https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OtO-cypKmY
Transcript:
All of these things are going to get worse
You know, I always say, look at Donald Trump today because that's the best Donald Trump you're ever going to see because dementia doesn't stay the same and it doesn't get better
It only gets worse
It's a rock rolling downhill. >> What do you think is wrong with President Trump? >> Two uh maybe three major things.
Uh the first thing is that he has the most severe personality disorder actually that a human being can have
It's called malignant narcissism
It was originally introduced by Eric Fro who escaped the Nazis to explain the psychology of Hitler and other murderous dictators like him
Uh it's actually not in the DSM.
It's kind of a historically obscure diagnosis, but I happen to have studied with the person who was the world expert on malignant narcissism
And so early on when Trump was running for president in 2015, I recognized that this was essentially a meteor heading towards Earth
uh because I knew just how destructive um a malignant narcissistic leader can be to a country and I saw it as potentially fatal to our country and unfortunately that seems to be potentially coming true.
So is that that's your assessment of Tom's condition? >> Yes
And it has four components
Narcissism of course but also psychopathy uh or what we call antisocial personality disorder
So lying, breaking laws and norms, having no remorse for violating the rights of others, also paranoia, and finally sadism.
Uh, a lot of what he does is is gleefully destructive and harmful
Uh, and it actually gives him enormous pleasure to hurt people and to destroy things. >> What symptoms in particular are you seeing
Can you give us some examples
Not obviously, we've seen some physical things
um the bruising on the hands, um the MRI scans that he's been to.
You're talking more mental. >> Well, that's the psychiatric diagnosis
That's where he starts
He's been that way his whole life
What is new are the signs of dementia that have been developing really now for quite some time
I and some physicians wrote some op-eds about this in 2019
And we were actually among the people who goed Ronnie Jackson into giving him the mocha during his first administration.
That's the dementia screening exam
What's interesting now, and this has just happened in the last week, is it's starting to bleed out that his medical team knows he has cognitive problems
Um, that White House report, first of all, they said he had his second annual physical
Well, if you do the math, you can't have a second annual physical.
That would be a semiannual physical
Um, they clearly wanted to follow up on things that concerned them
Uh, we know he took the mocha again, but he revealed that he took cognitive tests plural
Um, so just to be clear, and he took an MRI
So just to be clear, we never, and when I say never, I mean never ever ever give people a battery of cognitive tests or an MRI unless there's something very serious that we suspect or are trying to rule out.
So in other words, this is not by any means uh normal uh or routine
Um this is showing, you know, we've been criticized, right, for diagnosing him without examining him
I'm sure you were going to get to that, but um the doctors who are examining him are giving him a neurosychological battery and an MRI, which means that they suspect that he has severe cognitive decline or dementia.
Is there something in um his decision-m that you think points to uh or or perhaps the way he acts at at press conferences that points to this dementia? >> Yes, absolutely
So to diagnose dementia, you need to see a deterioration from the person's baseline
Um and really not just in language, that's language is the most obvious one, but language, memory, uh behavior and psychoot performance.
He is showing gross deterioration in all of those areas
But just to pick one that you talked about his recent behavior, impulsivity is a sign of dementia
And I think he was always somewhat impulsive, but he's becoming more erratically impulsive
And just to give you an example, the prime minister of Canada was in the Oval Office to discuss a trade deal.
the minister of Ottawa uh posted a a social media video clip of Ronald Reagan speaking against tariffs
Ronald Reagan was very against tariffs
Donald Trump became so angry that they showed a video that video that he kicked the prime minister of of Canada out of his office
So that's it
I'm not going to negotiate anymore because you That's crazy, right
That's an impulsive.
It wasn't even the prime minister of Canada who posted the video
Plus I you don't normally cancel international relations over you know social media video and also of course it was true
Um but that's typical Trump because he lies about everything
So that would be an example of you know really he wakes up and you know today I'm going to double the tariffs on China.
Tomorrow he says I'm going to there's this very erratic arbitrary quality to his decision-making
The other way that we see it in plain sight is his language
And this has been the main thing that has really been revealing his dementia
Uh you know when he was uh in the 80s he was extremely articulate
People might not believe that uh but he spoke in polished paragraphs not just sentences.
Now he really has difficulty completing a sentence, a thought and sometimes even a word
He evidences something that we call phenemic paraphas that we only see in dementia or other serious organic brain disorders
It's not when you're tired or old or drunk
You andic paraphasia, you use a sound that isn't an English word, but it has a part of an English word in it and you're struggling to say the word and you can't get it out.
You know, we have dozens and dozens of examples of this
Right before the election, you probably saw a lot of these super cuts where they went from one mis pronunciation after another
Well, just this week, everything I'm telling you about is this week
Okay, this week in Trump's dementia, um, he tweeted or he put on truth social du du du du.
Um, so some people speculated he might have been trying to say South Carolina, but what he what he wrote was South C a r d
So you rarely see a phmic paraphasia in writing. [laughter] Usually it's oral, but here there's like this is a smoking gun
It's it's it's right there in black and white right before our eyes.
The other thing that we see that shows the dementia and again just this week number one that he was wandering in in Japan
Uh I don't know if you saw that film, but the prime minister three times had to redirect him
uh he he would stop and have a blank look and look disoriented and she would kind of move him along.
And then finally he weirdly kind of stops in front of the Japanese flag and salutes it and then he just starts to wander down the line
He's about 20 soldiers down the line when they realize it's kind of like when you you take a kid to a department store and you're like wait what the hell happened to him
I took my eyes off him for a second.
you know, he's all the way at the other end of the room and a soldier has to come and escort him to where all the other dignitaries are
And then she takes over and starts to escort him
So this wandering has which is also, as you know, if anyone's ever had a p relative with dementia, is very typical of dementia patients, has been going on for some time.
He often wanders past his car, wanders past his plane, wanders the wrong side of the deis, uh wanders around the deis
Um so again what people need to understand about dementia is it only gets worse
So this is a sign that this is deteriorating
And finally this week in terms of his language the things that he was saying you know there's various ways in which he shows dimension in his language.
One is just the the deterioration in the quality of his vocabulary and his thought that people have done studies where they've actually looked at you know the vocabulary level of his speech and it started out at 12th grade and it's down to about third grade now you know in other words that's a clear quantitative decline.
We also have the phmic paraphas which again is only a sign of of dementia and then what we also have is this tangential thinking where he doesn't complete a thought and he kind of moves on to another thought
there might be some loose free association involved, but it doesn't really make sense
So, someone asked him about Harvard.
He went on and talked about Harlem and then came back to Harvard
Well, just this week, I have two examples of his speech if you don't mind
I'm one is short and one is long
I'll read you the short one first
He's speaking before the the troops on the on the uh on an aircraft carrier on October 28th
He said, "I never like good-looking people.
I never admitted that before." All right
So this is a disinhibition I guess you know that he's admitting that maybe but you see I'm allowed to we won in the Supreme Court based on merit
Okay
So what case in the Supreme Court gave him the right now to say he doesn't like attractive people
Um and you mean you won the case on merit
Oh no.
Then he goes but you know that's right
You know about that right now everything in this country is based on merit
So wait
So was the case did he win the case on the merits
is the case about merit and what's that got to do with so that's a very brief example now let me read you a slightly longer example this is where he was speaking in front of the his now walk of fame uh where along the rose garden he's got pictures of the different presidents he says this is you see over here the presidential walk of fame and we have this long wall with half windows because
that used to be a swimming pool on the other side of the wall that was the swimming pool where Jackie would say I hear women inside are there women inside quite quite a famous I'm not saying anything
This is part of a movie
And the Secret Service said, "No, no, there are no women inside, ma'am.
You'll have to move along, ma'am." But I hear women inside
No, you'll have to move along, ma'am
So, that was the famous swimming pool
Now, it's even worse
It's been covered over and now it's for the media
And I think we have a small representative group
I don't think they allowed the rest of them
I can't believe it.
What happened
They're all on the other side of the wall because this was supposed to be a private event
But there's no such thing as a private event in politics
Lindsay, you learned that a long time ago, right
The great Lindsey Graham
You're up 34 points, Lindsay
That's not bad
I'll tell you that's not bad
So, we did the Presidential Hall of Fame from George Washington to Well, I think we're going to have to rate him above me.
He's less than great
Less than George Washington
Somebody went there
They said, you're the third best president
And you know, this was on television
Third best
who had the first two, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln
I got extremely angry at this man
You know, you can't it's going to be it's going to be tough to beat.
And so, do you think this is down to his age? >> No
Um, I mean, uh, this age, there are some declines that go with age
Um, I'm very aware of them
I'm 67
Um, it happens to me sometimes even in the middle of a podcast
I can't remember a politician's name
I go, you know, the guy the guy from Japan, you know.
Um, but I know I'm having trouble finding the word
Um, >> and you're not the president. >> And I'm not the president
Um, but but in other words, uh, with signs of aging, people can be slower
They can be softer
Um, but they don't have this complete word salad
There's there's no connecting ideas.
No one even knows what he's talking about
There's this kind of emperor new clothes phenomenon going in our country, you know, where here, imagine a press pool listening to what you and I just heard, right
It's obvious that the real story is the president is babbling nonsensically
That is the story
But that's not the story you'll read in the newspaper or see on TV.
They'll pick some quote where he makes some provocative statement or some policy statement and that's what they'll show
and they won't show you that he's rambling on and on without any connecting ideas
Just to give you another example of how his um disordered and dis disabled mind works
Um back during the campaign, remember he said, "Oh, these immigrants, they're coming from the insane asylums.
" And then he goes, "Anyone seen Silence of the Lambs?" Well, because Silence of the Lambs is a movie about an insane asylum
So he went from immigrants are coming from insane asylums to, "Hey, that reminds me of a movie I saw about insane asylums." He goes, "Oh, the late great Hannibal Lectar
They don't like to talk about him anymore.
" Well, first of all, Hannibal Lecter is a fictional character
So, what do you mean the late Hannibal Lectar
And then he says they don't talk about him anymore, implying that, you know, he was really a great guy and they're not giving him credit
But, of course, he's a serial killer who eats people and uh but then again, actually, it tells you something about his psychology and his unconscious, right
That he is actually idealizing Hannibal Lectar.
But this is what I mean
this
You know, I used to say, "Is it going to take him babbling nonsensically from the White House for people to acknowledge that he is has dementia?" Well, guess what
That's not enough
Apparently, [laughter] >> does this tie more into the malignant narcissism that you talked about
Are they linked? >> Well, here they're linked in this regard.
These are two independent disorders
But when people develop dementia, whatever personality or personality dis personality problems or personality disorders they have get dramatically worse
And this is what's really frightening is now he is the worst version of himself as it were
Uh actually malignant narcissists also get worse when they get power.
um they become very omnipotent and grandiose and they feel entitled to do very violent destructive things uh which they get pleasure from and gives them a feeling of power
Um so you know now he wants to go to war with Venezuela
He's blowing up boats you know that makes him feel powerful and he he likes to do things like that.
So his his judgment which was always terrible now is completely erratic and he he doesn't really know where he is
He's talking about making peace between India, between Iran and Pakistan
Um, you know, well, it's India obviously, you know, and then he starts talking about India and saying, well, they've had a lot of changes of of leadership
No, that's Pakistan.
So, it's he's not just getting the names wrong
He's confusing the names, the countries, the facts
And he's making erratic, impulsive decisions, and there are no guard rails
There's no one there to stop him say, "No, I don't think we should go to war with Venezuela this morning because you had a a bad breakfast.
" Uh, [laughter] so we're in in a we're in a hell of a lot of trouble
Us, America, but the world is in a hell of a lot of trouble because the most powerful man in the world is both evil and demented. >> Do you think there's an element that he's perhaps playing up to this role
You talk about him, his narcissism
Um, is he playing up to a strong man role
If we see there's Putin and and Kim Jong-un and >> do you think he's trying to play up to to them and be a bit more like them and he's not actually really like this? >> No, he's really like this
He's not
playing. [laughter] >> You've compared him to Hitler in the past
Do you still stand by that
And what stage of Hitler do you think we're seeing now? >> Yeah
Well, we're, you know, we're we're well into Hitler's first year
um he's actually not moving that much more slowly than Hitler did to consolidate power and destroy uh democracy.
I was actually the one of the first people to uh publicly compare him to Hitler back in 2016
And then I got a lot of push back, as you might imagine, from the press
Uh and they say, "Well, it's not like he's going to form concentration camps." And I said, "Yes, he will
He will form concentration camps for immigrants.
" And lo and behold, he had actually built out camps in the desert to hold 250,000 immigrants
Then there was this child separation policy that he really got a lot of flack for and he kind of backed off of that
Um, but just so people understand, there's a difference between a concentration camp and a death camp
A concentration camp is when we concentrate a group of undesirable people, undesirable because of their ethnicity or their religion or their politics, and we confine them to a space.
the Japanese internment camps would be an example
Um, so he is basically already imprisoning, you know, thousands of people in alligator Alcatraz or whatever
And he's going to he wants to build out more and more concentration camp capacity, but he's also gone to the step of death camps
He's just outsourcing them
So he's sending people to these third world hell holes where it's abandon all hope ye who enter here.
Andrego Garcia, who came back from the prison in El Salvador, said over and over again, the guards would say to them, "You're going to die here
No one gets out of here alive." So, he's just outsourcing the murder. >> And you touched on this earlier, but what do you say to those who think, well, you've never met Trump and you know, you can't make an assessment of someone you've never met? >> Well, I think you're referring to the Goldwater rule.
And one thing I think is important for people to realize is the Goldwater rule doesn't say you can't diagnose a patient you haven't met
It says you can't diagnose a public figure you haven't met
You see the American Psychiatric Association isn't a guild organization
And what they figured out after the there was a debacle in 1965 when a newspaper wrote an article about Goldwater and said psychiatrists they took a poll.
Psychiatrists say Goldwater's unstable
Goldwater sued them
Uh and he won $75,000
um and and they were embarrassed
Um but it's as a if you're guarding the profession, you don't want people in your profession to make statements about public figures because they could retaliate against the profession
For example, recently um well, not that recently.
Now, it was during the first Trump administration, there was a lot of people in the American Psychiatric who wanted to relax the Goldwater rule
and a colleague of mine and he spoke about this to the New Yorker was in the meeting where they discussed this with the ethics committee and they not only doubled down on maintaining the uh Goldwater rule but they expanded it to say you can't make any public statements not just a diagnosis um and they said uh out loud we we don't want to we have to enforce this rule because we don't want to piss off Trump he might reduce our
third party payments from insurance um so in others they're watching out for the guild so it's not a high-minded uh ethical principle
I think you would agree that um the lesson we learned from World War II is when you see a Hitler rising, being silent is never the most ethical option
Um well, I was just going to say psych as psychologists, we also have another duty.
Uh we're actually what are called mandatory reporters
If we think someone's at risk, we need to warn that person
Well, having studied malignant narcissism, it was clear to me that the entire nation was at risk and that we had a duty to warn the nation and the world
And I formed an organization called Duty to War and we had thousands of mental health professionals participating in different ways.
Um but the American Psychiatric Association was very effective at keeping a gag on most of the people in the profession and then sort of delegitimized our diagnostic statements because as in this interview people would always say well but isn't that unethical or aren't you unable to make that diagnosis
The other reason that people don't know we are able to make that diagnosis is because we changed diagnostic systems in the 1980s after the Goldwater rule where now all of our psychiatric diagnoses are based on observable behavioral criteria.
Um so for example I told you that I Donald Trump is meets criteria for antisocial personality disorder
Well the first criteria is lying frequent lying
Well the Washington Post has documented like 50,000 they stopped counting after like 50,000 lies
He's the most documented liar
I would I would argue he's the most documented liar in all of recorded human history.
If you have another one, you know, whip it out cuz I don't think you're going to find one
Um, obviously he vi he vi he breaks laws
He's convicted felon
Obviously he violates other people's rights
He's a convicted sex offender
Um, obviously he has no remorse or an adjudicated sex offender
Excuse me.
It was a civil case
He he he he um uh obviously has no remorse uh about violating these laws and whatnot
He obviously loves to exploit other people
He's a con man
So we we know this without having to interview him
I don't need to have him lie to my face to know that he lies
So it just makes sense, right
These diagnostic criteria are very are all written in very common sense language so that you know an obvious an intelligent educated person can observe whether or not you're seeing those behaviors.
And sort of tying into that um how how important do you think it is to be honest about the health of the president because I don't think Trump is the first president that there's been some secrecy around this their real health conditions. >> No, he's not
He's not the first one to hide it.
You know, I I think about President Wilson who had a stroke and this is before we had the 25th Amendment or it was even uh you know, we didn't know what to do
So, Mrs
Wilson ran the White House for a number of months
Um unfortunately, right now, I think we're in a situation where Steven Miller is running the White House.
Uh and Steven Miller is insane
Uh he really I mean uh he's a Jewish Nazi
He really identifies with it's a something we call in psychology identification with the aggressor that it's actually a psychological defense mechanism where we someone can ident sort of like Stockholm syndrome someone can identify with the aggressor.
I think Steven Miller really is has is executing at a manic pace this anti-immigrant Nazi agenda which is really genocidal against immigrants um and completely indiscriminate
You've seen the the the videos, right, where ICE agents are smashing people's windows, wrestling them to the ground, slamming them on the ground, throwing them in unmarked cars, um disappearing them, no one can find them.
I mean, this is, you know, true police state stuff
It's Steven Miller
I mean, Trump approves of it, but Steven Miller is the one that's driving this
And the other person who's driving things is Russell VA, the Project 2025 U, you know, author who's uh head of OM
So basically he's kind of delegated the destru the destruction of democracy and um the genocide to these guys and he's there kind of babbling about the paper he uses to sign uh you know um commissions and the White House and they use gold and they use the best grass and he he's just
kind of uh talking about irrelevant stuff and babbling on
Uh it's sort of like the weekend at Bernie's White House if you saw that um movie, you know, where Bernie is dead and they just keep moving him around
Uh he's not he's not dead
He's not it's not that he's not dangerous.
It's not that he's not doing things
He is he's doing things very erratically and impulsively
Um but as he's becoming um more uh mentally and cognitively disabled, what's happening is it's empowering other people in his administration to pursue their agenda underneath um while praising him
uh you know like the dear leader uh overtly >> and going forward what are some of the signs or symptoms that would indicate Trump's deteriorating state as as you're describing it? >> Well, all of these things are going to get worse
You know, I always say look
at Donald Trump today because that's the best Donald Trump you're ever going to see because dementia doesn't stay the same and it doesn't get better
It only gets worse
It's a rock rolling downhill
The other area, by the way, where we see his dementia is his psychoot performance
um uh he actually evidences something we called a wide-based gate which is typical of fronttotemporal dementia which a lot of experts tell me they think that's the type of dementia there's more than one type of dementia that's the type they think he has it
makes people very impulsive um he swings his his right leg around in a semicircle you might have noticed that when he met Putin on the red carpet he kind of zigzagged around the carpet you could see it very prominently there that his right leg was swinging like an arc pushing him to the left and then he had to over had to overcorrect.
The other thing is his memory
Um recently he had a meeting not was a couple weeks ago uh he had a meeting with Schumer and Hakee Jeff about the shutdown
He said I met with Chuck Schumer and a really nice man
He brought a really nice man with him
He didn't know who I'm not talking about forgetting names.
He didn't know who Hakee Jeff was
Hakeem Jeff is the minority leader of the house
He deals with Hakee Jeff on a regular basis
He's not just some obscure congressman, right
He is the top congressman for the Democratic party
And he didn't even say and I met with a I'm sorry, I'm trying to get the name
He's not just look forgetting the name.
It's as if he'd never met this person as if he brought that nice man with him
That's like, you know, if you had a relative who was in a nursing home for dementia and you know, you bring your sister and she goes, "Oh, who's that nice person that you brought?" goes, "Mom, that's your other daughter.
" You know, uh it's that level of nonrecognition that we're talking about, but again, no one in the American press other than the independent media is talking about these things. >> And lastly, um the room as a whole at the minute that he's going to push for a third term
There's already Trump 2028 going around, but constitutional matters to one side, because that's obviously a whole other thing.
Is it even possible from a health perspective that he could make it that far? >> That's an excellent question
I don't think he's going to be able to make it to the end of his term uh in in in be composmentous.