There’s a version of this podcast appearance where the whole story is that Trump called JFK the most handsome president in American history while flipping through a children’s book, and honestly, that alone would have carried the news cycle. That did happen. According to one pathologist watching closely, it wasn’t the most interesting part.
The appearance was for Usha Vance’s “Storytime with the Second Lady,” taped in mid-June inside an Oval Office redecorated with a stuffed bald eagle and a Lego globe, and posted online Friday. Trump read from Presidents Play!, a picture book published by the White House Historical Association, using the occasion to rank his predecessors, discuss his own physique and wander well past the source material, which is fairly standard territory for him at this point.
Speech language pathologist Hilary Shae wasn’t paying much attention to the presidential rankings. She had her eyes on something far more subtle, watching closely for the way Trump reached for the book.
Shae slowed the clip down and zeroed in on the moment Trump reached for it from a stack of other books on the table, noting the awkward “external rotation” of his shoulder as he turned to grab it.
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More specifically, she flagged his grip itself, using all four fingers and leaving out his thumb, calling it “actually quite informative from a neurological perspective,” since this sort of behavior in dementia patients signals “a problem with motor planning, hand shaping or sensory motor integration.”
Shae explained that dementia patients can struggle with “pre-shaping,” which she described as the brain’s process of preparing movements before we make them, such as when you reach for something to grab it. These struggles might result in a patient defaulting to the simplest grip possible, she said, which is what Trump appeared to do.
She suggested this was a similar dynamic to what can be seen in some of Trump’s public addresses, in which he struggles with properly pronouncing multi-syllabic words. In these instances, she said, he instead tends to verbalize a “much simpler approximation of those words,” while also leaning on simpler words as much as he can.
Her observations arrive after months of renewed scrutiny over Trump’s public appearances. Questions have already been raised about his gait during the G7 summit, his posture while watching the July 4 fireworks, and the Walter Reed medical report the White House continues to describe as proof that he remains in excellent health.
None of that changed Shae’s conclusion.
“Donald Trump is showing significant observable signs and symptoms of dementia, and he’s got to go,” she said.
Featured image via Political Tribune Gallery
