"Hastening his deterioration": Dr. John Gartner on impact of court trials on "Trump's fragile brain"

https://www.salon.com/2024/03/26/hastening-his-deterioration-dr-john-gartner-on-impact-of-trials-on-trumps-fragile-brain/

Donald Trump’s already abominable behavior has been getting much worse in these last few weeks – and there may be a physiological component to it. In a 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 appears to be suffering from serious cognitive challenges as manifest by his speech, memory, and other behavior. In an attempt to raise public awareness about Donald Trump’s apparent cognitive challenges and the extreme danger they represent to the nation if he were to take back the White House, and in essence be a type of mad king dictator, Gartner has started a petition at Change.org called “We diagnose Trump with probable dementia: A petition for licensed professionals only.”

Unfortunately, the American mainstream media – especially the elite agenda-setting news media – has largely continued to ignore Donald Trump’s apparent cognitive and other mental and emotional health challenges. The Washington Post appears to be slowly creeping towards a more direct engagement with Trump’s apparent cognitive challenges. Last week, the Post featured a story about Donald Trump’s father who was afflicted with Alzheimer’s:

Trump’s long fixation on mental fitness followed years of watching his father’s worsening dementia — a formative period that some associates said has been a defining and little-mentioned factor in his life, and which left him with an abiding concern that he might someday inherit the condition. While much remains unknown about Alzheimer’s, experts say there is an increased risk of inheriting a gene associated with the disease from a parent.

“Donald is no doubt fearful of Alzheimer’s,” said a former senior executive at the Trump Organization, who worked for years with Trump and saw him interact with Fred Trump Sr., and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a confidential relationship. “He’s not going to talk about and not going to admit to it. But it’s relevant because every day he is hitting Biden with whether or not he is capable mentally of doing the job.”

Trump’s father’s condition also drove a wedge into his family, which fell into years of lawsuits that alleged in part that Donald Trump sought to take advantage of his father’s dementia to wrest control of the family estate — litigation that introduced reams of medical records detailing Fred Trump Sr.’s condition.

This failure to consistently and boldly speak truth to power about Donald Trump's apparent cognitive challenges contributes to the larger crisis in credibility that the American news media as an institution is experiencing. Any reasonable person can see that something is wrong with Donald Trump’s behavior. Many Americans have direct experience with relatives, friends, and other people they care about who have been or are afflicted with some type of brain disease related to aging. For the American news media and other gatekeepers and agenda-setters to deny the obvious about Donald Trump is a willful decision to ignore the facts and reality.

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