think he has such a terrible problem with low self-esteem. He's always been the dumbest kid in the class. He's been told he's been dumb his whole life. And he's been told he's been a jerk his whole life. So what do you do when you're confronted with that kind of self-concept? Well, one very primitive way is to turn it upside down and say, "I'm not the dumbest person, because I'm the smartest. I know more about COVID than anyone. I know more about nuclear weapons than anyone. I'm a perfectly stable genius." What he's really saying is he feels the complete opposite. And we see the complete opposite, and that seems to be the problem.

But the thing with Obama — I really believe that that's the case. I think in his heart of hearts, he says, "I can't let a Black man actually do better in his job than I'm doing. And so anything that he's accomplished, I'm going to destroy one way or another." And he has been doing that, literally.

President Donald Trump's dubious claims about his actions in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks show that he is fully "trapped in a fictional world," analyst Thomas B. Edsall wrote for the New York Times, and it has made him a danger to the entire world for the remainder of his term.

Edsall published his latest piece for the Times on Tuesday morning, breaking down the fallout of Trump's tall tales across several days surrounding the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, as he attempted to make the occasion all about himself, instead of the heroic first responders.

"Last Tuesday, President Trump demonstrated for the few who remain in doubt that his mind is trapped in a fictional world where he is the heroic savior of the nation, if not all mankind," Edsall wrote. "Speaking at a Tunnel to Towers Foundation event honoring police officers, firefighters and other first responders, Trump recounted his memory of 9/11 and the days that followed. It has to be read in full to be truly reckoned with."

"I was building a big building in New York, and I took the whole crew down there right after this happened," Trump said. "And they were — they had no hesitation. Everybody went down with me. We went down as a big group of people. Wasn’t too much we could do. I’ll be honest. It was, it was raw... The United States Steel Building was creaking, really creaking, and we thought it was going to fall down. The truth is, it creaked a lot. It creaked. It still creaks, but it never came down. And I’ll never forget two firemen. We thought it was coming down on top of us, and two firemen, big strong guys. And I’m not the smallest guy in the world. They grabbed me under the arm, said, 'Got to get out of here!' And they literally lifted me up. This is not easy to do. I’m big. They lifted me up and they started running with me. I said, 'Fellas, I can run myself.' But they were amazing. But they thought it was coming down. It didn’t come down."

As Edsall explained further, "the words were barely out of Trump’s mouth" when the fact-checks began to pour in. CNN's fact-checker, Daniel Dale, wrote that "It’s possible there are elements of truth in Trump’s latest story, versions of which he has told before, but he hasn’t provided any evidence for it." Nia Prater and Chas Danner of New York magazine said Trump was repeating "a questionable anecdote about his whereabouts and actions in the aftermath of the tragedy and later defended his recollection as questions arose."

Attempting to defend himself, Trump later claimed on Truth Social that his story "was exactly accurate," though he also later said that he was not at Ground Zero the day of the attacks, but only "as soon as the Law allowed." Edsall highlighted the now-infamous call Trump made to WWOR-TV as the attacks unfolded on September 11, 2001, in which he wrongly claimed that one of his buildings was now the tallest in downtown Manhattan.

In light of these new claims, Edsall highlighted the statement from "36 prominent medical specialists questioning Trump’s mental fitness for office," entered into the congressional record by Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse and Jack Reed.

"We are compelled to warn of a president of the United States who is increasingly a danger to the public," the statement read. "Severely impaired judgment and impulse control, reflected in reckless threats of violence, advocacy of lethal force against civilians, encouragement of extrajudicial actions by armed supporters, repeated threats and often actions — judicial, prosecutorial, police, military and by invoking emergency power — against political opponents and others who disagree with him. Significant loss of self-control (disinhibition) and getting stuck on the same thoughts or actions, unable to let go or move on (perseveration), including seemingly compulsive, manic-like late-night communications — e.g., 150 social media posts in one night — fixation on perceived enemies, persecutory ideas and prolonged, disproportionate attacks on specific individuals and institutions."

"The reality, however, is that no action to remove Trump from the White House will happen until he does something so threatening and damaging that drumming him out of the White House becomes an inescapable necessity — no small comfort for a nation looking forward to 28 more months of an unstable man holding the presidency," Edsall concluded.

President Donald Trump’s aides know that he is crazy, according to one of his most knowledgeable biographers, but they are afraid to say it.

On an episode of his podcast Inside Trump’s Head, Trump biographer Michael Wolff analyzed reports that the president entered a yelling match on Wednesday with the moderate Republican lawmaker, Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana.

“Following the hostile meeting, a rare direct rebuke of the president from a Republican lawmaker, Cassidy explained to reporters that the 80-year-old president called him a ‘lunatic’ and used ‘language ‘that would be said on a school... playground,’ reported The Daily Beast on Thursday. “I stood and said, ‘You have not told the American people what’s going on. It was supposed to last four weeks, it’s lasted four months. Our original objectives have not been achieved, and I want to know what’s going on.’”

Yet Cassidy later felt compelled to perform an about-face later that same day after being confronted by Vice President JD Vance and special envoy Steve Witkoff. When The Daily Beast’s Joanna Coles asked Wolff why Republicans capitulate, the author broke it down.

“Well... some of them are gonna get voted out, some of them—they... continue to need... him," Wolff told Coles. “We’ve just gone through the primary season, and that was a threat to everyone. I mean... the Republicans—and we’re talking about Republicans now—are dealing with this very specific Trump ecology and they really don’t quite know how to deal with it.”

Because Trump has the power to destroy Republicans who oppose him in his party’s primaries, but then saddle them with baggage that potentially makes them unelectable in the general elections, they find themselves in a Catch-22.

“I mean... let’s accept this guy is crazy. Everybody knows that. But that doesn’t change the reality of having to deal with him unless you invoke the 25th Amendment, which is not going to happen,” Wolff said. “I mean, that’s another issue. How do you deal with a president who is crazy without a realistic mechanism to deal with that? I mean, this is what’s going on right now.”

Mental health and other medical professionals are also raising the alarm about Trump’s perceived craziness. In May, Dr. Bandy X. Lee, a psychiatrist formerly from Yale University, explained to AlterNet that Trump displays symptoms like “significant loss of self-control (disinhibition) and getting stuck on the same thoughts or actions, unable to let go or move on (perseveration), including seemingly compulsive, manic-like late-night communications—e.g., 150 social media posts in one night—fixation on perceived enemies, persecutory ideas, and prolonged, disproportionate attacks on specific individuals and institutions” and “escalating violence that threatens national and global stability. As Commander-in-Chief of our military—more than 5000 nuclear warheads in inter-continental missile silos, on submarines, and in bombers around the world, are ready for launch solely upon his order, and no one now has the authority to countermand his order.”

Lee has previously predicted crises that would emerge from Trump’s public mental state. Less than a week before the 2020 prediction election, she told this journalist for Salon that Trump would wage an insurrection if he lost to then-Vice President Joe Biden because of Trump’s narcissistic tendencies.

“Just as one once settled for adulation in lieu of love, one may settle for fear when adulation no longer seems attainable,” Lee said at the time. “Rage attacks are common, for people are bound to fall short of expectation for such a needy personality—and eventually everyone falls into this category. But when there is an all-encompassing loss, such as the loss of an election, it can trigger a rampage of destruction and reign of terror in revenge against an entire nation that has failed him.”

President Donald Trump rehashed his hatred for mail-in voting in another overnight posting spree, per the Daily Beast, sharing "unhinged" conspiracy theories and accusing Democrats of "cheating" in elections.

As highlighted in a Thursday morning report from the Daily Beast, Trump took to his Truth Social account at approximately 12:48 a.m., taking aim at the ongoing vote-counting processes in California, for its gubernatorial race and for the mayoral race in Los Angeles. Despite a long history in the state, and almost every other state, of using the system without issue, Trump nevertheless used these races to rehash his past assertion that mail-in voting amounts to cheating. This was a lie he spread with particular vigor in 2020 while trying to claim that his loss to Joe Biden was the result of fraud.

"The Dumocrats are at it again! They are trying to steal the governor of California primary, and the mayor of Los Angeles primary away from two great Republicans candidates. Here we go with the very late and massive numbers of mail in ballots," Trump wrote in his post.

Vote counting processes in modern elections — especially in states with huge populations and with substantial numbers of mail-in ballots — can take a long time to wrap up. As the Daily Beast noted in its report, "As of early Thursday morning, only 56 percent of the votes had been counted in the California governor all-party primary, while 62 percent had been counted in the Los Angeles mayoral election."

Each race is the subject of intense drama and scrutiny. In the governor's race, in which all candidates compete in the same primary and the top two candidates compete in the general, there was fear that a large field of Democrats would split the vote too much and create a general election in which two Republicans were on the final ballot in one of the biggest blue states. The Los Angeles race has also seen the divisive incumbent Karen Bass challenged by Republican candidate and former reality TV star, Spencer Pratt.

Trump added in another post later on: “There’s BIG cheating by the Dumocrats in California. Votes are all tied up. May not be in for weeks. Under investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles. Why the vote counting DELAY???”

The Daily Beast noted that Trump did not elaborate on this alleged investigation into California voting.

President Donald Trump is showing off a new portrait painted for his upcoming 80th birthday — and users are pointing out an obvious inaccuracy.

“‘Why are his eyes open? It’s not natural,’ one user commented on X, while another posted a photo of the president with his eyes closed in the Oval Office, appearing to be asleep, writing, ‘This is a far more accurate depiction…’” reported The Daily Beast's Wiktoria Gucia. Another person was reported as posting “What’s wrong with this one?” while attaching a picture of Trump with his eyes closed. Still another user was reported as quipping, “Well at least he’s awake.”

While the internet is having fun mocking Trump’s apparent difficulty staying awake during meetings, there is a very real possibility that his seeming struggles at not falling asleep reflect a deeper problem.

“Anybody who has eyes, ears, and a brain... and hasn’t drunk the Kool-Aid or been bitten by a MAGA zombie, can see for themselves that this person is transparently mentally ill and cognitively deteriorating,” Dr. John Gartner, a former Johns Hopkins University professor, told The Daily Beast Podcast, adding that “showing signs of frontotemporal dementia since 2019.”

Dr. Jonathan Reiner, an expert on heart diseases, similarly told CNN News Central that Trump seems to have “severe daytime somnolence” and that this suggests deeper pathologies.

“The president has severe daytime somnolence,” Reiner said. “He falls asleep very often. He’s fallen asleep in the Oval Office on multiple occasions with people talking to him in the Cabinet room, and I was concerned yesterday that he might have fallen asleep at Arlington National Cemetery during Memorial Day observances.”

Reiner then warned, “Chronic insomnia is a severe illness. It can result in an increase in risk of dementia, decrease in cognitive effects in older people.”

Dr. Henry Abraham, a psychiatrist formerly associated with Tufts University, recently told AlterNet that he too is concerned that Trump is exhibiting signs of cognitive decline.

“It’s a red flag,” Dr. Abraham explained. “People perseverate because they can’t think of anything else to say, because they’re cognitively impaired, or they perseverate because their emotional motor is stuck in high gear. In the last five to 10 years, he has planted red flags of concern again and again and again, and they’ve clustered.”

Dr. Abraham added that Trump’s behavior suggests an inability to “internalize certain control over his language.” He further explained that “not only did he have these kinds of linguistic failings, but he began to exhibit more and more signs of really rage and poor impulse control, and at night, what appeared to be manic kinds of episodes where he would tweet, you know, 100, 200 times a night.”

A prominent political analyst argued on Monday that President Donald Trump’s administration is falling apart because of the one thing he cannot change — his aging body.

“He’s 80!” political analyst David Rothkopf told The Daily Beast’s Joanna Coles on Monday. “He’s had a good life, and he should be at Mar-a-Lago sitting by the pool, having a margarita, talking to his friends about things he used to do.”

He added, “Unfortunately, he is a disturbed, sick lunatic who holds the most powerful job in the world and is at a stage of his existence where, because he’s a narcissist, the only thing he cares about is himself. And if every single one of us ceased to exist, he wouldn’t care, because the world is him.”

In addition to Trump’s advancing age, Rothkopf also pointed to the president’s weight, an issue he raised because obesity can harm one’s physical and mental health. Trump claimed that he is 6’3” and 230 pounds, although as MS NOW commentator Michael Steele recently observed, that would give him roughly the same physique as professional American football players Sam Darnold (6'3" 225 lbs) and DK Metcalf (6'4" 229 lbs).

“When they say he’s 6′3″ and 230 pounds, all you have to do is Google what a 6′3″, 230-pound athlete looks like,” Rothkopf argued. ”Trump does not look like that.”

He also observed that “we know that the assertion that he has bruises on his hands because of handshaking is ludicrous. And we know that Trump’s assertion that he is the only guy who’s had to go through all these cognitive tests and he passed them with flying colors is silly because you don’t get cognitive tests unless the doctor thinks you’ve got a problem with your cognition.”

In terms of Trump’s behavior, Rothkopf described it as “erratic,” saying that the president does “irrational things” and is “ignoring rational advice.”

“Look, you don’t have to be a psychiatrist to know that this guy is behaving in an erratic, irrational way for whatever the organic reason is,” Rothkopf said. “You don’t have to be a doctor to know that this guy is physically unwell.”

In response to Rothkopf’s remarks, the Trump White House told The Daily Beast that “David Rothkopf is a far-left loser who clearly suffers from a severe and debilitating disease known as Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain.”

Yet Rothkopf is not alone in expressing concern about Trump’s fitness. Earlier this month psychiatrist Dr. Henry Abraham — who formerly taught psychiatry at Tufts University — told AlterNet that he co-authored a letter to Congress with dozens of other medical professionals for that exact reason.

“It’s a red flag,” Dr. Abraham told AlterNet. “People perseverate because they can’t think of anything else to say, because they’re cognitively impaired, or they perseverate because their emotional motor is stuck in high gear. In the last five to 10 years, he has planted red flags of concern again and again and again, and they’ve clustered.”

He particularly identified what appears to be Trump’s struggle to “internalize certain control over his language,” such as mixing up Iceland and Greenland in a recent speech.

“Not only did he have these kinds of linguistic failings, but he began to exhibit more and more signs of really rage and poor impulse control, and at night, what appeared to be manic kinds of episodes where he would tweet, you know, 100, 200 times a night,” Abraham said.

President Donald Trump bragged about his intelligence shortly after midnight on Sunday — but, in the process of doing so, made a fundamental mistake in explaining just how intelligence is measured.

“I’m glad the president did well on the MOCA exam, but it’s a dementia screening tool, not an IQ test, so a score of 26 or higher represents normal cognitive performance, not extreme intelligence,” Dr. Jonathan Reiner, Professor of Medicine and Surgery Interventional Cardiologist at GW School of Medicine, posted on Sunday. “None of the questions are high difficulty.”

Reiner was responding to a post the president posted on his social media platform, Truth Social, earlier on Sunday.

"The results of my Physical Examination, taken at Walter Reed Military Medical Center, and just released, were extremely good,” Trump wrote. “Unlike other U.S. Presidents, none of whom have ever taken an approved, high difficulty, Cognitive Test, I scored a perfect 30 out of 30, considered ‘extreme intelligence.’”

He added, “Are the Dumocrats really surprised? In fact, this is my fourth such test, all PERFECT or, 120 correct answers out of 120 questions asked! It is very rare that anyone gets a Perfect Score, especially when achieved four times in a row. All people running for President and Vice President should be forced to take high difficulty Cognitive Tests. Congress, and the Dumocrats, should demand it! President DONALD J. TRUMP"

Earlier this month, psychiatrist Dr. Henry Abraham — who formerly taught psychiatry at Tufts University — told AlterNet that he views much of Trump’s recent behavior as indicate of cognitive decline.

“It’s a red flag,” Dr. Abraham told AlterNet. “People perseverate because they can’t think of anything else to say, because they’re cognitively impaired, or they perseverate because their emotional motor is stuck in high gear. In the last five to 10 years, he has planted red flags of concern again and again and again, and they’ve clustered.”

Dr. Abraham added that, while Trump used to modulate his rhetoric for public opinion, his recent verbiage suggests that he struggles to “internalize certain control over his language.” For example, Trump at one point repeatedly mixed up Iceland and Greenland in a recent speech.

“Not only did he have these kinds of linguistic failings, but he began to exhibit more and more signs of really rage and poor impulse control, and at night, what appeared to be manic kinds of episodes where he would tweet, you know, 100, 200 times a night,” Abraham explained.

Speaking to this journalist for Salon in 2020, when there were widespread concerns about both Trump’s and future President Joe Biden’s cognitive fitness, Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe broke down why Americans have a right to be familiar with their elected officials’ mental fitness for duty.

"The so-called 'concerns' that Trump, his family, and his acolytes are raising about the former Vice President aren't worthy of response," Tribe told Salon at the time. "I've known Biden for years and detect no loss of intellectual acumen. His slips of the tongue are legendary and, even if slightly more frequent these days, are nothing compared to the constant truly idiotic slips of the brain that characterize Trump. Had we not grown sadly accustomed to Trump's mangling of language, logic, syntax, and sense, we'd all be running for the exits."