A medical practitioner has highlighted the rapid rate of President Donald Trump’s apparent cognitive decline.
During a trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this week, Trump, 79, confused Iceland with Greenland multiple times, shared private text messages from world leaders, undertook rambling, epic speeches and went on a manic social media posting spree. On Thursday, Trump displayed the worst bruising on his hand yet.
Dr. Vin Gupta, a medical analyst for NBC News and former Chief Medical Officer at Amazon, reflected on the president’s well-documented family history of age-related dementia, claiming he is seeing a “trend line” and that, “it seems like it’s getting worse.”
The president’s father died in 1999 at age 93 from pneumonia, complicated by Alzheimer’s disease. He had also previously been diagnosed with dementia, and by his late 80s was struggling to recognize his own family members.
While Gupta admitted he has not seen Trump’s medical chart, he has observed him struggling to express his own thoughts or regulate his speech to fit the requirements of his job.
“Word finding difficulties,” Gupta said. “The fact that he has inattention, he loses his train of thought. Everybody is describing these speeches as meandering, covering 30 different topics in the course of, say, 2 minutes.”
Gupta also raised Trump’s memory issues by confusing Greenland with Iceland during an address at the World Economic Forum.
He raised alarm at Trump’s message to Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre to blame the country for not giving him the Nobel Peace Prize.
“The fact that he would even put a letter like that out there in the public domain has caused a lot of alarm,” Gupta said. “Who does that? That is not even behavior for him that we think would meet a standard of decorum or just proper behavior.”
He suggested the letter to Støre deserved a “more thorough public assessment of his neurological fitness” because it “crossed a line of proper adult behavior.”
Gupta also weighed in on theories that Trump is showing signs of early Alzheimer’s disease or frontotemporal dementia, noting that a lot of the president’s behavior is “consistent with those diagnoses.”
“The acting out, behavior changes, lashing out, acting unreasonable,” Gupta said. “One could say this is his core fundamental personality based on what we’ve seen over, frankly, his entire adult life, but it’s getting worse.”
Gupta also called out Trump’s gait and the cautious speed at which he walks down the stairs of Air Force One or even a red carpet.
“He does seem like he’s walking gingerly, [it’s] hard to know what to make of that. But when you couple that with all these other signs of his cognitive performance, it makes one wonder what’s actually happening behind the scenes.”
White House spokesperson Liz Huston told the Daily Beast in a statement, “President Trump is the sharpest, most accessible, and energetic president in modern American history. While deranged and failing Daily Beast journalists and disgraced doctors with Trump Derangement Syndrome push blatant lies — President Trump is dominating on the world stage and brokering historic deals to advance the interests of the American people.”
Gupta mentioned that some of Trump’s extended family, including estranged niece Mary Trump, had also spoken about the symmetry between what his father went through cognitively with the president’s current behavior.
Mary Trump, also a clinical psychologist, spoke to Erin Burnett on CNN’s OutFront on Thursday and said she had also noticed the 79-year-old’s cognitive health “rapidly getting worse” in recent months.
“I think that Donald has had undiagnosed, untreated, psychiatric disorders for many, many years, predating his first administration,” Trump said.
“But given his advancing age, clearly there seem to be some indications that he has some cognitive issues. Hence all of the cognitive tests he‘s taking. And the MRI’s we‘ve heard about, but I have no specific information about.”
She added, “And just his behavior-the way he speaks, his inability to reign himself in, his inability to stay on topic. And often times it seems that he‘s not exactly aware of where he is or the audience he‘s speaking to.”
