Donald Trump’s lengthy monologues about his construction projects have prompted a prominent psychologist to warn that he is showing growing signs of dementia and malignant narcissism—and it’s about to get worse.
Dr. John Gartner, a clinical psychologist and former assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, argues that Trump’s tendency to veer off into extended tangents about projects such as the White House Ballroom or the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is evidence of his cognitive decline.
“Tangential speech is one of the diagnostic criteria for dementia,” Gartner told the Daily Beast, pointing to Trump’s habit of drifting away from the subject at hand and returning repeatedly to discussions about projects that bear his personal stamp.
Among them is the soon-to-be-built Triumphal Arch, inspired by the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, originally commissioned by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1806 to glorify his military conquests.
“What he’s obsessed with is a function of malignant narcissism. He’s obsessed with things that reflect glory on him,” says Gartner. “He’s changing Washington D.C. to Trump D.C.”
As for the lengthy rants? “It’s only going to go downhill from here,” he said.
Trump and his allies reject such suggestions, and his latest medical report from his White House physician says he remains in “excellent health” and is fully fit to carry out his duties as Commander-in-Chief.
“If it quacks like a duck, it may actually just be a Democrat hack doctor,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle told the Daily Beast in response to Gartner’s assessment.
“President Trump is the sharpest, most accessible, and energetic president in American history and any so-called medical professionals engaging in armchair diagnosis or false speculation for political purposes are clearly breaking the Hippocratic Oath they’ve sworn to.”
But Gartner is not the only medical professional to express concern about the president in recent months as his behavior has become more erratic, punctuated by late-night Truth Social frenzies, a wild threat to destroy “a whole civilization” and blasphemous posts depicting himself as Jesus.
Trump has also been caught nodding off at public events, has a growing tendency to rage against female journalists and has spent an extraordinary amount of time in recent weeks publicly discussing his vision for remaking the nation’s capital.
One of the most awkward rants took place last Friday, when Wisconsin farmers struggling with falling commodity prices and economic uncertainty were treated to a six-minute detour about the Reflecting Pool and other Washington beautification efforts. He even brought them “before and after” pictures.
“Look at that!” he said as polite farmers examined the images. “That’s our nation’s capital.”
Another bizarre episode took place during an Oval Office event on clean coal last week when Trump held up photographs comparing the length of the Reflecting Pool to skyscrapers around the world.
And in May, the 79-year-old president devoted a 44-minute press conference to the White House ballroom, escorting reporters through the construction site where he revealed he was quietly building an underground fortress below the White House, featuring a military hospital, classified meeting rooms, and top-secret research facilities.
“We went down six stories. It’s actually far more complex,” he said.
Supporters argue that his projects stem from his love of the country. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, for example, even pointed to the controversial UFC fight taking place at the White House this Sunday—Trump’s 80th birthday—as a “gift to America.”
A Daily Beast analysis this week found that Trump discussed his projects on 17 occasions from May 1 to June 5, including at Cabinet meetings, Oval Office events, airport press gaggles, and other appearances that ostensibly had nothing to do with construction.
This month alone, he has already posted or reposted about his Washington vanity projects 30 times. By comparison, he has posted seven times about Iran this month.
Gartner believes Trump has been showing signs of frontotemporal dementia for years and “his dementia is becoming more disorganized and more impulsive.”
“The whole war in Iran was an expression of this confluence between his personality disorder and his cognitive disorder,’ he added.
Gartner acknowledged that he had not diagnosed the president in person, but based on his clinical experience, “it’s clear that this is someone who is in dramatic neurological decline.”
Trump’s father died in 1999 at the age of 93 from pneumonia that was complicated by Alzheimer’s disease. He had also been previously diagnosed with dementia.
However, the president, who turns 80 this Sunday, repeatedly brags about “acing” cognitive tests as a sign of his “extreme intelligence”.
Medical experts, on the other hand, have noted that the test he takes is in fact a screening tool designed to detect signs of dementia and cognitive impairment, not to measure IQ.
