For his Substack newsletter, attorney Jay Kuo interviewed Dr. John Gartner, the founder of Duty to Warn. Gartner's organization is a collection of mental health professionals sounding the alarm about the former president's declining mental faculties since he took office in 2017. In his interview, Gartner laid out four examples that he says show proof that Trump is teetering ever closer to full-blown dementia.
First, Gartner explained that, to him, Trump has shown a "decline from baseline" since he first announced his run for the presidency in 2015. He argued that while the 45th president of the United States used to speak "in polished paragraphs with a sophisticated vocabulary," he now is exhibiting a "shocking decline in verbal fluency" and "often can’t finish a sentence or even a word."
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"Typical of dementia patients, he repeats himself and overuses superlatives and filler words," Gartner said. "Based on his current accelerating rate of decline, it seems very unlikely that Trump could see out a second term without falling off the cliff and becoming totally incapacitated."
Second, Gartner pointed to Trump's failing memory as evidence of cognitive decline. He noted that earlier this year, he mistook former UN ambassador Nikki Haley for former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California), saying "Nikki Haley" was in charge of security at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. He also noted that Trump has, on multiple occasions, confused President Joe Biden with former President Barack Obama on the campaign trail. While Trump's campaign played it off and suggested that Trump was just joking or that Biden was somehow a puppet of Obama, Gartner was not convinced.
"The more plausible explanation is that once again we are watching the workings of his demented mind in real time," he said. "Obama and Biden have something very important in common in Trump’s brain that can allow them to be fused in his molten mind: two Democratic presidents who bested and humiliated him have become one imaginary super-villain."
The third sign of Trump's dementia is, according to Gartner, Trump's "disordered speech" that he said is typical of "organically impaired dementia patients." He observed that in 2024, Trump has exhibited a pattern of using "non-words in place of real words," like "saying 'mishuz' instead of missile, or 'Chrishus' instead of Christmas." Other examples he listed include "'President U-licious S Grant' (For Ulysses S. Grant), 'space-capsicle' (for space capsule), 'combat infantroopen' (for combat infantry), 'sahhven country' (for sovereign country) [and] 'renoversh' (For renovations)."
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"As he deteriorates, these deficits will make themselves apparent more and more often. Now he can’t get through a rally without an example," Gartner told Kuo. "Cornell psychologist Harry Segal speculated Trump may be 'sundowning' and hence most vulnerable to going off the rails at night-time rallies."
Lastly, Gartner referenced Trump's pattern of poor "motor performance" as another reason for his decline. He pointed out that the former president has "shown deterioration in his fine motor coordination," noting that Trump sometimes "swings his right leg in a semi-circle as if it were dragging a dead weight." He added that he sometimes has "difficulty drinking a bottle or a glass of water without two hands."
Early on in the interview, Gartner addressed criticisms that mental health experts were being unprofessional in diagnosing Trump without him personally being a patient of theirs. He argued that "as a professional community, thousands of us have observed hundreds of hours of Trump’s public behavior" and that they "also have dozens of informant reports."
"So all the people hyperventilating about 'diagnosing from a distance' should take a breath," he said. "This is more business as usual than you might think. In real life, we’ve institutionalized tens of thousands of patients on far less data."
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