Donald Trump’s boasts about passing cognitive tests suggest he’s being monitored for the progression of dementia, one psychologist says.
Dr. John Gartner told The Daily Beast Podcast that the 79-year-old president’s claim to have “aced” three Montreal Cognitive Assessments could be more than simple routine screenings for the degenerative disease.
“You know, he kind of gave the game away again, as he often does,” Gartner, a former professor at Johns Hopkins, told co-host Joanna Coles about Trump claiming to have passed a test in front of “large numbers of doctors and experts, most of whom I do not know.”
“You could maybe justify giving someone the MoCA once, just on their age, just as part of a physical. If you’re giving it to him three times, that means you’re not assessing dementia. That means you’re monitoring dementia,” Gartner said.
The MoCA is a 30-question assessment given over ten minutes.
“Because if you keep feeling like, no, he’s still got the symptoms, we’ve got to see how bad he’s doing now, we’ve got to check again, see how bad he’s doing now—I think they’re giving him cognitive tests and M.R.I.s every six months to monitor the progress of his dementia, and/or strokes," Gartner added.
Trump had an M.R.I. in October, just six months after his April physical. The White House has said it was a “preventative” look at his heart and abdomen.
In July, Trump was diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, a condition common in older people where the leg veins have trouble pumping blood back to the heart. Trump has often been seen with swollen ankles.
Regarding the president’s cognitive health, his rushed speech this week defending his administration in an elevated voice was indicative of his “hypomania,” Gartner went on to say.
“We have to judge people against their own baseline, and if somebody doubles their rate of speed, that’s a mental status change of some kind,” Gartner said. “I’ve always said that Trump is on the bipolar spectrum. He’s not manic, he’s hypomanic. ‘Hypo’ is Greek for ‘less than,’ so he’s not fully manic.”
“I think the reason that he was speaking so quickly here...was because he’s scared,” Gartner continued, adding that he believed White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles told him he’s “losing the country” on a variety of issues.
“They’ll never admit it, of course, and so this was his attempt to kind of make a comeback, and so the anxiety stimulated his hypomania, which then made him speak at this hypomanic pace that isn’t even typical of him.”
Wiles, in a Vanity Fair interview published this week, described Trump as having an “alcoholic’s personality.” And her boss agreed, telling the New York Post that he does have a “possessive and addictive personality.”
One of thing the president can’t stop doing, it seems, is bragging about cognitive tests. Trump, the oldest person elected president, has been doing it since his first term. In a 2020 interview with Fox News, he claimed that he impressed doctors so much that he earned “extra points” on a 2018 exam, part of which required him to repeat the words “person woman man camera TV” in the correct sequence.
When reached for comment, the White House criticized Gartner and insisted that Trump’s health is “excellent.”
“The Daily Beast is a left-wing mouthpiece that should be deeply embarrassed to publish this garbage and pass off deranged resistance leftists as ‘experts,’” Assistant Press Secretary Liz Huston said in a lengthy statement. “Anyone pathetic enough to defend Biden’s mental state – while being labeled as unethical by their peers – has zero credibility."
”As the President’s physician, Dr. Sean Barbabella, has made clear time and again — and as the American people see with their own eyes every single day — President Trump remains in excellent overall health,“ she continued. ”President Trump’s relentless work ethic, unmatched energy, and historic accessibility stand in sharp contrast to what we saw during the past four years when the failing legacy media intentionally covered up Joe Biden’s serious mental and physical decline from the American people. Pushing these fake and desperate narratives now about President Trump is why Americans’ trust in the media just fell to a new all-time low.”
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