He 'lost it': Trump non sequiturs put neurocognitive decline on full display

President Donald Trump's recent rally in Iowa was notable for a reason the Republican leader likely did not intend — namely, that it drew attention to his seemingly deteriorating mental state.

On Monday, The Nation's Chris Lehmann, who attended the Iowa speech, described the president as he "gleefully went through a series of weird angular gesticulations to simulate his slantwise narrative style — the string of non sequitur grievances and resentful old-rich-guy refrains that he dubbed 'the weave' during the 2024 campaign."

Reflecting the headline in which he said Trump has "lost it," Lehmann described him as grandiose, such as playing before the Iowa rally "the 2024 rally chestnut called 'God Made Trump,' delivered as a riff on radio Paul Harvey’s address 'God Made a Farmer,' but shot through with the militant messianic imagery of the New Apostolic Reformation. The video starts with an AI-manipulated version of Harvey’s voice ... and goes rapidly downhill from there, depicting Trump as an axe-wielding mortal foe of wolves, vipers, the deep state, and the fake news."

Lehmann concluded that instead of addressing Americans' concerns directly, "his prescription for electoral victory in Iowa appeared to be Worship me harder."

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 expressing alarm about Trump's deteriorating mental state.

"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."

Describing how Trump attacks trans people with the non-existent word “mutilization," says random words like "jade" in the middle of his sentences and is unable to control his rage when speaking to journalists, Abraham told AlterNet that "I was meditating today on the medical consequences of the use of a single tactical nuclear warhead on Iran. And although I haven’t done the calculations yet, it would be horrific on multiple levels. And so, yes, this is dangerous, this is frightening, and I think that we are definitely moving as a nation into invoking the 25th Amendment for the first time."