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A
Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying Big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good
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B
in this world, stop with Mint.
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A
You can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments. But that's weird. Okay, one judgment anyway. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment
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of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra.
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A
See full terms@mintmobile.com anybody who 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. So at this point it's so absurd to ask questions about, well, can you really make a valid diagnosis from a distance? Not only can you make a valid diagnosis from a distance, you don't even need to be a doctor. You don't even need to be a specialist. You just need to not be under the influence of MAGA drugs.
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B
Welcome to the Daily Beast Podcast. I'm Hugh Doherty, I'm Executive Editor of the Daily Beast and I'm privileged to be sitting in for Joanna Coles. She will be back soon. Thank you to everybody who has been subscribing to the Daily Beast. If you do not subscribe to The Daily Beast YouTube channel, please hit that button. Share this with your friends. We are close to 700,000 subscribers. With your help we can reach a million and spread, spread the word. It's thanks to your support that we are able to bring you guests of the amazing caliber of Dr. John Gartner. He is a psychologist and clinical psychotherapist who has for many years been sounding the alarm on the questions that have to be asked about the President's mental state. And we have so much to discuss. Dr. Gapner, welcome to Daily News Podcast Once again. Thank you for joining us. I should say this is the first time that I have the privilege of speaking to you, but everybody who listens to the Daily Beast podcast is always, always on the edge of their chairs listening to your insights into Donald Trump. I guess where we might want to start is we are recording this on the 20th of May and there's a big day coming up on June 14th and that is that Donald Trump will turn 80. Just talk to us about. Let's just imagine we have an average 80 year old. What are the things that you are on the lookout for with an average 80 year old. And how do they contrast with what you are seeing with Donald Trump?
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A
You know, we talk about his age, but it's really his clinical condition that matters more than his age. There are signs of normal aging, but there's signs of dementia, which are very, very different. And I think sometimes we kind of confound them, like, oh, well, he's showing signs of age. Aging and dementia are not the same thing. There's certain cognitive decline that comes with age. I'm 68. Sometime in this broadcast, I may have trouble coming up with a name of some famous politician that I want to quote.
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B
Oh, I don't think that's age. I mean, I don't know. I'm 49. Maybe it's age related as well. We need to get in a 22 year old to do this and they will know them off the top of their heads. But. Right.
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A
But when Donald Trump met with Chuck Schumer, see, here it is. And Hakeem Jeffries, he said over the shutdown, he said several times, oh, Chuck Schumer came with a very nice man. I met a very nice man. He brought a very nice man that I'd never met before. Hakeem Jeffries.
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B
Right, right.
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A
That's a level of memory where you're not forgetting his name, you're forgetting you ever met the man and you've been working with him for years. This is a level of deterioration that at this point, it really is like the Emperor's New clothes. Anybody who has eyes, ears and a brain and is above mentally challenged intelligence 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. It's right there before our eyes. And the majority of Americans are telling pollsters that he is not cognitively equipped to do the job. So at this point, it's so absurd to ask questions about, well, can you really make a valid diagnosis from a distance? Not only can you make a valid diagnosis from a distance, you don't even need to be a doctor. You don't even need to be a specialist. You just need to not be under the influence of MAGA drugs.
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B
Well, let's talk about. You were last on, in fact, I believe almost exactly a month ago on the 18th of April. And since then, we have seen Trump head to China, come back from China. And I think the thing that everybody has been talking about is the relentless truth social posting which you spoke about the last time we were on, and the tempo of it Appears, almost appears to have got worse. I know you and Joanna have endlessly discussed what this means, but the pace seems to be part of the story now as well.
- [05:13]
A
The pace and the content both. So first of all, that he's up at all hours of the night, all night, posting basically shitposting, you know, posting all of these lies and crazy stuff. Okay, so both the pace of it, that someone would be up all night tweeting, right. 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. But the content of the tweets is something I really want to talk about today because I have been warning actually for 10 years, you'll think I'm plugging a book. But guys, you can't buy this book. It's been out of print since the day it came out. But it's Rocketman, Nuclear Madness and the Mind of Donald Trump, edited by myself and a couple of colleagues. I was warning about him as a nuclear war risk in 2018. I'm glad we're doing this show today because just on Monday he tweeted a picture of himself pushing the nuclear button.
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B
Right.
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A
I wanna say that again. I just wanted for emphasis.
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B
We are putting that up on screen as we speak.
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A
Oh, good. Oh good, thank you. Because let me tell you something about Donald Trump. He never ever jokes. Can you remember a single funny joke he's ever told?
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B
Right.
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A
Cuz I can't.
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B
Okay.
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A
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. Donald Trump is grooming us for nuclear war. He wants to be the first person to remember someone who is a malignant narcissist, feels powerful through destruction and domination, so that he is getting off his. With his sadism and his grandiosity, he wants to drop the bomb. You know, he has been comparing himself more recently to Caesar, Alexander the Great and Napoleon. What do those three men have in common?
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B
And just on, you know. Well, I mean, first of all, Napoleon ended in defeat. Alexander the Great kind of ended well. He had no more worlds to conquer. I think is the longstanding, probably bogus, but you know, who knows? Anecdote and Julius Caesar stabbed in the back. But you're right that these are great men of history and quote marks. And this, this is the comparison is obviously knowing, but just not to push back on the nuclear point, but in fact to probably to put a fine point on it. The war in Iran has obviously not gone well. So is this a sort of. Is there a narcissistic injury element to this as well?
- [07:53]
A
Yes, absolutely. No. And when he feels narcissistically injured, which is anytime he isn't worshiped or clearly winning, his response is to fight back twice as hard. And so one of the things I think people aren't understanding when we look, for example, at the midterm elections, I think there's going to be a huge blue wave unless he dramatically interferes in the election, which he could. So it's not a. None of us are feeling relaxed, like this is a sure thing. But let's take the best case scenario. Let's take the scenario. We win the House and the Senate, he's still the commander in chief with exclusive control over the military and the nuclear arsenal. And if he's feeling narcissistically injured, what does a wounded animal do? Right? It becomes more aggressive. And so if we are winning, right, because the Epstein files are being exposed, his poll numbers are down, we win both houses of Congress, you know, the economy is bad. He is going to fight back with the power that he has to fight that narcissistic injury and re. Inflate himself. And at this point, we're talking about someone who has delusions of grandeur, okay? So, for one thing about comparing himself to all those world figures is that's a delusion of grandeur. But the other thing those world figures have in common is their military world conquerors, okay? They basically fought world wars, okay? And so, yeah, maybe they had a bad end. Who cares? The point is that that's not the issue. The issue is that that's what he wants to do. That's how he's imagining himself. And so that's his basic temperament. If we add to that that he's showing signs of a form of dementia called frontotemporal dementia. It's the worst possible combination, literally the worst possible combination that psychiatrically we could imagine, because frontotemporal dementia is different than Alzheimer's in that it's not as much of a memory disorder, although there is a lot of memory disorder, but it mostly manifests in behavioral disorder. So, for example, here are some of the symptoms in the DSM for frontotemporal dementia. Behavioral disinhibition. Well, we've all noticed that he's become more disinhibited. He was always a jerk, right? And broke norms and said things that nobody could say. But. But now it's Getting worse. He's calling everyone piggy and stupid and cursing all the time. Socially inappropriate behavior, sort of same idea. Loss of manners or decorum. Now, he never had great manners to begin with, right? But now it's gotten worse. And so that's the point of deterrent. And here's the thing. Impulsive, rash or careless actions. If we review what's happened up until now with the Iran war, okay, Maggie Haberman said he went to war, the run, on a gut feeling, period, Full stop. In other words, no one in the government other than crazy Pete Hegseth advised him to do this, right? No one in the military, no one in the national intelligence space, no one in the foreign relations space advised him to do it. No one in his own inner circle advised him to do it. Only Pete. Crazy pet Hagseth. And he couldn't explain why he was doing it, when he was doing it, what the goals of doing it were. He didn't bring allies along. He didn't bring the country along. It's like we just woke up one morning and he had done it. I know sometimes people accuse me of laughing. I'll try to laugh a little less this trip because I really believe that we are going to wake up one morning and he will have launched a first nuclear strike. I believe that this is going to happen because he wants to do it. He no longer has the frontal lobe to give him the restraint, inhibition and judgment that would cause him to inhibit himself. And he now has a yes man cabinet right of true believers and psychopaths who are not going to be a backstep. We don't have any General Mattis. We don't have any John Kelly's. We don't have any Rex Tillerson's. There's no more adults in the room. And in fact, we just had a primary last night. Massey's been thrown out all of the. There's now literally no. There literally is no man or woman in elected political office as a Republican who isn't blindly lockstep following him. So I think people need to really get their minds around this. This is gonna happen. I mean, a lot of times on shows people say, well, what can we do? What can we do? And I always turn it around. You tell me who's gonna stop him?
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- [13:38]
B
There's a whole element here, as you said, in the first administration, and certainly at the start of the first administration, there were people who almost openly said they planned to stop him. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Milley, was very explicit about don't let you know if any orders come, they come through me. And these. That's right. Somebody who, you know, just to follow through on your analysis, somebody who is suffering from disinhibition. The normal course of events, I would assume, is to not find ways to enable them.
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A
I mean, we are living in the most surreal circumstances. If Donald Trump were your father or your grandfather, we'd be arguing about whether he could have the car keys, whether he needs in home care. If someone was, I forget which news show I was watching, if they were saying if this guy was on a park bench and started talking to you about windmills and all this stuff, you know, you'd ask you to invoke emergency mental health services or he'd move to the next bench. But the thing is that it's patently insane, okay? And there's no one stopping him. Even though it's so incredibly obvious we are literally blindly stumbling towards the apocalypse.
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B
Let's just talk a bit about the patterns of the people around Trump. We were talking about if this was your father, if this was your neighbor, then you would be looking for. You'd be looking for professional help. I was going to say, is there advice you can offer to the people around him? Let's be honest, they're not going to listen. But what possible course of action is there that actually hems him in? Because that appears to be the difficulty here, is he is on the one hand disinhibited and on the other hand enabled.
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A
Exactly.
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B
I know you actually, you advise Democrats. You've long liaised with Jamie Raskin, who was on our podcast last week talking about exactly this issue. But what advice do you give to a party that appears likely to have the upper hand in the House, possibly in the Senate? How is there anything they can do? You know, people rightly probably look for some sort of manifesto or action plan here. What are you going to be? What are you going to be offering them?
- [16:06]
A
I'm not offering them anything. What I'm saying is I feel like we're at the point in the movie where Thelma and Louise have driven off the cliff and they just haven't hit the bottom yet.
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B
And your analysis of the bottom. There's a long way to go.
- [16:24]
A
Yeah. I mean, I don't know if it's going to be the whole world blowing up in World War iii. Actually, if he were to drop a nuclear bomb on Iran, he would kill more people than Hitler. And I predict that he will kill more people than Hitler. You know, I've been criticized for saying that he has the same personality disorder as Hitler, malignant narcissism, which is a personality dis, which was actually developed to explain Hitler by Eric Fromm and other leaders like him. He meant it to be a type, not a unique diagnosis. Imagine if Hitler had dementia and nuclear weapons. What could go wrong? That's where we are now, and I don't have any hope, actually, to offer the viewers. I think that this is a done deal, barring some deus ex machina. He's going to do it. That's what I'm saying. Unless the hamburgers win. He's going to do it.
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B
Let's talk about the symptoms that we see. Right. One of the things we were just talking about, sundowning and the late night posting and so on, but this is during the. There are practices during the day as well that speak to this sort of disinhibition. And it's not just swearing and saying quiet, you know, quiet, piggy and whatever.
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A
Yeah.
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B
It's. It's also, we've all observed him in the Oval Office, this sort of surrounded by people. What. What's going on there?
- [17:56]
A
Well, he's falling asleep all the time, which is also a symptom of sundowning, because you're up all night and then you fall asleep, pass out during the day. Some of the other symptoms, by the way, of frontal temporal dementia are loss of empathy. Now, of course, the nature of his personality disorder is he has no empathy. But now it's becoming a cognitive issue. And the example I'll give you is, remember when someone passed out in the Oval Office?
- [18:19]
B
Now we know very famous picture, which in fact, we will put up on screen.
- [18:23]
A
Very famous. And he doesn't care about that person, and he never cared about that person. But the point is, now he's standing around looking confused, looking blank, like, looking at the sky, like, what's happening? Or what am I supposed to do? In other words, he doesn't even have the basic cognitive structure of, oh, someone's hurt. You pretend you care or you. You look on with a face of concern, even if you don't give a shit. But here, he doesn't even have the concept that he's supposed to somehow be engaged or concerned about this person who's fallen. And so this total lack of empathy, which he already had. And also he's a sadist. He actually likes hurting people, but he's not connected to any of the destruction, any emotional way that he's causing. So the kind of immense sort of weight of responsibility, right, that would be on any other president about, you know, the life and death, war and peace. You know, this is the most difficult decision a president ever makes. It's not a difficult decision for him. He's having fun, okay? When he was seeing pictures of Iran blowing up, they were showing them to him and he was laughing and enjoying them, and they spliced them with video games and put them online. And he said, you know, he said, oh, you know, the military can't wait, can't be restrained. They're so excited about their next conquest. Maybe we'll invade Cuba on our way back from Iran. You know, so he's having fun with the destruction. He gets sadistic pleasure from it. It makes him feel powerful. There's a term, omnipotent destructiveness, which is that malignant narcissists feel good about themselves by being powerful through destroying other people. You know, think of Robert Duvall saying, I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, it's that kind of perversity. And look in terms of his psychotic delusions of grandeur, right? Not only is he comparing himself to all these world conquerors, right? But he's, as we famously know, has posted pictures of himself as Jesus, right? Which obviously itself is sort of suggestive that someone might need to be hospitalized, okay? And there was all of this sort of hubbub about it, and he took the picture down. But you see, this is classic Trump. And this is classic how we respond to Trump. A few days later, he posted another picture of himself as Jesus on the cross wearing a crown of thorns. And he said, I've suffered more than Jesus. Okay. And no one really got upset about that one. It's like that we're past that. He's desensitized us now to these Jesus comparisons. But he's also posted pictures of himself as the Pope, as the Mandalorian. He's saying that he's going to be the president of Venezuela. He's saying that they asked him to be the mullah of Iran. He's giving himself a Nobel Prize and saying he stopped eight wars. He wants to have the Medal of Honor. He wants to build an Arc de Trump.
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B
Okay, well, I wanted to talk to you about the engoldification of D.C. that's a good word, the Arc de Trump. We had this spectacle this week of him in front of what was the East Wing with two pictures of what's coming. But that's, you know, we all know that he's destroyed the East Wing. He claims he's building a ballroom. It seems to be taking a bit longer than we promised. And now it's a drone empire as well. But there seems to be, there is obviously some psychological background to this rush to change the face of D.C. well,
- [21:53]
A
all of these grandiose dictators do this, right? They build monuments to themselves. There's pictures of themselves all over the country. Andrew Sullivan, a conservative commentary, once said, if you live in a democracy, you can ignore politics. That's actually your great luxury, that you can absolutely be totally disengaged and it won't harm you in the least. In a dictatorship, you can't ignore politics. The great leaders picture is in the post office. It's on the Justice Department. It's on the money. It's everywhere, right? So this is part of what he's doing. He's creating this. He's making everything, you know, a shrine to himself. He wants the airport in New York, in Washington to be named after him. He wants the train station in New York to be named after him. He wants the Kennedy center to be named after him. And the Arc de Trump is an homage to the Arc de Triomphe that Napoleon built, right, as a monument to his, you know, military victories. Only this is going to be like, twice the size of the Arc de Triomphe, right? Because, of course, he has to be the biggest military conqueror in world history. And he's bragged that he's the most powerful man in human history. And he's actually right. And for those people who don't know it, the Arc de Triomphe itself was an homage to the Ark of Cyrus, which was basically celebrating the victory, the destruction of Jerusalem. So, again, a kind of a Caesar like figure. And it's interesting, historically, these megalomaniacal, grandiose figures see themselves in past megalomaniacal, grandiose figures. Psychologically, they identify. So it makes perfect sense that he would be identifying with Napoleon and Caesar. But this is an insane level of grandiosity.
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B
Right.
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A
He thinks that he actually published a tweet saying that he knows God better than anybody and God loves him more than anybody else.
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B
And yet not a man who is regularly seen inside a church. It is worth pointing out. In fact, no, I think if he
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A
touched a Bible, it would light on fire.
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B
Well, he held it upside down.
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A
Well, what does that tell you? You know, the black mass, they have the cross upside down. You know, listen, if you wanted to
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B
make a case, you have to take precautions.
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A
Antichrist. I'm not even Christian, but I've said that I think Trump may have converted me to Christianity because he's made me believe in the Antichrist.
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B
Well, yes. And in fact. Well, there's a whole world of. Of. World of. I know of a world of discussion there. But one of the things about this sort of creation of grandeur, he doesn't. As you've said, there's a lack of empathy. So there's no kind of engagement with other people's critiques. Where does he get the taste from? If you are that narcissistic, what's the. What drives you forward on the sort of. Why a ballroom? The arc is kind of easy because of Napoleon and Cyrus. But why a ballroom? What are we looking at here?
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A
The ballroom is bigger than the White House.
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B
Right.
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A
He wants to be this preeminent, omnipotent, dominant figure. He's the Sun King. He wants to be God. He really has delusions of being divine, being God, being omnipotent, being supreme. Okay. And so, yes, he's obsessed with all these building projects because they're all to his glorification. And yes, the goldification. Yes. That's part of the grandiosity. He thinks like he's Louis XIV or something. Right. And so everything's painted in gold leaf. And he likes to talk about how. Interrupt policy conversations about serious topics to go on for five minutes talking about the beautiful gold curtains and also some of that sort of veering off the subject is, again, his dementia. Right. Because if you look at the course of the way he thinks, he's constantly veering off topic, right in this tangential way that makes no sense where you can't even follow him. I always bring a verbatim transcript to read on this show, so hopefully you've time for that. Because actually, only when you really hear the full unedited quotes do you realize how completely thought disordered we. What he's saying is, well, maybe since I'm talking about it, this seems like
- [26:08]
B
a perfect opportunity for it.
- [26:09]
A
All right, so I always do this. So this is where this was in late April. People were asking him about, like, the war in Iran. This was on Air Force One, and he's talking about Iran. And he said, well, they agreed to send eight boats two days ago, and then they another two, and that was 10 boats. And today they gave us a tribute. I don't know. I can't define it exactly. What they gave us, I think it's a sign of respect. 20 boats of oil. Big, big boats going through the strait that's starting tomorrow morning. A lot of boats. I would say we're doing really well in the negotiations, but you never know with Iran because we negotiate with them and then we always have to blow them up, whether it's B2 bombers or just terminating the deal made by Barack Hussein Obama. Probably the worst deal we've ever done as a country. One of the dumbest deals we've ever done. But I fortunately terminated it, otherwise they would have a nuclear weapon. Then we did the attack with the B2 bombers and we stopped them from having nuclear. And now we had to blow them up again. I think we'll make a deal with them. It's pretty sure, but it's possible we won't. We've had regime change, if you look at it already, because one regime was decimated, destroyed. They're all dead. And the next regime is mostly dead. And the third regime, we're dealing with different people than anyone's dealt with before. It's a whole different group of people. So I would consider that regime change. And frankly, they've been very reasonable. So I think we've had regime change. You can't do much better. The regime that was really bad, really evil was the first one that was done. The second one was appointed, and they're all gone, dead. Other than one that might have a little life in him. And the third group is more reasonable. Regime change is an imperative. But I think we have regime change automatically.
- [28:05]
B
Okay, I think I followed. No, in fact, I didn't But I think it's worth pointing out. I think there's a couple of things that we can absolutely light on though. You talked about the reveling in destruction. There was definitely some of that there. And there was the grandeur as well of the naming of things. Right. The B2 bombers, the association with the big and the grand. There's definitely something there. And then the complete lack of a train of thought.
- [28:40]
A
Exactly. And the other thing is, you're right, you're teasing apart these things. What a lot of people don't know about the negotiations right before the attack is that he had won.
- [28:52]
B
Right.
- [28:53]
A
If you talk about the art of the deal, this could have been one of the most impressive deals ever made. Actually. He actually got Iran to agree to things that Barack Obama never got them to agree to. For example, they had agreed to get rid of all of their enriched uranium or to degrade it at least.
- [29:13]
B
Yes.
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A
So that's the main thing. If they degrade and to not stockpile more, that's it. Game over. They'll never be able to build a nuclear weapon that way. He couldn't take yes for an answer, either because he was too cognitively confused to understand that he had won or because really he wanted to blow them up whether he won or not, because the destructive impulse is so powerful in him. Right. That it doesn't even respond to reason. He can't even call off the dogs if he's won the negotiation. So this is what I'm talking about, that there is something in him that is driven to do this that is completely unrelated to anything that we would call reality.
- [29:56]
B
Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money.
- [30:00]
A
Because behind every headline is a bottom
- [30:03]
B
line, whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings. There's a money side to every story. And when you see the money side,
- [30:13]
A
you understand what others miss. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now@bloomberg.com
- [30:23]
B
There is, but this is the other thing I really wanted to talk to you about. There is what appears to be a dawning reality among many people that this is something we have to talk about. And as you mentioned earlier, it's beginning to pop up in polls. There appears to finally be a breaking in the dam of this sort of corporate organized silence around this issue. And I just wanted to highlight a couple of examples. The Wall Street Journal did a very thorough analysis of his true social habits. Aaron Burnett on CNN had a very long segment about can you believe what he is posting? And I think for People like you who have been talking about this for a decade seems like a long time to be getting there. And I'll just say that at the Daily Beast, we have been determined to cover this issue. Yes, you are, on the physical front and on the mental front, the questions over both of those. But it's been kind of lonely, so I can't even begin to imagine how lonely it's felt for you. But it does seem people are beginning to finally talk about it.
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A
Yes, I think they are. I think, first of all, it's becoming a talking point in the Democratic Party. Jamie Raskins has been trying to bolster the 25th Amendment, actually, for 10 years, because there's a provision in the 25th Amendment for a board of experts to evaluate the president, but that board has never been set up. So he's been trying since he was elected in 2016 to get that board set up, because that way he could be evaluated by experts and not just his own cabinet. But that bill is not going to pass. The 25th Amendment is not going to be exercised. And it's true that the mainstream media is talking about it a little bit now, whereas they have really been criminally silent. I mean, you might as well been living in Russia and hearing, listening to Pravda, you know, it's been so silent. So, yes, the New York Times, for example, had an article by Peter Baker, you know, another one that I'm sure you're familiar with. So little, little drops. And As I said, 59% of the public now believes that he is not mentally competent to be president. But meanwhile, all of his favored candidates won in the primary yesterday. He still has a lock on the Republican Party, and again, he controls the military. Okay, in my mind, that's like checkmate.
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B
Okay?
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A
There's nothing. There's no. There is no width, nothing above him to stop him from acting out militarily.
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B
Is talking about it a good idea in terms of dealing with him, or is this risking further narcissistic injury? And by the way, I'm not advocating for not talking about it, but I'm just interested in what's the effect.
- [33:14]
A
Well, that's a great question, actually. And, you know, it's funny you mention that because, well, first of all, the Daily Beast has gotten through, because when you've had these programs with me, you also put it on your website. And then someone, a reporter usually calls the White House and asks for comment. And so we have a string now of commentary from the White House about Daily Beast stories about Trump's mental decline They've actually referred to me as a disgraced doctor, which some people have said is should be a badge of courage.
- [33:43]
B
Yeah, actually I was going to. I can run through some, you know, there are, we could actually we could do a whole show just reading out the insults that we get from raising that I was going to actually I should have said at the top of this very podcast that you are officially. Is that official a degree's doctor? I guess it's an honorary degree. It's an honorary degree, yes. And widely available, I believe. But this is a fascinating aspect of the kind of the beginning of a breakthrough, right, that we at the Daily Beast, our reporters ask questions. They are called glue sniffers. They are who referred to as crackheads. David Rothkoff, who is a regular on the Daily Beast podcast has been called a no name nerd, a cuck, and then with very elaborate insult delivered to him about how he cries tears in front of his computer screen. But this is actually quite a serious point, isn't it? That the answer to is the President unwell should be knowable and instead it is concealed behind insights.
- [34:56]
A
I mean, think about, you know, all the attention that the press gave to Biden's decline. Think about all the attention the press gave to Hillary's emails, right? I mean, every day, as far as I'm concerned, that story is a complete non story. Even to this day, no one can explain to me what the scandal was. It wasn't illegal. It wasn't even against policy to have your own survey. It is now, but it wasn't then. It literally a story. It's like Seinfeld. It was a story about nothing, okay, that was in the paper every single day. And yet we have to reference one article by Peter Baker, Right? And before the election there was actually one article by Peter Baker again about his mental decline. You know, kind of teasing the question, does he have a problem? So that's what we get, one article a year, you know, raising the question when it should be the question we're raising every single day. At least raising the question, right? This action seems bizarre. Is he okay? Is this an expression of mental illness? That should be a question we're asking every single day. Instead, he's been sane, washed, and he's been normalized. And now we have just assimilated to his craziness. And then he gets even crazier, he declines, his cognitions become even more disorganized and we then accommodate to that. And that's why I'm saying he is grooming us for nuclear War. Okay. He's getting us used to the idea. What would have been shocking, you know, a year ago now it's like, oh, there he is again. Okay, so this is. We're literally on a downward spiral, and the press is enabling it by normalizing it.
- [36:41]
B
Well, Dr. Gartner, I'll just say you're absolutely not normalizing or enabling it. You have been asking these questions for a decade, and we are privileged that you've been joining us today. And more than asking questions, I should say offering a almost complete diagnosis of a problem that we at the Daily Beast believe has to be discussed. I'm sure everybody who's listening and watching believes have to be discussed, but it's got to be more than that, I think. Right. We've got to, as a nation, be discussing it and aware of it.
- [37:15]
A
But, you know, you made a good point. I want to just pick up on. And I've said this to Joanna several times, and, you know, I said there may be. This was a few months ago. I said there may be dead fishermen in Venezuela now because of our Daily Beast broadcast. And I said that because exactly what you said. It's narcissistically injuring for him. Right. Think of how many times he's brought up the dementia screening exam that he had taken. Right? I mean, it was such a narcissistic injury for him that to have his cognition tested with a dementia screening exam that he cannot stop talking about it and lying about it, of course, as if he'd passed a Mensa exam or broken the roof on the IQ exam, when it's like bragging about passing a roadside sobriety test. It's just a test to make sure that you're competent to be on the road. It's not a. No one is impressed that you passed the test. And actually, I was part of a group of doctors that actually importuned Dr. Ronnie Jackson to give him that test. And that was actually one of the things that sparked that. But when he has a narcissistic injury, right, he feels like he has to strike back to make himself feel superior and powerful again. So every time we put a chink in his armor, right, he's going to act out somewhere else. So you actually raise a good point. In some ways, unless we can actually stop him. Right. Poking the bear, wounding the bear, cornering the bear, never seems to work out well.
- [38:44]
B
Well, I will leave it to finer minds than me to work out how to do that next. But, Dr. Gartner, I suspect the next time we speak, or that you and Joanna speak. It might be around a big birthday, so I think there'll be plenty more to discuss. Dr. Gartner, thank you for joining us.
- [39:04]
A
Thanks for having me.
- [39:09]
B
There's a lot to think about and a lot to chew upon from that amazing discussion with Dr. Gartner. Thank you to everybody who's been listening and watching Dr. Gartner. He's an amazing voice and I know he will be back with important updates no matter how dark they are absolutely necessary. And just a quick thank you to everybody who has been so supportive of Joanna in her absence. I know how much she feels it. I'm sure she's going to address it. And finally, thank you to our team, Ryan Murray, Rachel Passer, Heather Passaro, and Neil Rosenhaus.
- [39:42]
C
So the good news is we have so many beebeast tier members now, there are too many names to read out. And we really appreciate your support.