This is What Proves Trump’s Dementia: Psychologist | The Daily Beast Podcast

One of the dementia experts that I've consulted with is convinced he has frontotemporal dementia because of this symptom alone, which is, it's called a wide-based gait. But if you look at his right leg, sometimes he just swings it like a dead weight in a semicircle.

I'm Joanna Coles. This is The Daily Beast podcast. And thank you for all your thousands of comments over the last couple of weeks. They really mean a lot to me and they mean a lot to Michael Wolff, my partner on Inside Trump's Head. So, today, we have a fascinating conversation with Dr. John Gartner, who says Trump is clearly showing signs of dementia, not least because we've been able to track this man for the last 40 years, both

on television and on digital media. So, we have a very accurate portrayal of his demise in plain sight. I found this conversation absolutely enlightening. I very much hope you do too. And also, I strongly recommend his podcast, Shrinking Trump, that he does with his partner – or actually, his best friend he was telling us from school, Dr. Harry Siegel.

The two of them are trained psychotherapists. Dr. Gartner got his first degree from Princeton and then his PhD from Amherst and was for 28 years a professor at Johns Hopkins University. So, I thought I might not be able to understand all his medical terms, but in fact, I sort of got my head around most of it. And do feel free to send us questions, because I'm convinced we'll be having him back. I found his point of view on Donald Trump completely riveting. Let's get into it. Dr. Gartner is in the house.

We are extremely excited to have you here. You are a man who has diagnosed President Trump as having dementia. John, what are the symptoms of dementia that you can see in our president?

So the first most important thing to realize about a diagnosis like dementia is we're really evaluating someone against their own baseline. So we have to see a major deterioration in functioning, in language and thinking, in psychomotor performance, in impulse control, in a whole variety of areas. So what a lot of people don't realize is that Donald Trump used to be a very articulate person.

He used to speak with a high level of vocabulary in very polished paragraphs. Now what we see is not only has his vocabulary gone down, but his ability to actually put together sometimes, and sometimes he's very articulate, right, because with dementia people go in and out, right,

of functioning, but there are times when he's really unable to complete a thought. Actually, sometimes he's unable to complete a word. It's called a phonemic paraphasia. There's dozens of examples there online as sort of humorous bits, you know,

where he mispronounces words, but really says words that are not actually English words, that have a fragment of an English word, like saying mishes instead of missiles, or chrishis instead of Christmas. This is something that only people who have a organic brain disease do. It's not something people just do when they're tired or when they get old. So one of the things that we see is this great deterioration in his language, in his ability

to put together sentences and words, but also he's starting to show what we call this kind of random sort of thought where he really free associates and a tangential speech where he's talking about one thing and then he starts talking about another thing, and then another thing. For example, the Hannibal Lecter example is one I like to use.

He was saying, he was lying, and saying that they're sending all these immigrants from insane asylums, right? And then he goes, silence of the lambs. Anyone seen Silence of the Lambs? Well, Silence of the Lambs is a movie about insane asylums. So now we've moved from immigrants to, has anyone seen this movie?

And then he goes, the late, great Hannibal Lecter. Nobody likes to talk about him anymore. Well, first of all, he's not dead, so he's a fictional character, so he can't be the late Hannibal Lecter. As someone who's psychodynamically oriented, the fact that he would choose Hannibal Lecter as some kind of great figure tells us something about his psychology. That would be his ego ideal, someone who is a serial killer who eats people. That sort

of tracks. But in other words, it really doesn't make sense. Or another example would be when he was asked about the Harvard situation. He said, well, aren't you challenging academic freedom? And he said, oh, in Harlem, you know, all the black people voted for me because Harlem sounds like Harvard. And he didn't just mishear it because then he goes on to say, you know, the people in Harlem agree with what I'm doing in Harvard.

So I mean, this is really a gross, right? It doesn't make any sense. And he does this meandering kind of speech.

Yeah. Right. Well, of course, what's interesting is we have digital breadcrumbs and we have, you know, 14 seasons of The Apprentice to study him and then look at him now. Give us the phrase again that you called it. Was it phenol something?

Phonemic paraphrases.

Phonemic paraphrase.

Where he uses sounds that aren't really words. There's also a semantic paraphasia where you use a real word but in the wrong context, like saying the oranges of the investigation, when he meant the origins of the investigation.

Right. Although I promise you I do that too, and I'm hoping I don't have dementia. What is it in the brain that is sort of disintegrating, if you like? Is this just a symptom of old age or is it actually something in the brain no longer working as it used to?

Yeah, it's not just a symptom of old age. This is really a breakdown in – it's actually a breakdown in all of the mental functions, in thinking, in psychomotor performance, in impulse control. So we're seeing this in all areas of his life. Now, of course, with him, sometimes it's hard to tell because he has this severe personality disorder.

He is a malignant narcissist.

So is the personality disorder, did that come before the dementia?

Absolutely. Absolutely. No, he's been a malignant narcissist his whole life. That's a personality disorder is a lifetime disorder. So, you know, when he was 10 years old, he was throwing rocks at babies.

The neighborhood. I mean, he's always been this malicious malignant person. So that's core to who he is. And that's what makes him so dangerous and untreatable. Now on top of that, this really is the worst case scenario.

Well, hold on, hold on. You're throwing so many things out there. He's untreatable. He was throwing rocks at babies. I'm assuming you meant that metaphorically.

No, no, literally he was throwing rocks at babies.

Is that a story about him that he was literally throwing rocks at babies? Yes, yes, when he was a child. There was a baby's – a neighbor baby, he was throwing rocks at them. Okay. I didn't know that story and that certainly does seem like a symptom of some sort of personality disorder. Please continue and then let's come back to how one treats something like this.

Malignant narcissism is untreatable. That's the official position. We can't cure people who are this sick in this way. But also, it makes him incredibly dangerous. Every one of the great dictators has more or less been a malignant narcissist. The term was invented by Erich Fromm, who himself escaped the Nazis, to explain the psychology of Hitler. And other dictators like Hitler. He understood Hitler to be one of a type, maybe the most extreme, but one of a type. So that's what we started out as

a baseline. But now what we have is this chronic organic deterioration from his own baseline. So we have in a sense the worst of both worlds because his judgment was always bad. He was always impulsive. He was always a liar. But now he really is losing his ability to think clearly, to plan, to understand things, and to inhibit his speech and his behavior. So you know, one minute it's 400% tariffs on this country, the next minute he forgets all about it. It's much more chaotic and impulsive. And because the people around him are exercising no restraint, he's now got a cabinet of enablers, right? There's nobody to kind of rein him in, either in terms of his worst authoritarian impulses, but even in terms of his confusion. If you saw the recent cabinet meeting

where the cabinet was falling all over each other to praise the dear leader and talk about how he's changed American history and he should win the Nobel Prize. The ironic thing is that as he's increasing his grip on power, he's actually losing his faculties.

As you say, we've seen him in plain sight for the last 40 years, so we can definitely see his change. I think even in the presidency this time round, you can see physical changes. He's slowing down, which is not unexpected in a man of 79. And he still seems to have an astonishing schedule. I mean, he's traveling. I mean, I was watching him with King Charles as they gave their speeches side by side. Is King Charles also a narcissist? I mean, here was someone who was born to power. Donald Trump has been elected to power. King Charles hasn't

been. What is the difference between them? And in Donald Trump's defense, not three words I often say, but he appeared to deliver his speech at Windsor Castle, you know, playing to the crowd. He could obviously feel the energy in the room. He had a couple of asides which made people laugh. So, it didn't feel like he was detached from the reality around him as he sat with Tim Cook and Satya Nadella and Mark Benioff and of course, King Charles and Queen Camilla and the unusual sighting

of Melania by his side. So, can you just talk to – you mentioned that people with dementia go in and out, as it were. Absolutely. And then what's the difference between his narcissism and someone like King Charles, who was born to take over a throne?

There's a big difference between narcissism and malignant narcissism. A malignant narcissist, in addition to being a narcissist, which as you point out, maybe most or even all politicians are to a certain extent, or else they wouldn't run, it has three other components. Psychopathy, which means that he has no conscience, that he breaks laws and norms and lies, and has no regrets, has no anxiety, has no remorse, has no empathy for other human beings. Paranoia, which is why he feels like such a victim

and he feels persecuted even though he's the one who's doing the persecuting and demonizes minorities, demonizes people who oppose him. And the fourth component is sadism, that he takes enormous pleasure, he relishes in harming and degrading and debasing other, and frightening other people. So, Fromm called it the essence of evil. So not all narcissists are evil. I wrote a book about Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton is very narcissistic, but I happen to think Bill Clinton

is a very benign character. He has a great deal of love and concern for people. He radiates a lot of love. And Donald Trump does have some charm and some charisma, but he exercises it in this very destructive way. You know, Bill Clinton saved hundreds of millions of lives

in Africa after his presidency, you know, just because he wanted to. So we're talking about very different types of characters who have some traits in common. I also think they also have some hypomania in common, just to make things more complicated. So Trump has a lot of energy, as you pointed out. I think, and I wrote my book about Bill Clinton saying that he also had hypomania. Hypomania being Greek, hypo is for less than, so it's less than full-blown mania. It's more of a personality temperament to have hypomania.

But for Donald Trump, he's up in the middle of the night hate tweeting, 20 tweets a night. So all of his energy is going into his evil. But we are talking about someone who is truly evil, and therefore that's one of the reasons that he is untreatable.

So, and can we just include King Charles in this, because looking at the two of them, they are two old white men, one who has been elected to power, one who has been born to power. Did you see any – I'm not asking you to be critical of King Charles. I was just interested in the juxtaposition of the two leaders together.

Yeah. Well, I mean, to put it simply, I don't see any evidence that he is relentlessly evil.

Well, that's a relief. I'm sure that's a relief. But the monarchy, they have other problems. They have other problems. But he seems a benign king. I mean, he certainly seems to want to unite the country. Okay. So, this going in and out of dementia, what is that about? And is it connected to what we've been told is his chronic venous interruption and the sort of – the physical symptoms that

we're seeing now.

There's a number of physical symptoms that we're seeing. One of them I point out is his chronic falling asleep. You know, I'm a senior citizen. I fall asleep sometimes at home and after a beer or in the evening. But he fell asleep most of the days during his criminal trial, which is literally unheard of. It never happens that people fall asleep while they're in the

dock during their own trial. It certainly doesn't happen every day of their trial. He fell asleep at the finals of the US Open, where he was being cheered and jeered by thousands of people. He fell asleep there at Windsor Castle, apparently. So this inappropriate falling asleep, it's a small thing, but it is a real meaningful sign. The other thing is his psychomotor performance

has gotten worse, but in a very specific way that's worth focusing on. This is actually a sign of a specific type of dementia, frontotemporal dementia, and one of the dementia experts that I've consulted with is convinced he has frontotemporal dementia

because of this symptom alone, which is, it's called a wide-based gait, but if you look at his right leg, sometimes he just swings it like a dead weight in a semicircle. And if you saw that footage where he met Putin

at the airport, and they came down the red carpet, and some people sort of sped it up like a kind of Benny Hill sort of take down. You see him weaving across the carpet like a drunk driver. If you actually take that same footage and slow it down, what you see is the reason he's weaving to the left is because his right leg is swinging, this wide swing to the left, which is causing

his whole gait to move in that direction. We have a lot of different pieces of tape where we see that wide base gait. And the expert that I consulted with said this is what we call pathognomonic. You don't see this in anyone unless they have frontotemporal dementia. So it's a very specific symptom that really an expert would understand the significance of.

And of course now we're seeing a more general deterioration. He seems to have clearly serious circulatory problems. We don't know if the venous deficiency is really, the chronic venous deficiency is really the story. It might be actually heart failure with the swollen ankles. And we don't know why he's got black marks on the back of his hand,

probably getting some kind of intravenous fluid. But the other thing is he just looks like he's sort of falling apart. And the other thing is, a lot of people are predicting that he's having a series of mini strokes because if you saw him at the 9-11 memorial, half of his face was drooping like this, you know? And that's not something that comes with age or fatigue. Like, I can't even do it, right? I'm trying to make half of my face droop.

I have to like pull it down. It's not something you can just do or something just happens. It really is suggestive of some kind of potential mini-stroke. So all these things could be related, right?

The circulatory problems could be related to the deterioration in his brain. They could even be causal. Or he could just have both dementia and some chronic medical problems. We don't know.

This is really an area where we're really not sure. But he's clearly deteriorating mentally and physically.

I have to say, it's completely terrifying talking to you because first of all, these medical terms which I like and I'm sort of stabbing at guessing what they mean, but I've already diagnosed myself with severe dementia, personality disorder, hypomania. It's very nerve-wracking talking to you. So, assuming you're right, and we can certainly see because of his television and his digital media trail that he has definitely changed.

Yes.

How does one manage the change? I mean, you always hear about dictators or malignant narcissists, that they are very unpredictable and they are very frightening even for their closest colleagues to be around because of the unpredictability. You see Trump's Cabinet looking extremely anxious having to sit near him. And in fact, what Michael Wolff, who is frequently on our podcast, says is that within the White House it's better not to be in the room. Usually, certainly in corporate America people long

to be in the room where it happens. Obviously, the famous song from Hamilton, in the room where it happens. But actually people want to be out of the room, because if you're in the room Donald Trump's gaze may suddenly settle on you, and it will trigger him to either go off on you, it will remind him of something. How do you – how should people handle someone who's going through this?

Well, this is what's really frightening, because, right, so many people have had relatives who have been through this, and we get notification from so many viewers who are saying, you know, I went through this with my mother, I went through this with my father, I recognize all these signs that you're talking about. But this was someone that, you know, they were able to – and it's not easy to manage someone with dementia actually. Right. I mean, anybody watching this –

It would be quite difficult. Yeah. Anybody watching this who's got someone with dementia in their family will know it can be very unpredictable. And people can also get very bad-tempered. Exactly. And some people in my family are dealing with this. But then imagine that that

person has sort of omnipotent power, right, and is paranoid about anyone trying to control them and will attack anyone who contradicts them. It's really kind of like a worst-case scenario, right, that the person holding the nuclear codes is incompetent, but nobody can rein him in. He won't listen to anybody, and no one dares to oppose him. So one of the things that I think we're gonna start to see

is as he deteriorates, the lackeys around him are gonna be more and more kind of, if we thought the last cabinet meeting was crazy, you know, he says crazy stuff and it's not just the people in his government, it's even the press, right. He says crazy stuff and nobody follows up on it, nobody comments on it.

It really is like the emperor's new clothes but without the punchline, without the person saying he's naked and then everyone going, oh my gosh, he's naked. I thought it was only me that saw it. But isn't the complexity that people have actually called it out. And then everyone going, oh, my gosh, she's naked. I thought it was only me that saw it.

But isn't the complexity that people have actually called it out? I mean, you called it out with 45,000, I think, professional doctors, psychotherapists who were pointing this out during Trump won. And the press have relentlessly called it out, as Donald Trump himself would say. I mean, look at his reaction to Jimmy Kimmel this week. So, isn't the problem that people have called it out, but people also don't seem to care or they might even like it. I mean, in some ways, it's seen as

a sign of strength. Well, I don't think it's seen as a sign of strength to be demented. I think he, however, is very good at… Well, okay, just to clarify, I'm not saying it's seen as a sign of strength to have dementia, but his leadership or his bombast is misinterpreted as a sign of leadership.

No, malignant narcissists, you know, have a certain appeal. First of all, we talk about his charisma, but also the psychopathic part of them makes them have a will to dominate, and a will to control that is very, very powerful. And people identify with that. So, you know, a lot of people are thrilled by the fact that he's taking this kind of strong man control and beating up on their shared enemies. So there is a kind of psychological appeal that Hitler-like character has.

And actually there was a psychologist named Adorno, right, who wrote about the authoritarian personality in the late 40s, trying to really try to understand what kind of a person is attracted to a malignantly narcissistic leader, to an authoritarian leader. Someone who feels disempowered and who feels re-empowered by someone who in a punitive way is attacking their shared enemies and making them feel powerful and making them feel entitled to dominate. So there is this way he appeals

to a certain group of white Americans, right, who really want to reassert the dominance of whites in America, and who might feel disempowered because they're not that educated, or they're not that powerful or that wealthy. And so they identify with this powerful, wealthy white man who's saying what they think, but is socially unacceptable that they are superior to minorities and we need to keep them out of this country and they don't

have brains.

How significant is it that the first lady seems to have moved away significantly from Donald Trump and his daughter, Ivanka, who was very present during Trump won with her husband Jared Kushner, now seems nowhere to be seen. In fact, she said that politics wasn't for her, that it was such a brutal game. So, he doesn't have, as far as we know, any close women around him. I mean, he certainly has Suzy Wiles, his chief of staff, and he's got people in his office,

but he doesn't have any female family members who appear to be in his close circle and he seems increasingly isolated?

Yeah. Well, look, one of the things about malignant narcissists is they are literally incapable of love. They're incapable of love. And so, nobody really loves Donald Trump. He doesn't really have any figures that really love him. He's got, you know, followers who worship him. But to know him is really to hate him. And I believe basically his family has decided it's intolerable to be around him. Like you said, you don't want to be in the room with him. And so they're trying to distance themselves. I mean, his sons are certainly making lots of billions

in crypto in his name. But nobody really wants to be around him because he is unpredictable, aggressive, and you have to just submit to it. The other thing about his thinking is, I just want to point out a few other symptoms. One of them is something we call confabulation, I would actually argue. It's very hard to distinguish a lie from confabulation, But confabulation, and again, these people who are listening who have relatives who have dementia

will recognize this trait. There's so many gaps in their memory that they actually remember things that didn't happen by weaving together different sort of little pieces of memory. So for example, he told this long, elaborate story about how his uncle taught the Unabomber at MIT.

And he said, I talked to him, what kind of student was he? He said well he was a know-it-all and nobody really liked him. Well look, the Unabomber never went to MIT. Ted Kaczynski didn't go to MIT so he couldn't have been in his uncle's class. By the time they discovered he was a Unabomber his uncle was dead. Now this isn't like saying I have the highest poll numbers when he has the lowest poll numbers or we've added jobs when we've lost jobs.

That's lying for, where we know he has a purpose. It's going to make him look better. But telling this long rambling story about his uncle and the Unabomber doesn't really serve any purpose. When he's telling it, I believe he actually thinks he's remembering something. This is another sign of dementia.

The other sign of dementia that we see is people with dementia, they really can't come up with any thoughts, just use a lot of superlatives. So like for example, when he was at Gettysburg, he said, Gettysburg, wow. It was like amazing. And it was horrible. But it was like beautiful in a way. So just all these superlatives.

I think he's standing there and he really doesn't know what Gettysburg is. And then he's looking at a hill and he said, you know, and Robert E. Lee said, never fight up hill, me boys. And he says it for some reason in an Irish accent.

Never fight up hill, me boys. Which he never said, but he was looking at a hill. So he just kind of made that up. I think he was just in a confused state. And so he was just using all these superlatives and then making up this story. And I guess where I would maybe push back a little bit is I don't think people are commenting on it. You know, you'd have to show me the receipts, I guess. Show me where in the press they're talking about his mental deterioration. I don't think you're going to find it. And when you do, unfortunately, it'll be them quoting me

and my co-host, Harry Siegel, which is actually uncomfortable for us because then, if you put in chat GPT, is there evidence for Donald Trump having dementia? You say yes, because Dr. John Gartner and Dr. Harry Siegel said so on shrinking Trump.

The doctors are afraid to comment on it. I do think – well, certainly late-night comedians. I mean, Jimmy Kimmel has just lost his job over it, right? I mean, certainly…

Late-night comedians, some have.

I mean, there are definitely – and I definitely think there are – I mean, certainly, in The Daily Beast, we've relentlessly followed his cankles as they've been spilling over his Oxfords. Let me ask you something else. Joe Biden appeared to be failing in plain sight too. I mean, your point about Donald Trump is we can see this happening in front of us. Joe Biden also seemed to be failing. You saw him freezing. You heard the voice. I mean, he seemed to have every symptom of Parkinson's-ism that there was without anybody acknowledging it.

Did you see that in him too?

Well, I think that what's interesting about what happened in the Biden situation is, I think they did a better job of hiding him when he was deteriorating. It seems like about six months before the election is when he really took a bad turn. And yet, by keeping him out of the public eye, we weren't able to really see the same signs and symptoms. Although the press was a lot harder on him, I think, in terms of his mental competence,

than they were on Trump. And that's what really upset us, is the double standard. That they were commenting on his gaffes, but they weren't really saying much about Trump's. And a lot of the things with Biden, the slow voice, the slow movements, could be Parkinson's, could be normal aging.

I think what was really a shock was the debate. Was that's when the public really saw, oh my God, these rumors about his having some kind of deterioration are true. Because he literally looked blank, right? When he was staring at the camera.

And that's really the moment when I think the election turned. So he shouldn't have run again. The people around him shouldn't have urged him to run again. They knew that he had these deficits and they were hiding the deficits from the public. Okay.

So, if you know they're serious enough to hide them from the public, then don't urge the man to run for president.

So, but that's a good example of where Donald Trump would still have had dementia and as you're saying malignant narcissism and a personality disorder, but he appeared to win the debate.

One of the ways that he won the debate – well, first of all, I think Biden was very – I think Biden lost the debate.

Right. Well, he had a challenged opponent.

Yeah.

He had a challenged opponent. But one of his techniques, it's been called gish-galloping after a certain congressman, I think in like the 1800s, where, or to put it the way Steve Bannon called it, flood the zone with shit. Which is to spew out so many outrageous lies, but like a gatling gun, right? Boom, boom, boom, boom boom one after the other so that your opponent doesn't even know if you say five Outrageous lies that you know where do I even begin to rebut that person you know when they're not even related to each other

They're like off topic you know And so that technique is actually pretty effective That he just keeps spewing out lies in this pressured speech that then people really don't have a capacity to respond. Now, of course, he's just intimidating people, so they're afraid to respond. But it actually turned out to be a fairly effective technique in the debate if the person

can't respond effectively.

So, Donald Trump is supposed to be extremely good at sniffing out his enemy's weaknesses. What are his weaknesses? I mean, we know that he appears to be haunted by his old friend Jeffrey Epstein, who followed him to London for his amazing visit to Windsor Castle. And we saw the projection of the film on the side of Windsor Castle, thus hijacking the trip and making sure that all the headlines included Epstein. Is Donald Trump, do you think, actually sort of haunted by Jeffrey Epstein? What are the things that make Trump truly paranoid?

Yeah, I mean, one of the things about the psychopathy is they have no remorse for anything bad they've done and no fear about being exposed. So, but when you have someone who's a narcissist, at every moment there's a feeling that their grandiosity could collapse. So they're fighting to win each moment, right, to keep inflating themselves. So in a sense, in his paranoia, he's threatened by everything and everyone, right, who could potentially in any way pierce his veil of invulnerability and grandiosity. So that's one of the reasons

he attacks everyone, every reporter that asks him a question, you know, with any kind of a challenge. You know, you're disgusting and you're no good and your publication's failing and you should go to jail. That's hate speech. I recently told Jonathan Karl that he was committing hate speech by asking him a question about what Pam Bondi said about hate speech. But the thing is that that is the fear, is that his grandiosity will collapse

or that he'll be exposed as something less than omnipotent. So in a sense, he's in an existential battle every second.

That makes sense in terms of him just lurching moment to moment, pushing the narrative forward and not really answering specific questions but constantly changing direction. So, as you say, it's very hard to sort of follow him or understand how to pin things down.

Do you think he is genuinely scared of the Epstein story?

Well, I think that he – you know, he's been able to duck everything. And he now has a criminal justice system which is colluding in covering up the Epstein story. I mean, think about this. You know, when in the history, have you ever heard of an assistant attorney general going to meet with someone in jail, right?

A sex trafficker. A sex trafficker who's been sentenced to 20 years. Exactly. And we know that she could implicate Trump. Now usually when someone from the Justice Department meets with a criminal in jail, it's to implicate another wrongdoer, right? And lo and behold, of course, she gave them what they wanted. She said she'd never seen anything to cause her concern, which we thought was funny on the show, because what would cause her concern? She's a child

molester herself. But anyway, never saw anything to cause concern, and lo and behold, then quit pro quo right in front of everyone's eyes. She's transferred to this sort of spa camp prison as a reward. It was obvious. And, you know, we said, Kash Patel said that he had thousands of FBI agents working around the clock to find any reference to Trump in the Epstein files. Well, we know there's hundreds of references to him. And lo and behold, he's now claiming there's no references to him. Yeah. So, in other words, he actually sent

thousands of FBI agents with some whiteout to go through all the files to basically hide all the references to Epstein. So he thinks he's gonna get away with it because he's gotten away with everything. And that's part of the psychopath psychology. They always think they're gonna get away with it. They're not worried about being exposed.

And he probably will get away with it.

And is there copycat behavior from the people around him? I mean, I was watching the Kash Patel hearings this week and his determination to shout down certainly Adam Schiff and some of the other senators talking to him, it felt very reminiscent of Trump. And Michael Wolff, who is my partner on the Inside Trump's Head podcast, and I know you have your partner, Dr. Harry Siegel, on your podcast, Shrinking Trump, which I highly recommend for anybody listening and

watching to this. It's delightfully entertaining and you invite guest doctors on to analyze people in particular, Donald Trump. Where am I going with this? I'm going with copycat behavior. Is there a sort of knock-on effect from this kind of grandiosity? Is that why everybody else is suddenly getting much more aggressive?

It's a great question. I think the answer is yes. I sometimes think of Trump as being a malignant narcissist, as being similar to a malignant tumor in the body politic. And we had a chance to remove the tumor and save the patient. We failed there, obviously. But what happens with the tumor is it spreads its DNA around the body, and cells reproduce with that DNA. I think Trump's sort of psychological DNA has now seeped into the people in his administration. They're also, you know, as you say, shouting people down and devaluing people. But also, what we see too is that there's been a process,

this always happens with all of these dictators, of purging and purging and purging till you get down to the worst of the worst. You know, what's called a kakistocracy, you know, government by the worst. So in the first administration, you had people who might have been colluding with him to some degree, but they had some moral limits, right? They had some point where they say, well, wait a minute, Mr. President, we can't do that. You know, those people are gone. Even Bill Barr, right, who covered up the whole Mueller report, you know, he had a limit. He wasn't going to invalidate the whole election. That was where he got off the bus. And so then he became an enemy.

Right now, Bill Barr is reviled. So what he did, what happens is there's a systematic process of purging people. And it's happened within the Republican Party generally. There used to be some Republican representatives and senators, like Jeff Flake, for example, who had a conscience,

who believed in the Constitution. But those people have been systematically purged. And so now what you have left, it's sort of like a reduction sauce. You have the true believers, the true psychopaths, the true wingnuts, the people who are all in with no inhibitions, no conscience, no soul. And so, of course, they're going to imitate the behavior of their dear

leader. How do you diagnose or what is your diagnosis of someone like Elon Musk?

Well, Elon Musk is actually a complex character. I mean, he appears to be on the spectrum. I think he also has bipolar traits. When he was manically pursuing this whole Doge thing. You know, he brought his bed into the, famously, into their offices and said, we work 24 hours a day and on weekends and that's how we're going to defeat these bureaucrats because they only work 9 to 5.

Right.

That seems like some sort of mania.

Exactly.

Exactly. And even his behavior with the chainsaw, you know, waving the chainsaw around wildly. It was also irresponsible and erratic and extreme and hyped up, you know, and there may even been drug involvement too. We know that he's got, allegedly has a whole case of drugs. He's on ketamine, he's on this, he's on that, so that he could be hyping or firing up his hypomania perhaps with drugs. But so I think he's a

complex case. There's a lot of things going on in his case. But what you have in common among all of these Trump people now is they do have a kind of psychopathic core. That Levitt, his press secretary, said he has got the highest poll numbers in history. Actually, he's got the lowest poll numbers in history.

It's what I call oppo-speak. I think what you're hearing from public is oppo-speak, meaning it's literally the opposite, the polar opposite of what they say.

I'm going to re-listen to this and jot down all the medical terms that you've given us because I find it absolutely fascinating. John, you're describing what feels like a very extreme personality. How common is this among people?

That's actually an excellent question. So the guest that we had on this week, Dr. Vince Greenwood is a scholar of psychopathy. And he has said that Donald Trump really meets the very strict criteria for a severe psychopath. And what we know is that only one in about 150 people meet these strict criteria for psychopathy. So just as a start, just as a baseline, it's already a very rare disorder.

One in 150 people?

One in 150 people would meet criteria for being a psychopath. Now in his case, psychopathy is really only part of his disorder, as we've said, because as a malignant narcissist, there's four components, psychopathy, narcissism, paranoia, and sadism. But actually the guest we had on argued that those other components could be included in the psychopathy diagnosis if you're really being strict about your diagnostic criteria. But in any case, it is very rare.

And I think that's one of the reasons why it's hard for normal people to understand

how… But 1 in 150 doesn't seem rare. I mean, you know, I can't remember who it is that says that most people have or the peak number of friends you can have is 150, which means that we all have a psychopath in our friend group. That seems alarming.

I think one in 150 is actually – there's a hell of a lot of psychopaths wandering around then. I mean, this is a country of 330 million people.

Our expert also said he felt that Donald Trump was the most extreme example that he'd seen in his entire career. So in that small group, he would be in like 99th percentile.

Well I'm very excited to see what comments we get from listeners and from viewers on YouTube. I think there will be many, many, many questions. And well we'd love to have you back and to have you address them. Sure. Dr. John Gartner, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you for having me.

Well, I found that absolutely fascinating. One of the most interesting things about Donald Trump is that he has been a colossus across the media for the last 40 years. He has segued and changed as the media has segued and changed. And so, we've been able to see him in plain sight as he's gotten older and more powerful and now is exercising that power in some truly alarming ways. Thank you for joining us.

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