While Donald Trump has always been known for his unhinged social media meltdowns, onlookers have noticed that, in recent weeks, both the frequency and the erraticness of the former president’s late-night posts, in particular, have greatly increased.
Now, Harry Segal, a clinical psychologist and senior lecturer in the Psychology Department at Cornell University, has spoken out to sound the alarm, publicly theorizing that this uptick in Trump’s middle-of-the-night tantrums is consistent with “sundowning,” a phenomenon heavily connected to individuals with dementia.
Mayo Clinic defines “sundowning” as “a state of confusion that occurs in the late afternoon and lasts into the night.”
Segal sat down with progressive talk radio host David Packman and first explained that he was not looking at either President Joe Biden or former President Donald Trump from a political vantage point, only from a strictly psychological one, before outlining what he has noticed in his professional capacity through gait, speech patterns, and other noticeable possible symptoms.
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Packman pointed to Trump’s apparent increase in confusion lately, such as when he confused Joe Biden with Barack Obama and Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi. While Segal took note of those incidents, the psychology expert says his deepest concern lies with the fact that Trump appears to be “having more and more difficulties at night.”
“The other thing is that because it’s intermittent, it’s not difficult to see two or three minutes of him speaking what seems to be normally,” Segal explained. “And I do think he does speak normally in the sense of not calling people’s concern, like mixing up Nancy Pelosi with Nikki Haley.”
He went on to explain that he has observed that the “complexity of his language has changed” overall since Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign.
“So, when he is speaking what appears to be coherently, it’s almost like he’s gumming together phrases that he repeats over and over again,” Segal said of Trump’s public speeches, pointing to an Ohio rally in March where Trump appeared to completely lose his train of though mid-sentence.
“Now he’s always had a tendency to do this, but if you go back, as I have, to looking at interviews in 2016, he was clearly more crisp. He was more complex than he is now,” he explains.
Segal says he finds “the decline in the complexity of language” and “intermittent slippage” most concerning, as they tend to get worse with time. He warned that this means in a year or so, Donald Trump could be serving as the United States president while actively in the midst of very severe dementia symptoms.
He goes on to note that while Trump’s refusal to debate his opponents could be chalked up to a purely political move, there is a very good chance that the decision was born of a desire to simply not draw any extra attention to his worsening symptoms — especially since debates tend to take place in the late evening when sundowning symptoms are at their worst.
“I think we can surmise that he was afraid of debating,” Segal said. “Are you kidding me? Two hours on stage in the evening with someone like Chris Christie coming after him?”
The psychology expert went on to warn that, with the presidential election quite literally right around the corner, it is more important now than ever to pay very close attention to the way a candidate behaves.
He notes that the upcoming Republican convention speech will take place at night and will serve as a true test for Donald Trump that Americans need to pay attention to.
“I don’t know how he’s going to get out of debating Biden, but he’s going to try, is my guess,” Segal theorized. “So will we see the increase in these problems?”
Watch the interview here:
Featured image via Political Tribune Gallery
