Recent Trump speeches suggest 'underlying brain damage': psychologist

Dr. John Gartner, a psychologist and former assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, tells Salon's Chauncey DeVega that he thinks former President Donald Trump's mental state is declining to the point where he's experiencing a "fundamental breakdown" in his "ability to use language."

As an example, Gartner points to Trump's appearance at the U.S.-Mexico border in which he went on a strange tangent about immigrants "who don’t speak languages," while also arguing that "we have languages coming into our country, we have nobody that even speaks those languages."

"In my opinion, Donald Trump is getting worse as his cognitive state continues to degrade," commented Gartner. "If Trump were your relative, you’d be thinking about assisted care right now."

Gartner wasn't the only psychologist who spoke with DeVega who expressed such concerns, either.

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Psychologist Harry Segal, a senior lecturer at Cornell University and Weill Cornell Medical School, also said that Trump's mental sharpness has clearly fallen from where it was even six months ago.

"In the past six months, Trump's rallies are filled with strange lapses of logic," he said. "He has confused Biden with Obama, spoke of World War II, and has lapsed into bewildering digressions that are hard to follow."

Segal said that these slips weren't the only worrying sign about Trump's mental health, and he said that the former president's "pathological lying is itself a form of mental illness, so these cognitive lapses are literally sitting atop what appears to be an already compromised psychological functioning."

Vincent Greenwood, the founder and executive director of the Washington Center For Cognitive Therapy, also told DeVega that Trump's speech patterns seem to go beyond mere mental gaffes.

"In his speech in North Carolina, Trump said 'migrant cime' leaving out the 'r'; and was unable to say 'Venezuela' which came out sounding like 'Venezwheregull,'" he said. "These are examples of what we call phonemic paraphasia which is associated with underlying brain damage."

Read the whole set of interviews at this link.