Donald Trump Is ‘Cognitively Deteriorating,’ Psychologist Says

In an exclusive clip from the film #Unfit, author and psychologist John Gartner claimed that Donald Trump’s mental fitness is in decline, HuffPost reported.

“He’s gonna do what he wants or what his delusional thinking tells him to do,” he said. “Cause he is cognitively deteriorating. He’s showing signs of dementia. If you look at interviews that he gave in the 1980s and 1990s, he was very articulate. He actually had a very sophisticated vocabulary. He spoke in actually polished paragraphs.”

Gartner noted the difference between Trump’s past and present speech and pointed to what he found most concerning, including an “impoverished” vocabulary and excessive use of “filler words” and “superlatives.”

“Quite often, he shows what we call tangential thinking, which is that he goes from one idea and then just sort of drifts in mid-sentence to another idea.”

As The Inquisitr reported, #Unfit makes the argument that Trump is struggling with multiple psychological disorders and pushes back on the Goldwater Rule, which says it is unethical for psychiatrists to diagnose public figures they have not examined in-person. According to the experts interviewed in the documentary, the rule was never meant to as a hard-fast directive that prohibits mental health professionals from speaking out on someone they believe is showing dangerous or harmful behavior.

Gartner stated his belief that in-person psychiatric interviews are the least reliable tools for diagnosing psychological problems. Conversely — as noted by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — observable behaviors are considered crucial pillars for diagnosis.

Gartner pointed, in particular, to moments when Trump appeared to have trouble recalling significant events and sounded the alarm about the importance of recognizing these purported struggles.

“We have someone who is really not functioning cognitively who has the capacity to launch the nuclear codes.”

As Dan Rodricks noted in The Baltimore Sun, Gartner argued that Trump is such a public figure that many of his observable traits — paranoia, narcissism, and taking pleasure in demeaning others — are crystal clear. Using his observations, Gartner concluded that the president is a malignant narcissist and thus a threat to the world in his current position.

A disclaimer on #Unfit’s website claims that the film is not rooted in political motivations. Instead, it says that Gartner and the other experts involved have spoken out due to what they perceive as a duty to alert the public.

Trump’s niece, Mary, who is a clinical psychologist, also outlined her uncle’s purported narcissism in her recent book, Too Much and Never Enough.