Trump's mental deterioration

Survivors spoke at Congressional hearing Feb. 3
Screen shot from MS NOW @msnownews

President Trump is in sad shape. He is self-destructing. 

Meanwhile, he causes the deaths of more people every day--in Minneapolis, in Venezuela and the Caribbean, in South Sudan and in every nation that used to be served by USAID. We can't forget the 1.20 million deaths from his ignoring the Covid epidemic until it was too late.

In early December, as the season of Advent began, I resolved to stop posting on social media about anything he said or did. I planned to take a Christmas break and then not soil 2026 by commenting on him. I would just watch him dissolve.

But then he sent ICE and National Guard troops into Minneapolis. His untrained, eager-to-shoot recruitees shot and killed Renee Good and then Alex Pretti after causing several deaths in the Los Angeles area a few months earlier. We have to act. Thank you to those who have already spoken out or demonstrated in the streets.

We need Congress to impeach and oust him. Or maybe his Cabinet and vice president will declare him unfit to serve, as outlined in the 25th Amendment. Congress would then confirm the need to remove him from office. 

Trump's crude post linking President and Michelle Obama to primate animals is enough evidence for either impeaching or using the 25th. 

But Republicans have a slim majority in both the House and Senate, and too many them are still afraid to stand up to this man. 

One thing we can do right now is speak the truth about Trump's mental health problems as diagnosed by Dr. John Gartner in a podcast called The Daily Beast on September 19, 2025. Other psychologists have made similar diagnoses based on his gait and speaking problems.

Donald Trump's psychiatric disorders:

1) malignant narcissism - "the most severe personality disorder a person can have." This term was invented by Erich Fromm.

2) psychopathy (a type of antisocial personality), not currently in the DSM),

3) paranoia, 

4) sadism

5) And now in addition: frontal temporal lobe disorder

The signs of this last disorder are:

• his impulsivity (erratic, arbitrary decision making, disinhibition)
• his language including difficulty completing a sentence or a thought. Often he can't pronounce a common word (phonemic paraphasia) or shows just plain vocabulary loss.
• his tangential thinking and speaking
• his wandering in a Japan trip in the week of Oct. 27-31.

Dr. John Gartner's conclusion: "Trump will not make it to the end of his term compos mentis". Compos mentis means with a mind that is competent to think clearly.

If that is the case, what is our duty?

1. To pass this information along to others in whatever way we can--by speaking, using social media, or going out in the streets.
2. To contact our congress members and senators asking them to remove this incompetent man from office--especially if we have Republican representatives.
   
3. To refuse to succumb to despair.
4. To avoid "obeying in advance" -- Lesson #1 in Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.

The man's days are numbered. 

When he's gone, we can then start the task of rebuilding the nation, the CDC, the Department of Defense and other departments. We can begin rebulding our national reputation. We can restore the information about slavery in our national parks.... The list is long.

Resources:

Times Radio podcast about Oct. 30 2025, owned by Times UK (Murdoch) with Dr. John Gartner, guest speaker on various podcasts:

The Bill Press Pod, Sept. 9, 2025

The Daily Beast podcast, October 2025.

Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century