The Accelerating Madness of the Republican Nominee

 

Of all the egregious failures our mainstream media has subjected us to in recent months, perhaps none was more egregious than its refusal to distinguish which candidate was cognitively impaired, and which one wasn’t.

In the press, Joe Biden’s age issues were permanently on the front burner, while Donald Trump’s were, as usual, barely mentioned. Once again, the media gave Trump a pass, despite unmistakable signs that he was teetering on the brink of dementia, and may have already fallen in.

The public evidence of this has been massive, and there were plenty of people outside the mainstream media who were screaming about it, even as early as two years ago. But, as this did not comport with the both-sides narrative, the story was always that Biden was senile, while Trump was just your typical presidential candidate, felony convictions notwithstanding.

In the psychology community, it’s considered a big ethical no-no to diagnose public figures from afar, no matter how impaired they may appear. This I can understand, up to a point.

That point is surely reached when the public figure in question controls, let’s say, the nuclear codes.

Now, I don’t mean to question the ethical standards that a professional community imposes on itself. Nor do I regard amateur shrinkery as an exact science.

But this is an emergency, and the reticence of that community needs to be tempered with a sense of imminent peril. Those codes must be kept out of Trump’s hands, no matter what.

Because Trump is, quite plainly, bonkers. Full disclosure, this is not a clinical diagnosis. ‘Bonkers’ is a word that lives comfortably in the rich vocabulary of madness, from the clinical to the slangy. When speaking of Trump, is ‘bonkers’ any less valid than ‘narcissistic’ or ‘sociopathic’? We don’t need a psychotherapist to tell us what we can see with our own eyes.

Not that there aren’t, indeed, a number of mental health professionals sounding the alarm. Possibly the most vocal is Dr. John Gartner, who has been watching Trump for years. Fully aware of the ethical dilemma, he has sought validation in numbers, consulting with dozens of his peers:

I asked several highly specialized experts about Trump's use of language, and they told me that what Trump is doing in total, but especially the phonemic paraphasias, were almost certain evidence of brain damage…Trump is evidencing formal thought disorder, where his basic ability to use language is breaking down.

We know that the press coverage of Trump’s rallies has been dishonestly edited down to the least objectionable soundbites, but from Gartner’s perspective, a lot more has been removed:

[The media] are consistently not showing the parts of Trump’s speeches and interviews where his eyes go blank, his jaw goes slack, he looks confused, and slurs words, uses non-words, can't finish a sentence, rambles, perseverates, confabulates and babbles incoherently.

As with all things Trump, there’s danger in revealing the truth. In canvassing his fellow psychologists, Gartner encountered a different sort of reticence, unrelated to their ethical strictures. While many were happy to share their observations with him, they were not willing to attach their names:

Each of these experts convinced me they weren’t being paranoid when they believed there was a good chance they would lose their jobs if they went on the record, not to mention other forms of retaliation, especially for those who live in red states.

This is not unique to the psychology field. If Trump were to win the election, no science — or scientist — would be safe from political and religious interference.

Meanwhile, Trump’s on-camera appearances have grown increasingly weird, a strange mashup of nonsensical ramblings, bizarre fantasies of sharks and batteries, and a firehose of lies that are over-the-top even for him. It’s getting hard even for Republicans to ignore this.

But unlike the great megalomaniacs of the past, Trump has lived his life in front of cameras, which, it turns out, have yielded an enormous amount of data about both the content and style of his speaking. This data can be measured against that of other public figures.

James Pennebaker, a social psychologist at the University of Texas, has done just that. He reviewed transcripts of Trump’s interviews, from between 2015 and 2024, and what he found was startling, if not exactly surprising.

Over that time, there was, in Trump’s speech:

“…a major rise in ‘all-or-nothing’ thinking which is signified by the use of words such as ‘completely,’ ‘never’ and ‘always’.”

Let me add to that list: “most ever,” “worst in our history,” “total disaster” — I’m sure we all have our favorites. This zero-sum, “all-or-nothing” thinking is, yes, well connected to dementia. But that’s not even the real eye-opener:

Pennebaker noted that a linguistic metric of analytic thinking reveals that Trump’s levels of complexity are remarkably low – most presidential candidates range between 60 and 70 in the metric, while Trump ranges from 10 to 24, something Pennebaker called “staggering.” “He does not think in a complex way at all.”

It’s hard to know if this lack of complexity is a symptom of cognitive decline, or if Trump is just truly stupid and always has been. Ultimately the answer doesn’t matter, because either way, it’s hugely alarming in its own right.

I am not the first to note that Trump’s mental decline might just be the untold story of this century. The prospect of a “mad king,” enabled by a Project 2025, capable of doing unlimited damage to the country and, indeed, the planet, would seem worth discussing in the media.

Likewise, the prospect of “regents” manipulating that mad king for their own corrupt purposes — the likes of Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, Stephen Miller, and their cronies — running the country in Trump’s name.

Since the media seems content to leave this story untold, it’s up to others to tell it. It’s good to see the psychology community telling their side of it.