During his July 4th speech, Trump joked about a 107-year-old guest in the crowd. A clinical psychologist watched the clip closely and spotted something in his face.
“How bout that, isn’t that great,” Trump said. “Think of that — 107. That’s up there, but hopefully he’s got 20 good years left.” The joke got its laugh. What happened on Trump’s face immediately afterward is what Dr. John Paul Garrison, a licensed clinical and forensic psychologist who goes by “Dr. G” online, chose to focus on when he broke the clip down on speech-language pathologist Hilary Shae’s channel.
“You see actual sadness on his brow, which you almost never see from President Donald Trump,” Garrison said. “Right now he’s joking about health, but as you’re seeing, there seems to be real sadness in his eyes as he’s talking about that.”
Shae had her own theory for what that expression might mean.
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“A lot of times when the end is near, people do tend to become aware of it and they start talking about things that are death-related, lamenting about the past, wish they did things, and Donald Trump has been doing that for a while,” she said, describing the sadness itself as “very rare, very unique” for someone whose public persona has rarely allowed for it.
The speech gave the pair plenty to work with beyond that single expression.
Garrison pointed to slurred words, unexplained pauses and moments where Trump seemed to prompt himself mid-sentence, including a stretch where “third term” slipped out before he caught himself: “but I won’t do that because I don’t want any controversy.”
His summary of the overall performance didn’t soften much. “What we saw was consistent slurring of his words. He seemed at times to have to prompt himself about what to say. He seemed to be struggling in ways that he did not used to struggle, and it doesn’t just seem like normal age-related changes.”
Shae has been building a similar case for weeks. She previously noted from Trump’s Great American State Fair speech that he “couldn’t say ‘250th anniversary‘” or the word “magnificent,” describing those specific stumbles as “consistent with dysarthria and ataxia or apraxia.”
None of it constitutes an actual diagnosis, and neither Garrison nor Shae has ever examined Trump in a clinical setting.
His physician, Dr. Sean Barbabella, continues to describe him as in “excellent health” following the most recent Walter Reed exam, which included a perfect 30 out of 30 on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a screening Trump has now passed identically at least four separate times since 2018.
Featured image via Political Tribune Gallery
