President Donald Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior and repetition are raising red flags with medical experts who have sounded the alarm that the president is showing signs he’s mentally unfit for office.
“This is not normal. This is dangerous. And worse, this is a man who has access to nuclear weapons,” said Dr. Henry David Abraham, professor of psychiatry emeritus at Tufts University School of Medicine.
Abraham has been looking into Trump’s appearances over the past 40 years for mental abnormalities.
While he described the president, 79, as always narcissistic and sociopathic, he believes Trump has been exhibiting regression in his ability to manage language and is deeply concerned that Americans do not have a full picture of the president’s health.
Abraham observed that the president’s speeches have gotten shorter and that he’s introduced a “pathological technique of perseveration,” which is the repetition of actions or verbal patterns.
Trump has taken to frequently returning to the same lines from his attacks on perceived political foes to frequently touting his own cognitive tests, among other brags.
“It’s a red flag,” Abraham said. “People perseverate because they can’t think of anything else to say, because they’re cognitively impaired, or they perseverate because their emotional motor is stuck in high gear.”
He said that while there could be a benign explanation for it, Trump has shown an explosion of psychopathology in the last few years.
“In the last five to 10 years, he has planted red flags of concern again and again and again, and they’ve clustered,” Abraham observed.
The president has repeatedly attacked women reporters as dumb or stupid on numerous occasions in just the past few weeks alone.
While Trump sucked up to the press for decades, Abrahams believes he’s changed and observed the president doesn’t appear able to internalize certain control over his language more than ever.
At the same time, he said Trump has exhibited further signs of disorientation and verbal confusion, noting that he repeatedly mixed up Greenland and Iceland in a single speech earlier this year.
“Not only did he have these kinds of linguistic failings, but he began to exhibit more and more signs of really rage and poor impulse control, and at night, what appeared to be manic kinds of episodes where he would tweet, you know, 100, 200 times a night,” Abraham said.
The president himself has at times talked about what he has called “the weave,” where he goes completely off topic while speaking.
But Abraham warned that the president’s claim was simply an attempt to rationalize tangential thinking, which is abnormal. He said an increase in the frequency of the so-called “weave” was “absolutely” a bad sign of things to come.
Abraham is one of 36 medical experts who signed a statement raising concern that Trump is mentally unfit to serve, which was submitted to the congressional record last month. While they did not provide a specific diagnosis, they came to their conclusion that he’s on a dangerous decline after observing him publicly.
Their concerns kicked into high gear in light of Trump’s threats to wipe out an entire civilization in a post last month, coupled with his proximity to the nuclear button.
The group has called for the 25th Amendment to be invoked to remove Trump from office, a move that appears highly unlikely given that Trump’s Cabinet is sticking by the president.
Abraham warned that the list of potential conditions Trump has, or a complex differential diagnosis, could range all the way from the need for more sleep to a president who is suffering dementia, or some other serious problem “that threatens the world.”
“I think what we’re missing in this whole story is medical transparency,” Abraham said. “The safety of the country and the world has to be given a higher priority than whether or not the president has the right of confidentiality to his medical records.”
He blasted the White House explanations of Trump’s health so far for not adding up.
