Trump neurological smoking gun, 99% chance of dementia | Dr. John Gartner

Speaker 1: It's great to have back on the program.  Doctor John Gartner, who is the founder of Duty to Warn and former assistant professor at Johns  Hopkins University Medical School. It's great to have you back on, I appreciate it. Speaker 6: Great. It's great to be back. Speaker 1: So you were back in the news over  the last week or so, with a number of articles quoting your opinions about what is being observed  through the publicly available audio and video of President Joe Biden and former

President Donald  Trump with regard to potential cognitive issues, dementia, gross dementia, memory loss, age  related decline, etc.. So we last had you on a while ago. I don't want to totally retread  the perspective you have on the ethics of making these assessments. People like to bring up the  Goldwater rule, etc. but as we get into this, can you just give us the framework for people  to understand the context in which you're making these comments? Neither Trump nor Biden are  people you've

personally examined in any way. Speaker 6: Sure, sure. No, absolutely. And  actually, I've interviewed a lot of experts in this field, most of whom are unwilling to be  quoted, on the record. But, one of the things they tell me is, in clinical practice, most of  this, diagnosis is made by observation. And by talking to significant others, it's really not  a as much as the clinical interview. And there's other things we use as well that we obviously  don't have your MRI's and neuropsychiatric eva

luation. But what we are seeing is a lot of  clinical symptoms that we know something about, even obviously, a lot of the average people know  a lot about these symptoms because they've had people in their family who've had dementia. The  things that Joe Biden is evidencing are things that I evidence he's been, mixed up people's  names and mixed up dates. That's pretty much been the gist of it. And you know what? I'm going  to be 66. I'm accept people's names. I'm accept dates. But I still would

rather have me as a  psychologist now than the psychologist. I was, 20 years ago. But you want to talk about memory.  The kind of memory problems that Trump is showing are clear signs of dementia. The, Dementia Care  Society said that when people have dementia, they begin to confuse people in generations.  Not names and dates, people in generations. Speaker 1: So talk a little bit about the  difference. So and we can maybe talk through some examples, you know, with regard to Joe Biden.  There w

as this moment a few weeks ago where he referred to the Mexican president as El-Sisi, who,  of course, is not the Mexican president. Or times where he seems to kind of, mumble and kind of  trail off, lose his train of thought, or maybe look, maybe disoriented on stage. Talk about  that relative to what you observed with Trump. Speaker 6: Well, actually, some of these  sort of non-verbal things are a little bit hard to characterize. But again, you're talking  about the wrong name, the wrong date.

You know, I can call my older daughter, my younger daughter,  my older daughter's name. Trump actually, on some days thinks he's running against Nancy  Pelosi and and Barack Obama. And I'm not saying that to be funny. He's actually confusing people.  On the stump, he said, that he was running against the person who was in charge of security at  the Capitol. He said it more than once. In other words, he is actually confusing people.  He's not confusing names. And the same thing with he said seve

n times he's running against  Barack Obama. Okay, that's not a slip or a gaffe. Speaker 1: Now he says that it's satire. He now  says it's sarcasm and satire meant to suggest that Obama is really in charge. Do you buy that? Speaker 6: Not in the least. And he's told that lie a thousand times. Whenever he gets caught, he  says he was joking. We know by now that when he says he's joking, he's lying about joking. Joking  is the way he covers up his cognitive decline or his other, horrible, things t

hat he does in  plain sight. But it's absolutely never true that he's joking. And by the way, when you look  at these clips, he doesn't look like he's joking, because one sign of cognitive decline is a lack  of awareness that you have cognitive decline when you are making these mistakes, you know,  you don't correct yourself because you're not aware you've made a mistake. Okay. Whereas I think  a lot of these name situations oh, no, of course. Sorry. The other one. You know, you immediately  he

shows no awareness of that. And so that's actually part of ironically part of the syndrome. Speaker 1: Is there is something that is being said in the media about either Biden or Trump  that you think is like flat out inaccurate. Speaker 6: Well, yes, because they're they  basically what's happening is we're being gaslit again, okay. By a kind of what about ism?  The the narrative in the media, two old men are running for president. Is either of them really  up to it? And there's a certain amoun

t of ageism actually implied in that, you know, meaning that  if you're old and you're showing some signs of an aging brain, you know, you're really not up  to it. But what I'm saying is, we're not making the differential diagnosis between an aging brain  and a demanding brain. There's a big difference. Okay. And Trump is showing the kind of confusion  not just of memory but of language. He's showing a basic breakdown. And this is what all of the  experts are telling me in his ability to use lan

guage. First of all, we're noticing an enormous  regression. This is someone who used to be very articulate with a sophisticated vocabulary,  who spoke in complete, polished sentences and paragraphs. Now he has an impoverished vocabulary.  He repeats himself and uses superlatives, which are also signs of dementia. And he can't complete  a thought or can't even complete a word. And this gets to what I call the neurological smoking gun.  Okay. All of the experts I talked to said nobody without bra

in damage commits these kinds of a  phonemic paraphrases, which we have dozens of example of these, you know, blooper reels and  whatnot. Instead of saying missiles as misses, instead of saying Christmas, he says Christmas.  These are non words that he's using in place of real words that have the stem of the real word,  but he's unable to complete the word. So we just kind of garble an ending. And there's lots of  blooper reels, you know. I think Morning Joe had one and comedy shows have them wh

en it have  all of his mispronunciations. But it's not a joke. It's hard clinical evidence of brain damage.  When I ask these people, do you ever see this in someone who is not brain damaged? They said no. Speaker 1: So let me see if I can get the kind of big picture of what you are observing. On  the one hand, we're using Trump's own baseline from the endless hours of prior interviews.  You look at interviews from five years ago, they're very different. You go back to ten and  15 years ago with

Dave Letterman or whomever, dramatically different. So we're looking at the  base, correct. You're also looking at the fact that some of these things aren't so much a verbal  slip, but they're indicative that he's confused about the subject matter rather than this is a  verbal or linguistic element. And then you're also talking about the phonemic paraphrase for  the beneficiaries instead of beneficiaries or renovations that are renovation. And then if I  recall correctly, there's the tangential

speech. Now talk a little bit about what that means. Speaker 6: Yeah. Thank you for for bringing that up because that is another important  component. When people, start to become demented, they become more tangential. They ramble and they  go from one sort of unrelated thought to another. Sometimes they kind of tie it together in a made  up story. We call this confabulation. And it's not lying. It's somehow trying to take all these  disparate things and make a story out of it. And I'll give yo

u a recent example. When Trump said  something about the USS Gerald Ford aircraft carrier. No one knew why he was talking about  that. And he said, you know, they're not using the John Deere Hydraulics hmhm what that means,  and neither do you. They're using magnets. They're using magnets. He said they're using magnets. And  that's crazy because magnets melt in water. Okay. So when people this is what I mean about the  press, even the press that picked up on this magnets melt in water. Comments.

Right. Actually,  you need to hear the whole ramble to really understand how disordered his thinking has become. Speaker 1: In other words, it wasn't just that he got. I don't know that he said the the magnets  melt, but something like if they get wet, they stop working or something like. Speaker 6: That, they dissolved. Yeah. Speaker 1: You're saying it's not just about a  misunderstanding of how magnets work, it's that it was sort of like a series of non-sequiturs  that didn't logically follo

w from each other. Speaker 6: Correct. And that is a formal  thought disorder. That's not a I mean, that's something that we. That we're trained  to assess. Okay. And what I'm saying is the people who are specialists in the area are  assessing it. They're telling me they feel with 95% probability that he has dementia. They  just don't want to sign their name to it because they're telling me they might lose their jobs. Speaker 1: Let me ask you about something I've observed casually as a as as th

e son of a  psychiatrist, but not a medical professional myself. There seem to sometimes be two different  trumps, and sometimes we call it high and low energy trump. Sometimes it's called upper and  downer trump. And sometimes Trump will come out and he seems sped up to some degree. And I observe  him doing the tangential speech you just described much more frequently. Other times Trump comes  out and he seems almost like depressed, bummed out to be there. He's using a lower tone of voice,  spe

aking very slowly, and seems like he just seems sad and depressed to some degree. Now, obviously  people have different energy levels on different days. You might be in a good mood or a bad mood.  Who knows what went on five minutes before he went on stage? But is is that in any way relevant  to what you're observing or talking about? Speaker 6: I'm so glad you brought that up,  because one of the reasons that we're being gaslit is I believe that Trump and I've written  about this has a hypomani

c temperament. So he had biologically he has a lot of energy. So when he's  on he's charismatic. He shows a bullish kind of energy. And that is part of his his charismatic  appeal, obviously. But you do see these dramatic changes. And now that I mentioned this you will  start to notice it. You notice this dramatic change in demeanor like you described when he  can't find a word right before his eyes go blank, his jaw goes slack. Suddenly he looks confused.  And then he talks in a slurred way. Ye

ah. Tries to say the word, and sometimes he tries to say the  word several times, like again this weekend. He tried to say three years later, but he said, three  years lady, lady, lady. It was like an engine with a bad battery trying to turn over. He was just  trying to say later, but he kept saying, lady, he was slurring while he was saying it. So in other  words, look just like people with Alzheimer's have sundowning, right? They can be fine at one in  the afternoon and then at five, they're t

hey're they're off the hook. Okay. And disoriented. Okay.  He becomes momentarily disoriented. And you can see it in a sort of the healer. And so now that I  mentioned, it's not just the slip of the not just that he's not using the word you can literally see  he's his the lights are out mentally, but someone has pulled the plug and he is not there. Speaker 1: When it comes to the Joe Biden stuff. It seems to me that in general, if you have  someone who's in their 80s running the country, it make

s sense to have a backup plan and to know  exactly what happens if X, Y, or Z. Now, with presidents, we know that there's a vice president,  and then we have the speaker of the House, etc. increasingly, there's a discussion from some about  Joe Biden might not make it to November. And what do we do? What is the Democratic Party do? Because  there isn't really a primary being run, etc.. From a strictly actuarial perspective, does it seem  logical to you, at least for the Democratic Party to have

an answer to that question? Speaker 6: You know, I think the Democratic Party is very bad at politics. True. And I think that,  I would actually disagree with you. And I would take an opposite tack. I think we need to take in  the sense that instead of answering that question, we need to reassure the people that Joe Biden is  here. I think he's running sort of a Rose garden campaign, and he's he needs to show us Uncle  Joe. Okay. We need to feel like we know him, like he's with us. I don't care

if he commits  a gaffe. I don't care if he gets someone's name wrong. We don't need to be hit. But we need to  know he's with us and he's here. He's actually doing a good job, by the way. Speaker 1: I agree with that. I agree with that for sure. Speaker 6: And people actually, again, sort of, you know, I say to people, look, you know, I  messed up patients appointments. Now I never used to do that. I used to have it all in my head, you  know, and I'm calling someone up. Oh. Hey, Joe, where are y

ou? Doctor Grossman, I told you, we're  not meeting this week. Didn't you remember? Oh, sorry. You know, meanwhile, I'd rather have  me as a psychologist now than the me of 20 years ago because I'm wiser. Okay. And so  the point is, is. Yeah. Or maybe Joe has a, you know, because he's a normal president,  he's got an army of advisers and technocrats, right. Backing him up and giving him options and,  and yeah, helping to structure and organize his day and his decision making process. That team i

s  in place. He's using it well and he's using his judgment and his wisdom and his humanity. To make  good decisions. Okay. That's really the. I mean, yes, anyone can die. That would be really messed  up. But I think there's really a way in which the press is really committing a kind of ageism.  You know? Yes, I get it. His voice is a little raspy. He's got apparently muscle tension, you  know, from his, the. He recently had a white House physical. He doesn't walk with a lot of,  you know, limbe

r sort of, energy. Apparently, he's got some muscle stiffness. I mean, meanwhile,  the guy still tries to walk ride his bike at the Delaware National Park. God bless him. You know,  he's not. I don't count him out. I think we need to see him in. That's my personal opinion. I  don't know, do you? There's no question that your. Speaker 1: Do you agree that, but and by the  way, you know, I, I'm essentially, seeing this that the way that you are, do you agree that  there's some superficial way you

mentioned the raspy voice and the moving around, maybe with  a lack of effervescence and and this sort of thing. Do you agree that the, the picture of it  all sometimes gives the superficial impression that Trump actually is, quote, healthier? And I  know that that's such a fraught term because are we talking about mental health, cardiovascular  health? What are we talking about? Do you see. Speaker 6: How a lot of energy, you. Speaker 1: See how someone could see the two and say Trump seems hea

lthier? Speaker 6: That's why the doctors need to speak. That's what I'm trying to explain, is that if  you're not trained you don't know that a phonemic pathology is a neurological smoking gun. What you  know is what you see. And so if one guy looks a little slower or talks a little raspy, or he looks  like he's got less ability. But what we have is, a whole basically, it's like the emperors, the  man who would be emperor has a broken brain, and all of the people see it and know it, but  but th

e people have the authority to say it or not saying it because of things like the Goldwater  rule. You know, it's really interesting. There's a different atmosphere now than there was in  2018. A lot of the people that spoke out, in 2018 are afraid to speak out now. Speaker 1: And what is it exactly they're afraid of? Speaker 6: Well, one of them has already told me his  promotion's been held up because of his past, Trump activities. You know, the thing is, is  that when we first came out, who w

e defined the American Psychiatric Association, you know,  what are they going to do to us? You know, you're so brave, doctor. Guard. Just. No.  I'm not. I don't even work for Hopkins anymore. They can't even fire me. Speaker 1: But what's happening. Speaker 6: Now is this. Yeah, what's changed now  is people feel like this politically violent, repressive regime could take over. And there's  an atmosphere of reprisal and revenge and also kind of an ethos that that's okay, that maybe  your boss m

ight feel that he could take revenge, you know, because that's the new thing you're  supposed to do to the people who, you know, say bad things about the Dear Leader. Speaker 1: That is, that is chilling, for lack of a better term. And, hopefully at  least we will get a more precise coverage of this from corporate media between now and  November. If nothing else, although I'm not super optimistic, I have to admit. Speaker 6: Yeah, well, you know, one of the reasons I'm sort of getting out  here

and saying all this is because, we need to get that message into the into the mainstream  media, right? Because right now the narrative is just that. They've got this, you know, both side  ism, two old men narrative down pat. And actually, there's also a disproportionate way that they  edit the tape. You know, they focus so much on every stumble, or, or malapropism of Biden's, but  then they edit it out, the mad rambling rants, you know, so if he has a rally and five  minutes of it is incomprehe

nsible, that's actually the most important five minutes, right? Speaker 1: The whole thing. Yeah. Well, it doesn't fit into corporate media, isn't going to run a  five minute portion of the speech that you would need to understand the the rambling context.  They just don't do that. They want 15 seconds. Speaker 6: Well even. Right. So part of it, you're  right, is is the time limit. But they rarely show the you'll see it on late night television. You'll  see it on Twitter. But you'll won't. You

won't see it on the 6:00 news. But that's the headline.  The man who's running for president is unable to use English coherently. Speaker 5: Right? Wow. Speaker 1: We've been speaking with Doctor  John Gartner, founder of Duty to Warn and former assistant professor at Johns Hopkins  University Medical School. Always great having you on. I really appreciate it. Speaker 6: Yeah. Thanks for having me.