For months, the conversation about Donald Trump’s mental fitness lived mostly on the margins – whispered in op-eds, dismissed by the White House, and treated as politically inconvenient by nearly everyone else. That conversation has moved.
Dr. John Gartner, a former Johns Hopkins University professor and founder of the Duty to Warn coalition, went on The Daily Beast Podcast this week and spoke with strong conviction. “Anybody who has eyes, ears, and a brain… and hasn’t drunk the Kool-Aid or been bitten by a MAGA zombie, can see for themselves that this person is transparently mentally ill and cognitively deteriorating,” Gartner told host Hugh Dougherty.
He was not speaking alone.
On April 30, a group of 36 physicians – neurologists, forensic psychiatrists, geriatricians and other clinicians filed a formal statement into the Congressional Record calling for Trump’s immediate removal from office, describing what they called a “rapidly worsening, reality-untethered, increasingly dangerous decline.” The statement was entered into the Senate record by Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Jack Reed of Rhode Island. Among their main concerns were worsening cognition, grandiose delusions, and severely impaired judgment.
Gartner has been tracking the pattern for years. In April, he told the same podcast that Trump has been “showing signs of frontotemporal dementia since 2019.” What has shifted, he argued this week, is not the diagnosis but the pace. The evidence is now accumulating faster than it can be managed.
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The late-night posting has drawn particular attention. “First of all, he’s up at all hours of the night, all night… posting all of these lies and crazy stuff,” Gartner said. “The pace of it – that someone would be up all night tweeting – in and of itself is a clinical indicator of some kind of either mania or sundowning, and I think in his case it’s actually a combination of both.”
Among the behaviors flagged in the formal physician letter was Trump posting 150 social media messages in a single night, alongside imagery of himself dressed as the Pope.
That papal imagery was not lost on Gartner. He described it as part of a pattern of grooming, the president conditioning the public to accept things that would otherwise register as alarming. “Let me tell you something about Donald Trump. He never, ever jokes. Can you remember a single funny joke he’s ever told? Because I can’t. And he doesn’t bluff, either. He just – what he does is he grooms us. He grooms us to prepare for things that otherwise would be unthinkable.”
Featured image via YouTube screengrab
