Trump’s Deteriorating Mental Health - Dr. John Gartner

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]When he says destroy an entire civilization, he's indirectly alluding to using nuclear weapons. You're not going to destroy an entire civilization with bunker buster bombs, >> right?

[00:00:09]>> Yeah. Yeah. I suppose you're right.

[00:00:11]>> The thing about about him is he's not bluffing. I I was on a right-wing, you know, radio show where they were like, "Oh, come on. He's just saying that."

[00:00:19]Think about this. Everything that he's ever threatened to do, he has done when he had the power to do it.

[00:00:29]Yeah, I think that that is uh something that we do which is sort of sanewash him or normalize him or try to jiujitsu what he said into some kind of uh normaly and it's it's harder and harder to do, isn't it?

[00:00:44]>> Yeah. I I think we're really whistling past the the graveyard, you know, at this point. Um we're sane it, but we're also normalizing in the sense we don't normally think of being, you know, in in an existential threat.

[00:00:58]It's like every day is the Cuban missile crisis now, >> right?

[00:01:02]No, that may just be it that we're really not used to having it all cranked up to 10 every day of the week. And so that's a challenge to the media and that's a ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch challenge to traditional politics.

[00:01:14]>> Yeah. No, and and it is interesting, you know, it is kind of how the brain works, too. We do assimilate to things, you know, we we we habituate to things. Uh M Gesson is one of the people that's talked about this. You know, just when you you think like, oh well, people will never accept blah blah blah and then it happens and it's like, oh, I guess that's I guess it's blah blah blah now like like that's just the way we adapt.

[00:01:36]It's like look, if the temperature gets cold, we'll wear coats. I mean, we just have to adapt to the to the to the environment. But so as a result as he's been ratcheting towards more and more madness and more and more threat um we just keep um uh accommodating to it and then we take another step and then accommodating to it take another step and we really are stumbling towards uh oblivion towards a essentially extinction.

[00:02:02]>> Let me just uh now desperate for arguments to perhaps suggest that we're not let me try to grab uh the corruption. He's so uh committed to self-enrichment. He has a pipeline through crypto, through all of these no bid contracts that are being handed out and there are all kinds of ways in which his which is his beak is being wet along the way. The the Trump sons with their drone company that all of a sudden gets hundreds of millions of dollars from the government both in loans and in contracts. uh their resorts that continue to open the one in Vietnam just to get out of the Vietnam uh tariff.

[00:02:41]Vietnam granted him that resort. They moved people out of an area just to get that thing started. There's one in the Middle East as well. So, uh if you look at that and his desire to amass sort of the greatest fortune ever, does that balance against or argue against this sort of Armageddon that you foresee?

[00:03:00]>> Well, he they kind of go together. uh because you know he wants to have all the money, you know, just like he wants to have all the honors, you know what I mean? He has to have the Nobel Peace Prize. He has to be the Pope. He has to be Jesus. He has to have the the Kennedy Center named after him. He has to have the airport Reagan airport named after him. He has to Penn Station named after him. I I mean everything has to be he has to be God. Okay? And if if you won't allow him to be God, he will smite you.

[00:03:30]There is when you list it all like that the literal insanity is striking beyond any imagination. I mean if anybody else had done this you would go this is outrageous. This is insane. I mean who is this guy? And it's and and it's so striking that we really aren't at that place. In fact you've got Mike Johnson in the house concocting a gift for him, an award for him. the America First Award that was bestowed upon him. It's utter insanity. You have major corporate leaders coming to him with these golden encrusted fill-in- thelank. It's a it's a watch. It's a baseball. It's a whatever. It's it's utter insanity.

[00:04:13]There is a desire to mllify this like 9-year-old mind who just wants shiny gold stuff everywhere with his face on it.

[00:04:23]>> It's unbelievable, isn't it? It really is. when you really look at it and think about it, it's you can't believe this is really happening.

[00:04:30]>> I I I I I wonder for a second if you can just give me a sense of the American psyche. Uh is there, as you say, now we're all starting to disconnect. Even those who were the Trump devotees, just couldn't get enough of the show, are starting to be let down. The Rogan sphere, you know, the manosphere. Uh, how did you break that down? Uh, did you uh did you see the cultism emerging? And is there a break from the cult?

[00:05:05]>> Well, I I think the people who weren't deepest into the cult are now breaking from him. But here's the problem. I think it's too late.

[00:05:12]I think it's too late. I really I really feel like, you know, unless there's a deusex machina, unless there's a miracle, our fate is sealed.

[00:05:23]And there's no real push back that we've seen. And whatever push back you might get internally to, let's say, even the nuclear codes being entered, you just don't have that anymore with a guy like Hegsth and with the kind of uh the functionaries that he surround himself with.

[00:05:41]>> And it could happen in a in a confused, irritable haze in the middle of the night. you know, I actually So, I have um uh something that I wanted to um possibly uh read to you. Um >> please. Yeah.

[00:05:56]>> Yeah. So, well, because I I think it's helpful, first of all, to read his words verbatim. Um because we get these little snippets in the press um and and when you really hear the whole thing, it becomes you be more apparent how thought disordered it is. But also this is his attitude towards uh the war in Iran.

[00:06:16]This was actually on on Air Force One um in late March, but I I I had had it printed out because I wanted to uh hear people just to hear the words and hear how it doesn't make any sense. They agreed to send us eight boats two days ago and then another two boats and that was 10 boats. And today they gave us a tribute. I I don't know. I can't define it exactly what they gave us. I think it's a sign of respect. 20 boats of oil, big big boats going through the straight and that's starting tomorrow morning. A lot of boats. I would say we're doing really well in the negotiations, but you never know with Iran because we negotiate with them and then we always have to blow them up.

[00:06:58]Whether it's B2 bombers or just terminating the deal by Barack Hussein Obama, probably the worst deal we've ever done as a country. One of the dumbest deals we've ever done, but I fortunately terminated it. Otherwise, they would have a nuclear weapon. Then we did the attack with the B2 bombers and we stopped them from having nuclear.

[00:07:15]And now we h now we had to blow them up again. I think we'll make a deal with them. It's pretty sure, but it's possible we won't. We've had regime change if you look at it already because the one regime was decimated, destroyed.

[00:07:27]They're all dead. And the next regime is mostly dead. And the third regime, we're dealing with different people than anyone's ever dealt with before. It's a whole different group of people. So, I would consider that regime change. And frankly, they've been very reasonable.

[00:07:40]So, we've had regime change. You can't do much better.

[00:07:45]I mean, >> wow. Wow.

[00:07:49]>> This is the thing. When you read that or list those things as you have in this conversation along the way, you just see it a completely unspooled mind.

[00:08:00]>> Exactly.

[00:08:06]It's it's very hard, Dr. John Gardner, to come up with uh anything to be optimistic about for all the reasons that we've detailed.

[00:08:16]>> Really, really tough spot.

[00:08:18]>> And the rest of the world doesn't know how to manage him either.

[00:08:21]>> No, I mean, there really is no one on planet Earth who can stop him.

[00:08:26]>> Yeah.

[00:08:29]Well, I'm uh discouraged uh in the extreme. We've had um a couple of other doctors along the way, I want to say, through the uh through the Trump years uh who've analyzed similarly his the degradation of his mind, you know, and just how how it has uh frittered away, but also physically how he seems to be physically uh diminished as well. Um, do you notice that physical diminishment in him in any kind of substantial way or does he >> Oh, yeah. No, absolutely. No, when I talked about the the deterioration in four areas, one of them is the physical and and now it looks like he may have had a stroke uh you know, I think it was around New Year's I think where his part of his right the right side of his face still droops sometimes. He's also been showing um even before the potential stroke what we call a wide-based gate where um and this is specific actually to fronttotemporal dementia specifically where and if you remember that thing where he was in Japan and they showed him weaving across the red carpet. Um, if you slow that down and when they actually they speeded it up so it was like Benny Hill, so it was kind of funny. But if you do the opposite, if you slow it down and really watch his gate, it's a peculiar thing that's very peculiar to this thing called a widebased gate where instead of stepping with his right foot, he's swinging it kind of like it's a dead weight in kind of a semicircle and that pushes him towards the left. And he's been showing that more and more. Um but that is a a specific type of motor deterioration that a medical person would know actually relates to fronttotemporal dementia. Um the other thing we've seen is deterioration in his language. I mean he used to actually people don't realize this because they think he's such an idiot but actually he was actually he used to be intelligent. Um he was always a jerk, right? But he and anyone would say say jerky things. A China they're ripping us but but he but he spoke in polished paragraphs. Now he can't finish a often a sentence or a thought or sometimes even a word and that's also a sign of dementia. It's called a phmic paraphasia. We can only get part of the word out and then he stumbles on the rest of it. And again, this has been uncommon clips, but it's actually a medical sign of dementia. We don't see phenemic paraphasuras in just about anything but dementia or other similar brain diseases. It's not something when you're old or tired or you drunk or that you do that. Um and then there's the tangentiality of his thinking, right?

[00:10:52]that he just wanders from one idea to another. And that's why if you read the more extended uh and I I have I have dozens of these, you know. Yeah. I have five minutes on on a on the pen on the Sharpie pen. Remember, in the middle of Iran, he goes on, >> yeah, that was bizarre.

[00:11:08]>> Right. I I I read that on a different show, you know, just >> Well, when you ever when you come back here, I want the full range. Okay. I want the full oneman show.

[00:11:19]>> Full one man show.

[00:11:22]You bring the Sharpie pen, you bring the Air Force One stuff. I want it all next time.

[00:11:28]>> Yeah. I mean, the other thing is uh and as we finish up here, he's on a loop.

[00:11:33]So, as he drifts from thing to thing, from tangent to tangent, you hear Barack Hussein Obama, best deal we've ever had.

[00:11:40]I'm going to make worst deal we ever had was the one they had. I mean, you you kind of there is a default mechanism that appears to be sort of really the way his brain is working now.

[00:11:49]>> Yeah. No, people when they have dementia, they just have certain phrases they use over and over again. You know, they they often use like a lot of superlatives. It's great. It's amazing.

[00:11:57]It's, you know, because uh he did that actually at Valley Forge where, you know, um uh uh not Valley Forge. Um Oh.

[00:12:04]Oh, shoot. U anyway, the Civil War. Um uh >> uh you're uh he was at Gettysburg. No, where was >> Gettysburg? Gettysburg. Gettysburg.

[00:12:14]Wow. It's it's it's amazing. It's incredible. It's >> there was a lot of love here. There was over here.

[00:12:21]>> Yeah. In some ways it was very beautiful and another you know and and then and then and then actually interesting. Then what he starts to do is make up a story. And you know this is something we know that Donald Trump is actually the most documented liar in recorded human history. That's just a fact um that the Washington Post has established. But his lying is actually great camouflage for his dementia because he tells these wild stories now. And this is something that that anyone who's had a demented parent probably knows about where they just start reminiscing about something that never happened, right? So they they it's something the brain does. It fills in the gaps. And so they'll tell a story that may sound very reasonable or may sound bizarre, but that you know is couldn't possibly have happened. He's been doing this more and more. So for example, when he said, you know, oh, you know, the uni bomber was in my uncle's class and I said to him, oh, Uncle John, what was the uni bomber like? and he said, "Well, you know, he was a know-it-all, but he was very smart." And like this all very involved story. The uni bomber never was in his class, didn't go to that school, you know, so it we know it can't be true. He's told multiple stories like that where he's just making it up, but it's not it's a bizarre making up. It's not they call it honest lying. Um because the person who's telling the reminiscence thinks it's true, but this is how confused he is. And as far as memory is concerned, he's not recognized people that he's known for years. Um, you know, when uh Hakee Jeff and Chuck Schumer came to negotiate over the government shutdown, he said, "Oh, Chuck Schumer came and he brought a very nice man with him, very nice man, as if he hadn't not that he forgot Jeffrey's name." As if he'd never seen him before in his life, you know.

[00:13:57]So, we're talking and and he keeps saying that his father was born in Germany. He he keeps saying it. His father was born in the Bronx. His grandfather was born in Germany. And they actually have a name for this with dementia. They call it confusing the generations. Um my uncle who had dementia kept thinking that I was a lawyer because my dad was a lawyer but he was in a nursing home at that point not holding the nuclear codes.

[00:14:19]>> Yeah. Yeah. We're the United States of nursing home now. I mean it's uh and it's a government that just is not really set up to handle this and certainly not to set up to handle this when you've surrounded yourself with so many enablers. Uh >> that's the worst case scenario. It really is a perfect storm.