Whether it's demented or not, we're all now at the mercy of Trump's big brain, by Hal M. Brown.

 

How the holy Hell does Hezbo-f*cken-llah being involved in Jan. 6th pop into Trump's brain when he's downplaying what happened on Jan. 6th? 

Here's is the excerpt about this from HuffPost:

Trump took questions from reporters near the end of the roughly hour-long remarks, during which he pledged to make “major pardons” for people convicted of participating in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

Asked if he intends to pardon anyone convicted of violent offenses for their actions that day, Trump dodged — instead appearing to blame both the FBI and Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militant group in Lebanon, for the violence.

“We have to find out about Hezbollah, we have to find out about who, exactly, was in that whole thing,” Trump said. “Because people that did some bad things were not prosecuted.”

Hezbollah? Really? These guys?

Trump likes to brag about how intelligent he is. He characterizes this by saying he has a very, very big brain. Consider this from a science website:

Trump's "Very, Very Large Brain" Comment Underscores Myth About Intelligence

Intelligence has a lot more to do with what's inside your brain than its size.

BY SARAH SLOAT

SEP. 27, 2018

Excerpt:

President Donald Trump has repeatedly dedicated moments of his presidency to informing the public about his intelligence. A few weeks before he took office, Trump announced he didn’t need daily intelligence briefings because “I’m, like, a smart person.” In January, he reminded everyone on Twitter that his “two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart.” Now, he’s telling reporters about his “very, very large brain.” But contrary to longstanding claims, a bigger brain doesn’t mean a smarter man.

Speaking at a press conference in New York on Wednesday, Trump referenced an interview that Michael Pillsbury, the Hudson Institutes director for Chinese strategy, gave to Fox News last month. Pillsbury said that China respects Trump because he is “so smart.”

“If you look at Mr. Pillsburgy, the leading authority on China, he was on a good show — I won’t mention the name of the show — recently,” Trump said. “And he was saying that China has total respect for Donald Trump and for Donald Trump’s very, very large brain.”

The article explains that the size of a brain has nothing to do with intelligence: "Assuming that absolute brain size is decisive for intelligence, then whales or elephants should be more intelligent than humans, and horses more intelligent than chimpanzees, which definitely is not the case.” 

Perhaps Trump really believes his brain is literally larger than 99.9% of the world's population and that this means his IQ ranks in the upper 1/10 of one percent. Of course this would put him off the top of the IQ test scales at the Einstein level.  

If brain size determined intelligence, Trump would be less intelligent than he was as a young man because brains shrink as people age:

"Your cerebral cortex, the wrinkled outer layer of the brain, gets thinner as you age. It's especially noticeable in the frontal lobe, which processes memory, emotions, impulse control, problem-solving, social interaction, and motor function. Thinning can also be noticeable in parts of the temporal lobe, which is located behind the ears and helps people understand words, speak, read, write, and connect words with their meanings." WebMD

The brain shrinking, or atrophy, that is inevitable when one ages does not affect intelligence. What does happen with some people when they age is that they develop one or another form of dementia. 

Human brains weigh between 2.8 to 3.1 pounds. Brain size can vary slightly among different populations and individuals. Gender also plays a role in brain size variations. On average, male brains are about 10% larger than female brains. However, this difference disappears when accounting for body size, and importantly, there’s no evidence that this size difference translates to any cognitive advantages. (Reference: Human Brain Size: Exploring Dimensions, Comparisons, and Evolutionary Significance)

There's no way of knowing if Trump has dementia at this point. There's no actual diagnostic test for it like an MRI which can find a brain tumor that is affecting behavior. A dementia diagnosis can only be made with a full neurological assessment. Whether you're an expert or a lay person you can only reach a conclusion based on your observations of Trump's behavior.

Without this we are left with looking at Trump's behavior to try to discern whether these recent examples of his throwing out abberant ideas are a manifestion of brain disease or of Trump's psychological condition. It may very well be the latter. Trump may be feeling that, since he has won the election, he can totally let loose and express any thought no matter how weird or unrealistic that pops into his mind. 

A personal note: When group of residents in the senior community where I live started an improv group, I didn't even consider joining even though I thought it would be fun. I think I have a modicum of talent for this. I knew I couldn't do improv without being able to go blue and unleash my inner Lenny Bruce.

Where did Hezbollah come from when he was trying to gaslight about Jan. 6th? You can say it doesn't matter. Maybe it doesn't. It could be that he'd been seeing stories about it on the news or reading about it since. It has been in the news:

We are still left with not knowing what is really going on in Trump's big brain. It could be that he's showing more signs of dementia. It could be that we're seeing the true Trump unleashed in all his unhinged glory.

If this is dementia one thing is certain: it will get worse. If this occurs there will be a point where it will be impossible to hide given Trump's lust to be in the limelight and his being a motor mouth. He won't have the advantage of being given questions in advance like he was 30 minutes before his Fox News Iowa Town Hall (see article). Besides, even being given a heads up about questions wouldn't make a difference since the results of an election won't be in the balance. He won't feel he has to come across as presidential.

There is no way anyone with severe dementia can present as cognitively unimpaired. If this happens we have the 25th Amendment scenario. I have no doubt that once it is obvious to the public, Vance would lose his loyalty to Trump in a New York minute.

 

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Am I the only anti-Trump shrink who thinks Trump may not have dementia? By Hal M. Brown, MSW

Many mental health professionals are absolutely, positively convinced Trump has dementia. I seem like a lone voice among them saying we need more evidence. 

Most mental health professionals who are saying this are not neurologists, let alone neurologists who specialize in dementia. 

I am not an expert, but because I live in a continuing care retirement community I have seen a lot of people with dementia in all stages. 

In my training there was no mention of considering dementia in making a differential diagnosis. In my 40 years of practice I never treated anyone with dementia. I did, however, have three clients who I thought had temporal lobe epilepsy which I knew about having read the book "Seized" by Eve LaPlante. I referred them to a behavioral neurologist who did sleep deprived EEGs with them and it turned out two of the three did have this disorder. When I began practice nobody was conversant about another brain disorder, the autism spectrum. My point is that mental health professionals must be aware that there are sometimes physiological and neurological explanations for behavior. This certainly applies to trying to discern explanations for what seems to be aberrant behavior in Trump. The unanswered question is whether is this behavior psychological, physiological, or a combinaiton of the two.

I have seen the  photos and illustrations of Trump's leaning forward posture countless times as if this was absolute proof of dementia. Lots of people his age stand that way at times. 

His word salad could be an indication of mania, not dementia, or it could be, as he claims, a kind of improv which he calls the weave. 

Many mental health professionals are digging in on the Trump dementia position. I think this is, in a way, wishful thinking couched in science.

We, meaning shrinks, have all the evidence we need to say Trump is a malignant narcissist, but then perhaps desperate to find more to justify saying Trump is unfit, they added dementia to bolster the argument that he was dangerous. I think mental health professionals need to be more self-critical and open minded in our judgments and not succumb to confirmation bias. It is easy to cherry pick from all the evidence when there's so much Trump, Trump, Trump just about every hour of the day.

Is anybody keeping track of every bit of Trump's behavior to find indications that he doesn't have dementia?

We have ample examples of Trump going on for one or two hours without exhibiting any unambiguous signs of dementia. Much of his extemporaneous sidetracking can just as easily be considered a manifestation of his malignant narcissism as of dementia.

There's currently a Change.org petition online  "Our Diagnostic Impression of Trump is Probable Dementia: For Licensed Professionals Only."

The petition begins:

We, the undersigned licensed medical and mental health professionals (INCLUDE YOUR ADVANCED DEGREE IN YOUR LAST NAME WITH NO PUNCTUATION) concur: From our years of training and experience, we are convinced that, while a definitive diagnosis would require further testing, Donald Trump is showing unmistakable signs strongly suggesting dementia, based on his public behavior and informant reports that show progressive deterioration in memory, thinking, ability to use language, behavior, and both gross and fine motor skills. 

I highlighted the part that jumps out at me. First, the "years of training and experience" should apply to those who were in fields like neurology, particularly behavioral neurology, and neurosciense. It is true that a definitive diagnosis would require testing, however the use of the word "unmistakable" along with "strongly suggesting" shows a bias. Leave that word out and I can accept this sentence.

The petition then goes on to list diagnostic indices in these categories:

1) Decline from baseline

2) Memory:

3) Language

4) Motor:

5) Behavior: 

The list reads like someone went over a text on dementia and then found things in Trump's behavior and managed to make a case that he had this disorder. It wasn't that long ago that splotches seen on Trump's hands during the E. Jean Carroll led to rampant speculation that he had syphillis. Even before that the syphillis theory was in the news and no social media. This was from 2017: Trump’s ‘Unhinged’ Behavior Could Be Due To ‘Untreated Syphilis,’ Expert Claims. 

There is a reasonably good case to be made that Trump might be suffering from some stage of dementia. However, reasonably good isn't good enough as far as I am concerned.

I think the list lacks the scientific rigor necessary to reach a foregone conclusion. This being said, I agree with the conclusion whether or not he has dementia:

This represents a unique danger because of Trump's pre-existing Malignant Narcissistic Personality Disorder. As he continues to deteriorate he will become even more erratic, impulsive, paranoid, and aggressive than he already is. A demented malignant narcissist as president of the United States would have unimaginably catastrophic consequences.

Not only is Trump unfit, but he cognitively incapable of carrying out the duties of president. Under normal circumstances, relatives of such a patient would be seeking consultation with experts, and considering long term care, as he continues to deteriorate.

We feel an ethical obligation to warn the public, and urge the media to cover this national emergency.

The media must report objectively on anything that suggests Trump may have a cognitive impairment and bring in true experts from the appropriate fields. We can't allow another Goldwater Rule fiasco to occur. When there were obvious examples of his being  a malignant narcissist and mental health professionals spoke up about this  they were debunked by many and accused of breaking some sacrosanct professional rule. 

Anti-Trumpers who make the news warning about the dangers of Trump wielding the power of the presidency have been accused of having a psychiatric disorder the name of which has been used to discredit them. You know what it is: Trump derangement syndrome. We must not feed into this narrative.

When mental health professionals go public about the possiblity that Trump has dementia they must do this by emphasizing that this is a possiblity not a certainty. They must write or speak with gravitas and always allow for the chance that they are wrong. 

Time will be the ultimate decider regarding this since dementia always gets worse. There may come a time during his presidency that his symptoms are so obvious you don't need to be an expert in dementia to reach this conclusion.

This is when the 25th Amendment becomes a real possibility. Then we will be dealing with J.D. Vance. Nobody has suggested he has dementia.

More of my thoughts on this subject:

 If Trump has dementia it might be a kind doctors have never seen. Call it weaveheimers. If not, the weave may be as brilliant as he says it is.

This was in Salon (I'm the clinical social worker in the title): Clinical social worker: "With the Trump Bible, one must consider dementia"

I also wrote I’m not the only mental health professional who says that Trump needs a rigorous neuropsychiatric evaluation to rule out a cognitive illness.

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If Trump has dementia it can only be hidden for so long. This is may be the biggest "if" hanging over him. by Hal M. Brown, MSW

 

Trump's post on Truth Social (shown above, click to enlarge) was the subject of an article in RawStory.

One of the commenters to the article "'What is going on here???' Trump melts down over Harris endorsements weeks after election" questioned in one way or another whether Trump had dementia." wrote "Does anyone in America believe that we should have a government led by a man who is constantly described as having a meltdown" and another, Fred Berfel (who makes many good comments which you can read here), posted this Simpsons video saying Trump reminded him of Grampa Simpson. 

In the video Grampa Simpson is compos mentis. He is, in fact, deliberately using something like what Trump calls the weave.

I commented: 

Does anyone in America believe that we should have a government led by a man who is constantly described as having a meltdown

Many of the commenters to this article also raised the question of Trump's mental deterioration. Click images below to enlarge them.

Trump asks "what is going on here?" in his Truth Social post. Indeed, this is the question America should be asking. The man won the election. You'd think this post (and others) were sour grapes coming from the loser of an election. If he wasn't about to be president and wasn't surrounded by sycophants, someone who cared about him would be saying "give it up, man."

Right now we simply do not know with absolute certainty that Trump has early dementia. You can use Google and search "Trump dementia" (click) and find numerous articles wiht speculation about this.  You will find many articles by experts and others who think he does. (Clicking below will enlarge Google search image.)

Dementia always gets worse. The course of the downslide varies but it always gets worse. If Trump has it there will be a point where even the most agressive effort to hide this from the public will fail. The cliche about having to take grandpa's drivers license away because of his dementia won't apply to Trump. I wouldn't want to be standing between Trump and someone who tried to take away his ability to post on Truth Social, let alone their trying to keep him from making public appearances whenever it suits him.

It would be easier for his apologists to dismiss what he posts in Truth Social than what he says extemporaneously in public. If he goes off onto tangents like Grampa Simpson in the video saying this was a brilliant example of the weave would eventually be seen as the gaslighting it was.

Watch the video. Grampa explains that this way of talking was a deliberate trick. Note that Grampa began a fairly logical story but ends up talking about having an onion under his belt (below) and who's image was on a nickel and the toast he was making and JD Rockefeller.

There are lots of "ifs" being pondered about what Trump will do to democracy. I do not to minimize them. Our fate as a nation depends on the answers, but in many ways the biggest "if" may be whether he has early dementia and what will happen if it gets so serious it is impossible to deny.

Then the next matter open to speculation is what would happen if a year or two into Trump's term as a lame duck president J.D. Vance became president. Currently Trump can make decisions without having to worry about being elected again. We can only hope that his malignant narcissism doesn't drive him to exact revenge aganst his enemies and rule like a ruthless dictator, but that his psychopatholgy will abate as it sinks in to him that he's actually president. It would save the country considerable suffering if he just settled back and enjoyed the trappings of power. This depends on how much of a sadist he is and whether he enjoys watching enemies suffer more than having world leaders and CEOs bow down to him. 

Vance has to pay attention to the base more than Trump does. I rather doubt he will accept the team Trump put together for top positions. He will be looking for people loyal to him. He won't have to please Trump. He will want to please the voters. The country will discover what he really stands for.

There are two routes aside from Trump being impeached to Vance becoming president in the next four years. One in that Trump dies. The other is through the 25th Amendment. This has to be initiated by the vice president and approved by the majority of the Cabinet. If Trump succumbed to severe dementia unless he resigned he would have to be removed though the 25th Amendment.

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I post my blogs on Stressline.org where you can subscribe (for free everywhere) and on Substack where, if you want to submit your email, you can be notified of all new blog posts. I also post them on Medium because this enables them to be easily found on internet searches.

The halbrown.org platform includes a Disquis comment section. To use it you have to register on Disquis. 

Drill, baby, drill: Three words that may show Trump isn't mentally all there. By Hal M. Brown, MSW

In Trump ‘s “Meet the Press” interview with Kristen Welker, not only did Trump demontrate a callous disregard for the feelings of those he promised to deport (see my blog about toxic masculinty from yesterday) he uttered three words that were so unrelated to what he was talking about that at the least I would describe them as a mental glitch. This is the sort of odd juxapostion of unrelated thoughts he has called “the weave” which he brags that linguists said it was brilliant. It is has also been suggested this is an indication of his having early dementia. 

This is the exchange:

KRISTEN WELKER:

So you think Liz Cheney should go to jail?

PRESIDENT-ELECT DONALD TRUMP:

For what they did — 

KRISTEN WELKER:

Everyone on the committee you think — 

PRESIDENT-ELECT DONALD TRUMP:

I think everybody — 

KRISTEN WELKER:

– should go to jail?

PRESIDENT-ELECT DONALD TRUMP:

– on the — anybody that voted in favor — 

KRISTEN WELKER:

Are you going to direct your FBI director — 

PRESIDENT-ELECT DONALD TRUMP:

No.

KRISTEN WELKER:

– and your attorney general to send them to jail?

PRESIDENT-ELECT DONALD TRUMP:

No, not at all. I think that they’ll have to look at that, but I’m not going to — I’m going to focus on drill, baby, drill.

KRISTEN WELKER:

When you say that, it carries weight though. You know, you’ve tapped these people to lead the Justice Department and FBI — 

As you see above Welker ignores this and brings him back to the subject. You can read this in the entire transcript here.

While it is true that “drill, baby, drill” has been a line he has used in his rallies it makes no sense for him to say that this will be the focus of the first day he’s in office. At the least, this is an unserious response when a thoughtful person would have said that he’d have other far more important things to deal with that whether certain people should be going to jail. If he wanted to keep the topic on the matter of jail, he could have said it was far more important to free the people he calls patriots who are incarcerted.

At the worst this may be an indication of early dementia. I can’t imagine that as Trump thinks ahead to what he will do 

The point is that “drill, baby, drill” not only doen’t have anything to do with the issue being discussed, high gas prices aren’t even currently in the news. It wasn’t a major issue in the final months of the campaign. In fact gas prices are down on average for the US as a whole, with the price of gas falling in 38 out of the 51 states over the last week.

Trump clearly want to change the subject. I think this is because he knew he was lying through his teeth and had every intention of making sure he wreaked vengeance on as many of his enemies as possible. He wants to make them suffer the indignity he suffered having to sit through the E. Jean Carroll trial and much worse. That trial was a nothing burger to him because even though the basic charge was sexual assault it was a civil trial. 

It isn’t only his saying “drill, baby, drill” that lead me to question Trump’s mental condition. Consider these two rambling responses to Welker:

KRISTEN WELKER:

Let me ask you about something you’ve referenced a couple of times in this interview. I asked you last time we sat down for an interview if you were going to pardon yourself. You said no. But now that President Biden has pardoned his son Hunter, are you reconsidering? Might you pardon yourself?

PRESIDENT-ELECT DONALD TRUMP:

I didn’t do anything wrong. I — I was given the option, and the lawyers told me — a very specific lawyer. I don’t have to go into who, but very high up in the — in the administration, said, “Sir, if you pardon yourself, you’re going to look guilty, and you did nothing wrong.” Oh, I had that option. I could’ve saved myself a lot of legal fees. But it turned out that I was right. Look at what’s gone on. Everything’s being dropped. I still have a — Fani Willis, Fani, a total hoax. That’s a total hoax. Every — it’s all being dropped. It’s all been discredited. It’s been dropped. There are those people that say, and this would be the first time in history, that all of those fake indictments, they were — they were going after a political opponent. There are those that say that I actually did better in the election because of it. Now, that would be a first. I think you would agree because normally, that’s like, you go back to the microphones, you say, “I’m leaving right now. I will leave office. I’m going back to my family and I will fight for my name.” Well, I had to fight for my name in public because I didn’t leave office. But no, I didn’t want a pardon. And I didn’t want to pardon myself. I had the option to pardon myself.

Here’s another one:

KRISTEN WELKER:

Let me ask you about some of this new reporting. NBC News is reporting that President Biden is considering giving preemptive pardons to the likes of Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff, and Anthony Fauci. If President Biden doesn’t issue those pardons, do you think they are going to wish that he had? Are they going to be — 

PRESIDENT-ELECT DONALD TRUMP:

I don’t know.

KRISTEN WELKER:

– pursued?

PRESIDENT-ELECT DONALD TRUMP:

I can tell you this about Cheney. And she’s a so-called Republican. I think she hurt the Democrats terribly. When I saw that Kamala put Cheney out on the campaign trail, I said, “That’s the end of Kamala.” I really did. I thought it was a terrible move, especially if you’re a Democrat. But Cheney did something that’s inexcusable, along with Thompson and the people on the un-select committee of political thugs and, you know, creeps. So the unselect committee went through a year and a half of testimony. Wait. They deleted and destroyed all evidence of — that they found. You know why? Because Nancy Pelosi was guilty. Nancy Pelosi turned down 10,000 troops. You wouldn’t have had a J6 because other people were guilty. The people that said that I attacked two Secret Service agents in a car, I grabbed one around the neck. I was then rebuffed and I grabbed the other one. These are two of the toughest men anywhere on the planet. And they happen to slightly younger than me. You know, just a little bit. Let me just tell you. They testified. They said it was total bullshit. And all of this stuff came out. People lied so badly. Now, listen, this was a committee, a big deal. They lied. And what did they do? They deleted and destroyed a whole year and a half worth of testimony. Do you know that I can’t get — I think those people committed a major crime.

For a period of time I was one of many mental health professionals who went public saying that there was good evidence Trump had early dementia. My colleague in the Duty to Warn movement, it's founder Dr. John D. Gartner was interviewed by Chauncey DeVega in Salon in March noting the signs of "accelerating dementia."

I was the clincial social worker referred to and quoted in this Chauncey DeVega column in Salon:

I also wrote: I’m not the only mental health professional who says that Trump needs a rigorous neuropsychiatric evaluation to rule out a cognitive illness and The debate may help determine if Trump has dementia and it may also demonstrate whether or not he has mania.

Here's a Google search with links to many more articles about this.

Then I began to think that maybe, as those who defended him said, what I saw as symptoms were just Trump being Trump. I was trying not to allow my opinion of Trump as a dangerous demagogue to influence my clinical assessment. As a psychotherapist I am qualified to opine on psychopathology, but I am not a neurologist with expertise in teasing out signs of early dementia from other behaviors.

Now I am not so sure. Maybe speaking in “the weave” isn’t as brilliant as Trump says it is. It could be a sign of dementia after all.

Previous list of blogs here.

Primary Hal Brown's Blog website is halbrown.org (if you are reading this anywhere else any additions or corrections will be at this address)

If Trump has dementia it might be a kind doctors have never seen. Call it weaveheimers. If not, the weave may be as brilliant as he says it is. By Hal M. Brown, MSW

I was among numerous mental health experts who thought there was evidence that Trump was in the early stages of dementia. Most of what we pointed to as symptomatic was his fragmented speaking style where he jumped from disconnected topic to disconnected topic. We often called it word salad. He never denied he did this but he described it in a positive way. This is from The New York Times on Sept. 1. 2024:

Meandering? Off-Script? Trump Insists His ‘Weave’ Is Oratorical Genius.

Former President Donald J. Trump’s speeches often wander from topic to topic. He insists there is an art to stitching them all together.

But on Friday, while speaking at a rally in Johnstown, Pa., Mr. Trump insisted that his oratory is not a campaign distraction but rather a rhetorical triumph.

“You know, I do the weave,” he said. “You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about like nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together, and it’s like, friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.’”

Asked for examples of the technique, the Trump campaign provided what it called a “masterclass weave” — a four-minute, 20-second video of the candidate speaking at a rally in Asheville, N.C., in August in which he bounces from energy bills to Hunter Biden’s laptop to Venezuelan tar to mental institutions in Caracas to migrant crime to “the green new scam” to Vice President Kamala Harris. 

 

Trump has said his speaking style, his weave, is genius. What if it is? Here's more from The NY Times:

Certainly, in the history of narrative, there have been writers celebrated for their ability to be discursive only to cleverly tie together all their themes with a neat bow at the end — William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and Larry David come to mind. But in the case of Mr. Trump, it is difficult to find the hermeneutic methods with which to parse the linguistic flights that take him from electrocuted sharks to Hannibal Lecter’s cannibalism, windmills and Rosie O’Donnell.

James Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia University and a renowned Shakespeare scholar, ruminated about Mr. Trump’s use of the word: “I read Trump’s comment bragging that ‘I do the weave.’ I take him at his word, as one of the Oxford English Dictionary definitions of ‘weave’ is ‘to pursue a devious course.’”

James Joyce was celebrated for his stream of consciousness that, over the course of hundreds of pages, revealed a person’s temperament. William Faulkner was an early adopter of the weave, engaging in a kind of circular storytelling, as seen in “Absalom, Absalom!” These weavers were trying to capture on the page the inconstant nature of a shifting mind.

If it is not an indication of dementia or psychosis, as a Freudian I see his speaking style as free association. Instead of putting a filter between his unconscious and what comes out of his mouth he does what a patient on an analyst's couch does. He says whatever comes into his mind without censoring it or trying to make it sound rational. If he was in psychoanalysis with his analysts help he would try to understand the messages his unconscious was sending him.

Because he often did this so-called weave during rallies he had the audience reaction to decide which lines were effective. If the crowd cheered or laughed he incorporated the better lines into subsequent rally speeches and interviews. If an audience didn't repsond the first time he'd know not to use the lines again. The effective lines became part of his shtick.

If Trump has dementia we are likely to see it worsen over the next few years. If he doesn't I will be able to say that I was wrong.

It will be a major mea culpa. After all I'm the clinical social worker in the title of this Salon Chauncey DeVega column:

Clinical social worker: "With the Trump Bible, one must consider dementia"

Here's more of what I wrote at other times:

It wasn't just myself and a handful of clinicians seeing signs of dementia with Trump. Here's a general Google search of "Trump dementia" and here's a Google News search of the same terms. 

There are two things we will discover about Trump in the coming months and years. One is whether he really wants to follow Project 2025 chapter and verse and remake the country into an authoritarian country with him as its dictator. The signs that he is trying to do this will be obvious. The other thing we will know is whether he has dementia because this condition, while its course varies, always gets worse.

If Trump has been doing the brilliant and beautiful weave perhaps we'll see that he's created a tapestry you might want in your house.

However, we don't know whether he'll create a lovely tapestry or an ugly scary one.

If he has dementia his weave could create something that looks like this:

These images were created by Perchance Photo AI

Read previous blogs here.

Addendum on a personal note: 

I live in a continuing care retirement community in a liberal suburb of Portland, Oregon. Many of the residents here, almost all of whom are politically progressive, have taken to wearing generic name tags. I had my own made to reflect how I was feeling. The first used as a background Salvadore Dali's painting The Persistence of Memory (see Wiki article). 

Then as the election approached with the polls neck and neck I had another one made with the figure from Edvard Munch's "The Scream" (see Wiki).

Thinking Kamala might win I had yet a third one made with another Dali painting, Le Sommeil (Sleep) which you can read about here. Here's the excerpt that resonates with me:

Freudian theories, however, extends beyond just a consideration of the unconscious. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle by Freud, the renowned psychologist proposed a theory, Thanatos, or 'Death Instinct', in which he suggests that all animals, including humans, try to prolong their life by defending all threats of death that are inappropriate to their particular species. In humans, this is manifest as aggression if the threat is external and self-destruction when directed at the self. The counterpart to Thanatos is Eros in which an individual life moves towards a 'natural' death. Le Sommeil seems to suggest that tension, the head in a catatonic state supported by a series of crutches.

Now I am not sure which one I will be wearing. Perhaps I will alternate. 

(Click below to enlarge)