Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin and
the editors of the online website Salon have pointed toward the severely
declining mental capacities of Donald Trump that have not only remained
unreported by the mainstream media but have been systematically covered
up. Numerous mental health experts,
however, have
signed a petition declaring that Trump is showing signs of severe, accelerating
dementia. Reviews of several of his
recent speeches have shown startling cognitive problems.
One must acknowledge that even experts cannot reliably
make definitive psychiatric diagnoses without a face-to-face examination in a
structured setting. But Donald Trump is
unlikely to sit for such a professional evaluation and even less likely to make
the results public. So we must look to perhaps
less reliable expert assessments-at-a-distance.
Psychologist Dr John Gartner has pointed to specific speech and
behavioral pathologies that indicate actual dementia, not just the cognitive
slowing of aging. Gartner writes in USA
Today
If Donald Trump were your father, you would run, not
walk, to a neurologist for an evaluation of his cognitive health. You don’t
have to be a doctor to see something is very wrong. …
In Alzheimer’s, as language skills deteriorate, we see
two types of tell-tale speech disorders, or paraphasias:
Semantic paraphasia involves choosing the
incorrect words. For instance, after Attorney General William Barr
released a letter on the Mueller report, Trump said: “I hope they now go
and take a look at the
oranges, the oranges of that investigation, the beginnings of that
investigation."
Phonemic paraphasia, which is linked to the
moderate to severe stages of Alzheimer’s, is described as "the substitution of a word with a nonword that preserves at least half of the segments and/or number of
syllables of the intended word.” For example, Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu becomes “Betanyahu,” big
league becomes "bigly"
anonymous becomes “enenamas”
or "anenomynous," renovation becomes “renoversh,” missiles
become "mishiz," space capsule becomes “capsicle,” midterm
elections become "midtowm" and "midturn"
elections, and Christmas becomes “Chrissus.”
Trump’s speech patterns appear even more disordered
when you go beyond the sound bite and look at a whole speech. He careens
from one thought to the next in a parade of non-sequiturs, frequently
interrupting himself in the middle of a sentence to veer into another free
association. When commentators described his two-hour speech at the Conservative Political Action Caucus (CPAC) last month as “unhinged,”
they were referring in large part to this quality.
Amanda Marcotte
wrote in Salon
Those who learned about the speech from glancing at
mainstream news headlines the next morning would have no idea how flat-out
bonkers the whole thing was … even by Trumpian standards.
The
Washington Post's Eugene Robinson said
Trump “gave a rambling and incoherent two-hour speech in which he raved
like a lunatic.”
Heather Cox Richardson suggests that
Trump is communicating with voters outside his
carefully curated bubble almost exclusively through videos, even on a topic as
important as abortion. At rallies [such as the CPAC convention], his speeches have become erratic and
wandering, with occasional slurred words, and observers have wondered how he
would present to more general audiences. It appears that his team has concluded
that he will not present well and that general audiences must see him in
carefully curated settings, like [his recent] apparently heavily edited video [on abortion].
What is astonishing to me is that at this point there
has been no mainstream media analysis of Trump’s accelerating dementia. There is plenty of coverage of President Joe
Biden’s aging – his forgetfulness, his mixing up names, his physical gait –
symptoms consistent with normal aging, but no coverage of Trump’s dementia,
which should surely disqualify him from acting as president.
Gartner writes that within the mainstream media:
There is … this focus on Biden's gaffes or other things
that are well within the normal limits of aging. By comparison, Trump appears
to be showing gross signs of dementia. This is a tale of two brains. Biden's
brain is aging. Trump's brain is dementing. …
The press is pathologizing the normal in the case of
Biden and normalizing the pathological in the case of Trump. It’s perverse.
The mainstream media talks of Biden and Trump as if
their conditions – aging and dementia – were somehow equivalent. It is a gross dereliction of duty. If Trump wins in November, the failure of the
mainstream media to warn us will bear a great responsibility.
