Trump is crazy: Qualified clinicians sign letters to document his dementia

Check the list of Republicans who oppose Donald Trump at this site here.

Echo report by Chauncey Devega published in Salon.com

"They see the signs of Trump’s cognitive decline through the eyes of years of training and experience". Dr. John Gartner

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/03/18/poll-conviction-trump-2024-elections-00147338

Since at least 2016, a brave, determined, and stalwart group of psychologists and other mental health professionals have been trying to warn the public about Donald Trump’s obvious unwellness and pathological behavior. Based on mountains of public evidence of Trump’s behavior and what he has encouraged in others, these mental health experts concluded that the corrupt twice-impeached ex-president, a sexual assaulter as confirmed by a court of law, aspiring dictator, and defendant who is now facing hundreds of years in prison appears to be a sociopath if not a full-on psychopath.

In following through on their ethical obligations, the “duty to warn*” the public about a uniquely powerful and dangerous person such as Donald Trump, these mental health professionals risked their careers, reputations, and yes, even personal safety. 

If members of Congress, then President Trump’s cabinet officials, senior law enforcement, and others with the power to contain the dangerous ex-president had listened to them and acted accordingly, the country would not be on the precipice of Trump's return to power where he will, as threatened and promised, become America’s first dictator.

Donald Trump’s dangerousness is rapidly escalating

One of Dr. Gartner’s colleagues, Dr. Harry Segal, who is a senior lecturer at Cornell University and Weill Cornell Medical School, has gone so far as to suggest that Donald Trump should withdraw from the 2024 Election and seek immediate medical help.

Dr. Gartner is far from alone in his concerns and warnings.

In attempt to raise public awareness, Dr. Gartner has created a new petition at Change.org.: “We diagnose Trump with probable dementia: A petition for licensed professionals only.”

As seen in the last few weeks and months, Donald Trump’s dangerousness is rapidly escalating. At his rallies and other events, Donald Trump is exhibiting obvious and repeated examples of challenges in his speech, language, and memory. In a widely read series of conversations here at Salon, Dr. John Gartner, who is a prominent psychologist and contributor to the bestselling book "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President," has been warning that Trump is apparently suffering from dementia or some other type of brain disease.

Gartner summarizes this as: “Not enough people are sounding the alarm, that based on his behavior, and in my opinion, Donald Trump is dangerously demented. In fact, we are seeing the opposite among too many in the news media, the political leaders and among the public. There is also 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.”

At the time of this writing, hundreds of verified mental health and other medical professionals have signed the petition. This group includes some of the leading experts in their respective disciplines. Some of these signers have also offered detailed comments about what they have concluded, based on the obvious evidence, is Donald Trump’s increasing cognitive difficulties, and why he is therefore unfit for office.

In this, our third conversation about Donald Trump’s apparent cognitive problems, Dr. Gartner continues to document the ex-president’s behavior, explains the importance of the growing consensus by medical professionals that Trump is apparently experiencing cognitive challenges, and warns that the ex-president should not be given access to classified information because he is untrustworthy and easily manipulated by malign actors.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Several weeks ago, we began our series of conversations here about Trump’s obvious cognitive challenges and how they appear to be getting worse at a rapid pace. It is all unfolding as you predicted.

Our conversations are starting to feel like a weekly dementia round-up. Trump keeps proving my point. This week’s lowlights include more phonemic aphasias. Here are a few examples I have noted. “We have becrumb a nation.” “All comp-ply-ments” to Joe Biden. “I know Poten.” "He can’t cam-pay." He can’t campaign. “We will expel the wald-mongers.”

*“duty to warn” is a concept associated with mental health professionals who must alert authorities or a potential victim if their patient appears to be a threat to others."

January 6 insurrection continues to be a threat to American democracy

"If Trump is deranged, Republicans bear an even greater responsibility for the mayhem and continued threat to democracy," Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post. 

Echo essay published in Salon by Chauncey Devega:

The U.S. House January 6 committee's public hearings have made it increasingly clear that Donald Trump (aka tRumpzi) and his confederates attempted a coup to nullify the results of the 2020, presidential election and, in effect, end American democracy. 

An American Tragedy delves into the uprising that shocked the world—the January 6, 2021 storming of the US Capitol by insurrectionists

Because of the failed coup, the plot involved every branch of government including the courts, Congress, the Department of Justice and (at least potentially) the military. It was nationwide and included plans to rig the Electoral College results and alter actual vote totals at the state level. 

Contrary to what too many public voices have continued to suggest — in a collective state of willful denial — Trump's coup plot was highly sophisticated and came very close to succeeding.

January 6, committee exposed Trump’s lies — and indicted the GOP in the process.

It is equally clear that the Capitol attack of January 6, was not spontaneous or purely coincidental. Donald Trump and his confederates welcomed and incited the lethal attack as a central element of the attempted coup. The violence of Jan. 6 appears to have been a pretext for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and declare a national emergency as a means of remaining in power indefinitely.

Dr. Lance Dodes: Trump is a dangerous sociopath — but he's sane enough to stand trial.

The currents that exploded that day are, and will continue to be (with an emphasis on the present and future tenses), a direct threat to the continuation of the United States as a democratic republic.

Echo opinion- Donald Trump and his incompetent regime are callous, malevolent and deeply cruel

Donald Trump is a malignant narcissist....echo reported in Salon by Chauncey Devega

As of Friday April 24, the coronavirus pandemic has killed at least 50,000 people in the United States. That number is likely to be an undercount, and it's possible we will never have a true reckoning.

At almost every juncture, Donald Trump has made decisions about the coronavirus pandemic that have led to more death. His behavior is that of a person who has no care or concern for the health, safety and welfare of the American people. Nothing could epitomize that more perfectly than his grotesque suggestion this week that "injecting" disinfectants or household cleaning products might kill the coronavirus. This would seem comical, and entirely unbelievable, if it had not actually happened.

In 2016 the Obama administration told Trump and his advisers of the high likelihood that a pandemic would strike the nation and advised the incoming administration to take appropriate steps to reduce its impact. Obama officials also left their Trump counterparts a step-by-step guide on how to respond to a pandemic. Trump and his inner circle ignored that guidance.

Last November, the U.S. military warned Donald Trump that the country was likely to be afflicted with a devastating pandemic originating in China.

In January 2020, the Trump administration was told by its own experts that the coronavirus would spread beyond China and become a global pandemic. Again, Trump chose inaction.

Trump has deprived Democratic-led regions of the country from receiving needed medical supplies. He also waited months to begin using the Defense Appropriation Act to compel American companies to produce more ventilators, masks and other emergency equipment.

Late last year, Americans working with the World Health Organization began to warn Trump and his administration about the coronavirus pandemic. These doctors and other medical professionals were ignored.

In these examples and many others, Trump and his inner circle ignored or purged experts and other truth-tellers, and lied about, misrepresented, deflected or denied the dire threat to the American people posed by the coronavirus pandemic.

Considered in total, Trump and his regime have shown themselves to be incompetent, callous, malevolent and deeply cruel in their response to the coronavirus crisis (as well as to a plethora of other issues).

But to merely document the Trump regime's deadly failures in response to the coronavirus pandemic is to ignore the most important question: What were Trump and his advisers' underlying motivations?

This forensic question must be answered if we are ever to have a full accounting of the coronavirus, and see justice done for the sick, the dead and the dying as well as the damage done to the broader American community.

Media critic (and former Salon writer) Eric Boehlert summarizes the importance of determining Donald Trump's motives this way:

The media's preferred storyline suggests that Trump is simply incompetent, but that's too simplistic. It just doesn't add up, because Trump has made the wrong decision every single time in terms of how crises like this are supposed to be dealt with. (i.e. Be consistent, transparent, factual, and credible.) It's increasingly not believable for the press to suggest Trump has been distracted or inept during this crisis, in part because of the level of White House uselessness has become so staggering.

Maybe Trump's vengeful. Maybe he wants to wreck the economy to create investment opportunities? He's under the thumb of a foreign entity? He wants to cause panic and cancel the November elections? He's a fatalist? Who knows. And honestly, the specific "why" isn't what matters now. What matters is asking the difficult questions and pondering what the Trump presidency is truly about, no matter what lurks in the shadows….

Now the press needs to shift some of its focus and ask the truly alarming questions about Trump and his motives. Because we still don't know why he essentially ordered the federal government to stand down for the virus invasion.

Psychologist and psychotherapist John Gartner, contributor to the bestselling book "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump" and co-founder of the Duty to WARN PAC, has an answer: Donald Trump is a malignant narcissist. Our president's mental pathologies inexorably compel him to hurt and kill large numbers of people — including his own supporters.

Dr. Gartner taught for many years at the Johns Hopkins University Medical School, and has private therapeutic practices in Baltimore and New York, specializing in the treatment of borderline personality disorders. In our most recent conversation, he explains that sadism and violence are central to Trump's malignant narcissism and his decision-making about the coronavirus pandemic. Gartner also warns that Donald Trump is an abuser locked into a deeply dysfunctional relationship with the American people and that, like other sadists, Trump enjoys causing harm and suffering.

Ultimately, Gartner concludes that Donald Trump is engaging in "democidal behavior" and cautions that the tens of thousands of dead (so far) from the coronavirus pandemic are not simply collateral damage from Trump's policies, but rather the logical outcome of Trump's apparent mental pathologies and the poor decisions that flow from them.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Feudal mentality - Republicans use the poor to protect the rich

"If a society is judged by how it treats the most vulnerable and weak, America is a country in decline, a country whose citizens should be ashamed of their leaders — and, in some cases, ashamed of themselves."-Chauncey DeVega is a politics staff writer for Salon.

In a feudal system, the idea was for peasants and surfs to work for the king of the castle in exchange for certain privileges associated with security and (perhaps) food.  On the other hand, the king could tax the minions for the privilege of providing essential services.  This feudal system may have been genetic because many Republicans, including Speaker Paul Ryan, seem to have inherited the practice of robbing from the poor to give to the rich.

Feudal system graphic- taking from the poor

Why are Republicans so cruel to the poor? - in Salon.com

Paul Ryan’s profound hypocrisy stands for a deeper problem
Paul Ryan has dreamed of slashing Medicaid since his keg-party days — and that blithe hostility is widespread

Republican Paul Ryan, like most other members of the United States Congress, is a millionaire.

On the other hand, Christa Patton is 68 years old. She is frail and no longer able to leave her home. She lives on a fixed income. Patton told Van Jones on a recent episode of his CNN show “The Messy Truth” that she would not be able to eat without the Meals on Wheels program.

Paul Ryan is the speaker of the United States House of Representatives. By his own account, in college he used to hang out with his friends and drink beer while sharing his dreams of cutting Medicaid. When Ryan was 15 years old, his father died from a heart attack caused by alcoholism. Ryan and his family then received his father’s Social Security survivor’s benefits. Ryan used that money to attend college. This was not the only money that Paul Ryan received from federal government. 

His family built its wealth from receiving government contracts.

Like his idol Ayn Rand (who argued against the very idea of government and the commons yet received social security and Medicare). Paul Ryan has combined meanness, cruelty and callousness towards the weak and the vulnerable with gross and unapologetic hypocrisy.

Ayn Rand (1905-1982) is the inspiration for Speaker Ryan's ideology about cutting what he believes are "entitlements", but Ms. Rand her self was a beneficiary of Social Security and Medicare. 

Bu the way, Ms. Rand was a Russian immigrant - (ahhh, the #Russia_connection again!)

Republicans like Ryan — along with the millionaires and billionaires who comprise Donald Trump’s Cabinet and inner circle — literally want to take food, shelter and health care away from poor people like Christa Patton.

Today’s Republicans view these Americans as useless eaters to be disposed of by means both passive and active.

It is normal to feel aghast at and disgusted by the Republican Party’s war on the poor. The more challenging and perhaps even more disturbing task is to ask why today’s conservatives feel such antipathy, disregard and hostility towards poor and other vulnerable Americans. Certainly greed and a slavish devotion to a revanchist right-wing ideology are part of the answer. But they may not be sufficient

Conservatives are more likely to exhibit social dominance and bullying behavior. This is a function of their authoritarian tendencies. The election of Donald Trump exemplifies this phenomenon.

American political elites often use language that robs poor and other marginalized people of their individuality, humanity and dignity. This language also creates a type of social distance between “middle class” or “normal” Americans and the economically disadvantaged.

Conservatism is a type of motivated social cognition that by its very nature is hostile to those groups located on the lower rungs of the social hierarchy.

Conservatives are more likely than liberals or progressives to believe in what is known as the “just world fallacy,” where people who suffer misfortune are viewed as somehow deserving their fates. Conservatives are also more likely than liberals or progressives not to use systems-level thinking as a means of understanding that individuals do not exist separate and apart from society. Conservatives are also more likely to defend social inequality as “fair and legitimate.”

Social psychologists have shown that, in effect, poor people are invisible to the rich and upper classes.

The psychological dynamic known as the “diffusion of responsibility,” in which individuals tend to ignore people who are in crisis — especially if they are perceived to be a member of a different social group, race, ethnicity or class — also encourages a lack of empathy and concern. It undercuts policies meant to offer direct assistance to vulnerable and marginalized individuals and communities. A perverse corollary to the “diffusion of responsibility” can also be used to legitimate punitive policies that target specific individuals and groups.

The myth of meritocracy and its cousin the myth of individualism exert a powerful hold over many Americans. This is especially true among conservatives. Social scientists and others have repeatedly demonstrated that American society is not a true meritocracy. Other research has shown that intergenerational income and class mobility are also relatively uncommon in the United States.

Likewise, the concept of the self-made person whose success is a function of “rugged individualism” is also a fantasy better suited to its dime-store origins than as a serious way of understanding American society. 

Nevertheless, these cultural mythologies do the practical political and social work of legitimizing the Republican war on the poor.

Race and class are intimately linked together in American (and Western) society. As such, poor people are incorrectly stereotyped as being overwhelmingly black and brown. 

In the United States, the intersections of race and class also impact the media narratives and cultural scripts that dictate who and what groups have historically been considered “deserving” (widows of war veterans, the disabled, single white mothers, children, the elderly) and “undeserving” (adult men and people of color).

Conservative media — and sometimes mainstream media as well — routinely uses false and misleading information to discuss the social safety net. For example, President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society as well as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal initiatives were extremely successful in terms of alleviating poverty and improving the general welfare of the American people. Yet right-wing media consistently tells its public that such programs were failures, a narrative that intentionally ignores the Republican Party’s efforts to undermine the effectiveness of those programs.

Among evangelical Christians, what is called the “prosperity gospel” has become increasingly influential. This grotesque interpretation of Christian doctrine assures its adherents that poor people deserve their circumstances because God has chosen not to bless them with money. Conversely, rich people have more money because God has deemed them worthy. 

Christian evangelicals — especially those who believe in the prosperity gospel — were a key constituency in Donald Trump’s winning coalition.

The brain structures of conservatives and liberals are quite different. Conservatives are capable of being empathetic. However, conservatives focus those feelings on their in-group such as immediate family and community. Liberals have a different biological inclination: They are able to feel empathy for those people and groups who are not part of their close social circle and community.

What can be done?

The bad news is that there is no evidence to suggest that the brains of conservatives can be modified to make them more empathetic and sympathetic towards their fellow human beings. Nor is the harmful messaging and narratives from the right-wing media about poor folks — and the Other more generally — likely to change in the foreseeable future.

On the level of practical politics, there have been no substantial negative electoral consequences to Republicans’ decades-long war on the social safety net and the common good. Thus, there is no reason in terms of electoral calculus for the Republican Party to stop pursuing such policies. Moreover, it is unlikely that conservative red-state voters will “wake up” and stop supporting a political party that actually leaves them less economically prosperous and financially secure. Here, poor and working-class Republican voters are like Pavlov’s dogs, seeking out abuse from their masters in the hope that the latter will hurt other Americans even more so.

But maybe there is hope. Americans must reinvigorate their social and political institutions across divides of race and class. This is the social glue that can be used to transcend the culture of cruelty that the Republican Party and the regime of neoliberal economics has imposed in the United States. Political messaging is critical: America should be a true “we the people” democracy that meets the needs of all people and not just those of the rich and the powerful. The Democratic Party must improve the way it communicates that vision to the American people.

Unfortunately, the Republican war on the poor is but one sign of the deep moral rot at the heart of American society. This crisis extends well beyond the election of Donald Trump and the cruelty both promised and so far enacted by his cadre and the Republican Party. If a society is judged by how it treats the most vulnerable and weak, America is a country in decline, a country whose citizens should be ashamed of their leaders — and, in some cases, ashamed of themselves.