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- [00:02]
Adam Grant
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- [01:17]
Dr. John Gartner
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Adam Grant
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- [02:41]
Dr. John Gartner
You know, he kind of gave the game away again, as he often does. He said, you know, the moca, that, that or that screening just, you know, I've passed it now three times in front of a whole bunch of doctors. Well, you could maybe get justify giving someone the MOCA once just on their age, just as part of a physical. If you're giving it to him three times, that means you're not assessing dementia. That means you're monitoring dementia. These because if you keep feeling like, no, he's still got the symptoms, we've got him. See how bad he's doing now. Oh, we gotta check again, see how bad he's doing now. I think they're giving him cognitive tests and MRIs every six months to monitor the progress of his dementia and or strokes.
- [03:25]
Joanna Coles
I'm Joanna Coles. This is the Daily Beast podcast. And today we're going to get into analyzing what is going on with Donald Trump's mental health. Let's think about this. We've got the angry Santa speech, hastily called, even interrupting the finale of Survivor. We've got the crazy alcoholics personality that Susie Wiles, his chief of staff, was describing. We've got the manic truth socialing in the middle of the night, dozens of true social posts, including the horrifying one on Rob Reiner. We've got the renaming of the Trump Kennedy center, the grandiosity of that gesture, his own Christmas gift to himself. Who better to analyze what this actually says about Donald Trump and how he's getting on in the White House right now than Dr. John Gartner. Dr. Gartner, for those of you who've watched the podcast before will know he is a clinical psychologist. He was 28 years as an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins. He's been in private practice for a long time, and he has been watching the 40 Years of Donald Trump performing in plain sight on all of our televisions in the public eye. And so he's got an incredible base case against which to look at Donald Trump now. And his diagnosis and his observations are fascinating. You do not want to miss this. Dr. John Gartner, it is thrilling to have you back with us to give us an update on the president's mental health. And I will say that we had an outpouring of interest, thousands of comments with questions for you about what stage of dementia is he in? Can he be on drugs? How can he manage this? But let's kick off with what felt like an angry Santa speech yesterday from the White House by Donald Trump, hastily called. I think he Called it on Tuesday. We know that Mark Burnett, the producer of Survivor, called up the White House pleading that they didn't interrupt the finale of Survivor with one of the president's rambling speeches. But it seemed to be fair to Donald Trump, given some of the behavior we've seen recently, him sleeping, his falling asleep in cabinet meetings, that he actually seemed pretty much on message. He seemed pretty high functioning last night. That's what I saw. What did you, as a clinical psychologist who spent years studying this behavior, what did you see?
- [06:21]
Dr. John Gartner
He was high functioning in the verbal sense. He wasn't showing the kind of breakdown in thinking that we've been talking about because he stuck very closely to the teleprompter. I think what we did see, you know, people have been talking about this manic pace is what they're calling it. He literally spoke at double the velocity and speed that he normally speaks, which is telling. You know, I said for a long.
- [06:44]
Joanna Coles
Time, what is it telling?
- [06:46]
Dr. John Gartner
Well, it's telling that this is, you know, we have to judge people against their own baseline. And if somebody doubles their rate of speed, that's a mental status change of some kind. I've always said that Trump is on the bipolar spectrum. He's not manic. He's hypomanic. Hypo is Greek for less than. So he's not fully manic. But, you know, when he's. I think this month, he had one night where he put out 180 truth social posts. I mean, that's crazy. Just the quantity of it is crazy. I mean, think about this scenario. You go out on an Internet date and you come back home, and the person you just left at the restaurant has left you 45 texts without reading a single text. You already know this person is crazy.
- [07:31]
Joanna Coles
Okay, so two women in the office with me who are listening to this are both nodding like, oh, they're like, he's that guy. He's that guy. You stay away. You never respond, do not engage.
- [07:44]
Dr. John Gartner
Exactly, Exactly. So the quantity is telling us something about one aspect of his mental illness, which is being on the bipolar spectrum. I think the reason that he was speaking so quickly here, he was like a Gatling gun of Gish galloping was because he's sc. He's scared. You know, I think Susie Wiles told him, you've got to give this speech because you're losing the country. You know, they can read the polls. They can see that he's losing the country on every issue. They'll never admit it, of course. And so this was his attempt to kind of make a comeback. And so the anxiety stimulated his hypomania, which then made him speak at this hypomanic pace that isn't even typical of him.
- [08:28]
Joanna Coles
So he's basically panicked, and that's what you're seeing in the speech. He's frightened.
- [08:34]
Dr. John Gartner
Is it possible, like a manic panic?
- [08:37]
Joanna Coles
A manic panic. Is it possible that he's taken some kind of performance drug to be able to do this? Because normally he wanders off the teleprompter, too?
- [08:48]
Dr. John Gartner
Absolutely. He could have taken some Adderall beforehand, and that may be part of what we're seeing. If you've ever interacted with people when they're on Adderall, they'll tell you that they're really able to concentrate much more, but they're speaking very quickly, they're very pressured, or they're very irritable and impatient. So it very well could have been chemically induced. And there's been rumors before that he has taken Adderall before major speeches to stay focused.
- [09:15]
Joanna Coles
So what did you think of the content of the speech?
- [09:19]
Dr. John Gartner
Well, it was, like I said, it was a machine gun of lies. It was kind of a gish galloping because he was so rapidly punching out the lies that you almost couldn't mentally process, much less rebut each one at a time. But they were, you know, of course, completely at odds with reality in every situation. Almost everything he said, the one that I thought was ironic was when he was saying, you know, it's the Democrats who want to raise your health care premium. The Democrats are doing it. They want to do it. Don't blame the Republicans. Well, the Democrats shut down the government to protect the Obamacare subsidies, so we can hardly say they're the ones that want to raise the prices. But, of course, reality has never been a constraint for him, and is that.
- [10:05]
Joanna Coles
You have previously diagnosed him as a malignant narcissist, and now he's got a layer of dementia on top of that. Is that the dementia that we're talking about, or is that the malignant narcissism?
- [10:21]
Dr. John Gartner
Yeah, that's the malignant narcissism, because one component of malignant narcissism is psychopathy. And the first diagnostic criteria for psychopathy is frequently lies. And as I like to point out, Donald Trump is the most documented liar in all of recorded human history. And I challenge anyone to show me a close second.
- [10:40]
Joanna Coles
So. And does he know that he's lying, or is this his own truth, which is different to the truth that the rest of us experience.
- [10:50]
Dr. John Gartner
Well, his own truth. That's a very nice way of putting it.
- [10:55]
Joanna Coles
But what I'm asking is because I think sometimes people who have mental health struggles don't believe the rest of us don't believe what the rest of us believe, but they don't believe it. I'm trying to give him the benefit of the doubt here. They're not trying to deceive. They actually live in a different world.
- [11:16]
Dr. John Gartner
I think Donald Trump is actually complex and I've discussed this with a lot of other mental health professionals. You know, I think there's almost three kinds of lies that Donald Trump tells. One are the ones that are simply bald faced lies meant to deceive. The other ones are places where he's really lied to himself to the point, to your point that he's starting to actually believe what he says. I mean, at a certain point, maybe he actually believes the election was stolen. You know, he said it so many millions of times. And the third type of lie, I'm putting this in air quotes is the result of his dementia where he's misremembering events that just didn't take place. And the example I like to use is the one that actually the New York Times quoted in their article about him is his assertion that his uncle, you know, John Trump had the Unabomber in his class and they had this whole conversation about him. It's like, oh, what was he like, Uncle John? Well, you know, he was a big know it all. And the other students didn't really like him because he was such a know it all. And you know, he goes on and on about this whole kind of character study of the Unabomber. Well, the Unabomber was never in John Trump's class. He went to Harvard, not mit. He never could have had a discussion with his uncle about it because Unabomber, we didn't even discover who the Unabomber was until his uncle had died. So this is an invented story. But it's not like saying inflation is going down and it's the Democrats that want to raise your prices. This is actually. There was no political benefit to him in telling this, you know, ambling, rambling tale that he's remembering from his past. This is something you see a lot with people who have dementia. We call it confabulation, which is there's gaps in their memory and nature abhors a vacuum. So they fill it in. They fill it in with things that might be kind of adjacent. So he knows the Unabomber went to Harvard. He Knows his father taught in Boston, his uncle taught in Boston. So he kind of merges them, you know, and he's done this in ways that are very serious. He said that his father emigrated from Germany. Well, no, it's his grandfather who emigrated from Germany. But you see, when you have dementia, you kind of mush things together in a way that makes sense to you at the time. And you're not lying. You're actually misremembering.
- [13:27]
Joanna Coles
You're misremembering, and then you're constructing a reality which actually isn't real at all.
- [13:32]
Dr. John Gartner
Exactly.
- [13:33]
Joanna Coles
Okay, So I think perhaps the most astonishing example of what I think you will say is malignant narcissism is his response to the tragic death.
- [13:45]
Dr. John Gartner
Yes.
- [13:45]
Joanna Coles
Rob Reiner, where he puts himself center stage, where he says that the reason Rob Reiner, the film director, whose sonwhose middle son has now tragically been arrested for his death, that he had died of Trump Derangement syndrome, and that he was so whipped up in a fury about Trump that this had caused his death. Can you just sort of take apart this statement for us that he made and analyze it for us from your point of view?
- [14:18]
Dr. John Gartner
Yeah, it's a little more even nefarious than you're saying, because he, he implies, if you put it in sort of mob boss languages, he got what was coming to him.
- [14:28]
Joanna Coles
Right.
- [14:29]
Dr. John Gartner
You know, because he's saying, well, he made a lot of people angry with his Trump Derangement Syndrome. And that's what happens. You know, I actually have the tweet somewhere here. I could read the exact wording. I'll read the whole thing. A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away together with his wife Michelle, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as Trump Derangement Syndrome, sometimes referred to as tds. He was known to have driven people crazy by his raging obsession of Donald Trump. With his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness. And with the golden age of America upon us, perhaps might never be, May Robin Michelle rest in peace. So he's saying he made people angry with his Trump Derangement syndrome and it drove people crazy, and that's the cause of his death.
- [15:40]
Joanna Coles
I mean, what do you, have you ever read anything like that before? I mean, you may have done that, so you may well have done because, you.
- [15:49]
Dr. John Gartner
Know, I think the one thing is that, you know, I think for all of us mental health professionals, we have to admit this is a case like the likes of which, you know, you always. The likes of which no one's ever seen before. Well, this is a mentally ill person, the likes of which very few of us have ever seen before because it's.
- [16:05]
Joanna Coles
So extreme, and who's also in a position of unfathomable power.
- [16:11]
Dr. John Gartner
That's what's really frightening. He's in a position of unfathomable power. He has no guardrails because he's surrounded by fanatical true believers and sycophants. Right. Who will not set any limits on him whatsoever. We really have the worst case scenario. We have someone who is a malignant narcissist, someone who is fundamentally evil, in a state of dementia. So he is disorganized, impulsive, primitive even. This tweet itself is more grotesque and more disorganized than even his very low standard. I like what David Frum said about it. He said the post is deranged, pathologically narcissistic, crude, stupid, and cruel. No adult outside a psych ward expresses such thoughts. To have it all as evidence of a twisted soul. So he has a twisted soul. This is what he thinks. But now it's kind of vomiting it on the page in this completely unmediated way. You know, even King Henry viii, you know, had a little bit of, you know, restraint when he wanted to get rid of Thomas More. He just sort of looked into the air and said, who will rid me of this meddlesome priest? You know, that's kind of what he's doing, though, in this post, Trump has been encouraging stochastic terrorism. He's been encouraging people to attack and kill his enemies and his opponents. And some of them are doing it like that couple that was killed in Minnesota, like the people that wanted to kidnap Governor Whitmer. This is a green light encouraging people to act on those impulses.
- [17:46]
Joanna Coles
Okay, I just wanted to come to another line. I like David Frum's line very much. There's a very good line from Ben Schwartz in the Nation, which I was going to read, which says Trump gloated over Reiner's murder the way he did about Stephen Colbert's show getting canceled and Jimmy Kimmel's getting suspended, as if Reiner's murder were another media victory for him. And I thought that was also an interesting way of, again, not being able to understand the gravity of the Reiner's murder. And Attributing it to something similar to a victory in the media.
- [18:24]
Dr. John Gartner
Well, look, if you're a mob boss, which is really what he is, a glorified mob boss, when they rub out the rat, it's something to celebrate. He got what was coming him. You dirty rat. Jimmy. James Cagney.
- [18:39]
Joanna Coles
I remember. I remember. All right. So moving swiftly on Susie Wild this week, it turned out, was the subject of 11 interviews with the journalist Chris Whipple in a piece for Vanity Fair. And she refers to Trump as having an alcoholic's personality. What do you think she meant by that? What is an alcoholic's personality?
- [19:04]
Dr. John Gartner
Well, first of all, I think it's very interesting that her father was an alcoholic. He was a famous football player and sportscaster Pat Summerall. So she's used to dealing with these types of explosive, toxically male personalities. It's probably the only reason she can be chief of staff for Donald Trump, because it kind of fits her repetition compulsion in some psychodynamic way. But what she's talking about is, yeah, Trump doesn't drink, but he's demonstrating these same personality traits. The explosiveness. Right. The rage. Right. The irritability, the unpredictability, the impossible impulsivity, the dangerousness of how he could lash out at any given moment. So there actually is a link between alcoholism and these severe personality disorders in the sense that alcoholism can, first of all aggravate a severe personality disorder. But also, having alcoholic parents can create severe personality disorders in their children because essentially, they're experiencing this very volatile, violent personality shifts in their parent, and so they internalize a very chaotic shifting and unpredictable personality themselves. So the fact that she's saying he's an alcoholic personality is really her way of saying he's got a personality disorder.
- [20:30]
Joanna Coles
So, John, you just discussed there what it's like being the child of alcoholics. What is it like being a colleague or being a Cabinet member around Donald Trump if he has an alcoholic's personality?
- [20:47]
Dr. John Gartner
I think everyone who works in his cabinet, maybe with a few exceptions, are afraid of him. I think they try to avoid him, and I think they try to mollify him as their strategy. Of course. Course, we haven't gotten to his repetitive falling asleep. We've been talking about this. You and I have been talking about this for weeks, months, actually. But every time you have me on the show, there's been new incidences of his falling asleep. But one of my favorite ones is where he falls asleep in the cabinet, and they show this screen of Marco Rubio going on and on prostrating himself, falling all over himself to talk about how wonderful he is. Oh, if it weren't for you, the world. World would be falling apart. You've saved the world. You're so wonderful.
- [21:32]
Joanna Coles
So it has an effect of, as you said, it's an unpredictable environment. So people don't want to provoke the temper, right?
- [21:41]
Dr. John Gartner
Exactly. They're all walking on eggshells and I think actually trying to avoid him, to be honest, as much as they can. I think that Oval Office is like a hot zone, you know, it is not a safe space.
- [21:56]
Joanna Coles
It is. Right. It's the opposite of a safe space. And in terms of Susie Wiles own role, what was interesting, we interviewed Chris Whipple, who did these 11 interviews with her earlier this week on the Daily Beast podcast. And he was saying that she's actually unlike a traditional chief of staff, who is supposed to be the person that can close the door to the Oval Office and confront the President with what they're about to do and say, Mr. President, are you sure that this is a wise decision? It becomes very clear over his series of 11 interviews with her that Susie Wiles does not do that for the president, that actually it's impossible to do that. Do you see her, or is it possibleand I was contemplating this as I was listening to Chris, that she's actually much more of a caretaker. And, you know, Melania Trump is nowhere to be seen. Ivanka has disappeared, has decided that her comment was politics is too cruel. She doesn't want to be a part of it. But we have spoken before on this podcast about how difficult it is being around relatives who are displaying dementia symptoms because it's exhausting. It requires the patience of Job, and.
- [23:11]
Dr. John Gartner
It'S distressing, you know, all of those things. And look, nobody has ever been able to control Donald Trump, even before he got dementia. Okay? That's in part his hypomania. You know, people on the bipolar spectrum cannot be controlled. In part, it's his personality disorder, and in part, now it's also the discontrol that comes from his dementia. So he's wildly uninhibited or disinhibited and out of control. And so if nobody can control him, they just kind of try to manage him, which is sort of like what you're saying people do when someone is has dementia. They're not gonna be able to cure it. They're just trying to get through the day.
- [23:51]
Joanna Coles
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- [24:52]
Dr. John Gartner
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Adam Grant
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Joanna Coles
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Dr. John Gartner
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Dr. John Gartner
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Dr. John Gartner
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Dr. John Gartner
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Adam Grant
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Dr. John Gartner
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- [26:27]
Joanna Coles
Cmintmobile.com and I'm back with Dr. John Gartner, clinical psychologist, who is diagnosing what's going on with Donald Trump's mental health. So one of the things that people point out about Donald Trump is that he has zero attention span and he rolls from one policy to another very quickly. I mean, it's astonishing to think that the Rob Reiner Truth social at the beginning of the week weeks seemed so remarkable. Everybody seemed to be talking about it. Even Maga was coming out and saying, Mr. President, this is inappropriate. And yet we've already rolled on through two news cycles since then. We've got the renaming of the Trump Kennedy center, the grandiosity of it. We've got the angry Santa speech. The sort of telling us off for not appreciating him more is the thing in terms of managing someone like this in a position, position of power. Is the goal to just keep them onto the next thing so they don't get stuck on something?
- [27:26]
Dr. John Gartner
Well, I think they kind of distract him a lot with these little sort of aesthetic projects. He's very involved with what paint they're using in the White House and exactly what kind of lamps they're using and what grass they're using. He can go on and on about these things. He loves to point them out. And you talk about his grandiosity. You know, the other thing, and I think, I think you're right, it's hard for us to focus on the outrage du jour. And this is the Gish galloping, because then there's five more by the next news cycle. The other thing, not only is he renaming the Kennedy center, but he put in those, you know, he has that walk of fame now with every president's picture. He himself put in these explanations under the pictures that sound like a deranged truth social post. You know, so under Joe Biden, it says, oh, crooked Joe was sleepy. And, you know, Obama was the most divine, divisive figure in American history. Oh, yeah, And Joe Biden was the worst president in American history. And he said, and Ronald Reagan was okay because he was a fan of mine. You know, these are not official plaques that you would expect to see anywhere, much less in the White House. It's just his ramblings, his grandiose ramblings. And it's part of a larger narcissistic picture, which is malignant. Narcissists want to erase history. They want to erase everyone that came before them so that the world began with them. And that's what he's really doing, if you look at it. That's why he's tearing down the East Wing of the White House and trying to build a ballroom that dwarfs the White House. That's why he paved over the Rose Garden and put up a parking lot, essentially. That's why he wants to rename the Kennedy center the Trump Kennedy center, and he wants to rename Reagan Airport the Trump Airport. And, you know, it's all about. Everything has to be about me. And anything that even has any resonance or hint of anything, any of the people that came before me, has to be destroyed.
- [29:27]
Joanna Coles
So how does this normally end for someone with such strong strains of malignant narcissism?
- [29:37]
Dr. John Gartner
Well, it almost always ends badly. I mean, the Hitlers always end up in the bunker. The problem is the collateral damage along the way. Collateral damage being us.
- [29:52]
Joanna Coles
Right, so. And if you were working alongside Donald Trump, if, for example, you're the custodian of the White House and you see these little remarks going up about previous presidents, which you understand are, you know, they're immature apart from anything else, and they're unhelpful and they're divisive, and I'm sure they're offensive to other members of the Cabinet. How would you negotiate removing them or not getting them put up there in the first place? Would you say, what a good idea, Mr. President, we should do it next month? Or, oh, Mr. President, that's a genius idea. I'm going to have them done in lettering, and it'll take a few months for them to get here, but when they do, it will be marvellous in the assumption that he will have moved on and forgotten all about it by then. I mean, we've all had to humor elderly relatives who get stuck on something.
- [30:45]
Dr. John Gartner
Well, you make a good point. You know, it's sort of like the way we work with infants, too, right? We sort of distract them. And I think that's sort of what you're saying is he's very distractible and infantile, so maybe we could just distract him and tell him we'll do that later. But the bottom line is there really is no way to manage him there.
- [31:02]
Joanna Coles
Really.
- [31:02]
Dr. John Gartner
You know, his disorder, his malignant narcissism is an untreatable disorder. It's interesting he described Reiner as having untreatable Trump derangement syndrome. Maybe he's heard us talking about him having untreatable disorder.
- [31:15]
Joanna Coles
Right.
- [31:15]
Dr. John Gartner
Because he projects everything, you know, so when you start using language that you're using. You have to wonder if he's recycling it. And then dementia is a deteriorating illness for which we have no cure. Although there is that rumor that he's getting, you know, infused with some kind of anti Alzheimer's drug, and that's why he has those bruises on his hands. We really have no facts to back that up, but it would certainly make sense. But even with such a drug, it's only going to slow down the progress of the dementia. It's not to stop it. So the core problem is not treatable in terms of management strategies. I don't know, maybe after the Trump presidency, we can have a whole other strategy where we interview the people who were in the cabinet. It's like, well, how did you manage him? What was your idea? What was your strategy? What did you come up with?
- [32:01]
Joanna Coles
Well, I'm sure they must all be talking behind his back about sort of how they manage him and the madness of some of the things that he says and how theyhow they try to diffuse some of his stranger ideas. I wanted to ask you too, about impulse control. Is that something that goes as people struggle with mental health issues? Do you think that the tearing down of the East Wing was a symptom of that? I mean, it suddenly went well.
- [32:35]
Dr. John Gartner
It was very impulsive. Right. I mean, it didn't go through any process at all. It's like one day we just woke up and it was gone.
- [32:40]
Joanna Coles
Right. And he tore it down in the night. I mean, the construction, I think the people in charge of the construction, or at least according to Michael Wolff, this is what he heard from inside the White House that, you know, they came to the, they came to Trump and said, you know, we're going to have to. This is going to take some time, blah, blah, blah. And he was like, can you just do it at night?
- [33:00]
Dr. John Gartner
Right. He want just do it now. Let's just do it now.
- [33:02]
Joanna Coles
That's the unfortunateness later.
- [33:04]
Dr. John Gartner
Right, Right. So don't go through any, don't go through any process. You know, you, Michael Wolfe, who's been on your show or with your joint show, has talked about how people in the White House are talking about how aghast they are, how repulsed they are that they talk about the 25th Amendment. There used to be, in his last administration that we found out there was like a text chain where the people would just text to each other. 25. You know, that was code for he's. He's at it again.
- [33:31]
Joanna Coles
Right, right. 25 for the 25th Amendment.
- [33:35]
Dr. John Gartner
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So it was code for, you know, he's off the leash again. So the sad thing is the people who are closest to him know better than anybody how disturbed he is.
- [33:48]
Joanna Coles
So, Dr. Gartner, what is it like being married to someone like this? We know that the first lady is really not around. What are. Just talk to us about what on earth it can be like to be married to someone with malignant narcissism and a layer of dementia.
- [34:05]
Dr. John Gartner
Yeah, to be honest, I think she hates him. I think she truly hates him. He's very hateful and hate a bull. And if you can imagine being married to someone so vile, you would eventually hate them. That's a normal response to someone like him. And it really shows. I mean, when he tries to grab her hand, she slaps it away. She's, as you say, basically ape wall completely from his whole administration. So I always say to know Donald Trump is to hate him. That's the natural human reaction to someone so vile.
- [34:42]
Joanna Coles
And one of the other symptoms you hear about, and you certainly hear about it when you talk to people who've got relatives in care homes, senior care homes, is the sort of hypersexuality or a lack of inhibition that kicks in. Have you seen any evidence of that with Donald Trump?
- [35:03]
Dr. John Gartner
Well, I mean, of course, he's been disinhibited in one way about his sexuality for his whole lifetime because he's a sexual predator. And that just goes with his personality disorder. You know, is he more impulsive or disinhibited about sex now? I'm not sure. There aren't many real examples coming to mind. I don't know who he might be carrying on with at the White House right now. I think there's some rumors about some of the people caring for him, but I wouldn't be surprised or we shouldn't be shocked if he starts making blurting out very sexually inappropriate things just like he's been blurting out curses and then being much more coarse with the press calling them piggy and stupid, and everyone's stupid, everyone's an idiot. But I haven't seen that. Have you seen anything to that effect?
- [35:56]
Joanna Coles
No, I haven't. But I'm conscious of listening to friends whose parents are in care homes. And you hear, I mean, you know, in Florida, I think the fastest group getting STIs are all sort of post 80, because people become very disinhibited. It's a sort of strange and very unappealing characteristic. Characteristic of people, I think, as they get older, when they have Dementia. So, in terms of your own observations, and as you say, we have a very good base case against which to judge Donald Trump because he's been in the public eye for so long and there are various phases of dementia. Where would you say he was on the scale of, say, if one is pretty functional to 10, where you're really needing 24 hour care?
- [36:47]
Dr. John Gartner
I think he's right on that edge. I think he's right on the cusp of being able to function independently and actually requiring care. I mean, I guess we could say the White House is the world's biggest nursing home because he does have a lot of people taking care of him. But the other thing people need to understand is, look, if we were to chart this rate of deterioration on a graph, if you just follow that line with your finger, there's no way he's going to make it to the end of his term compos mentis. And then you have to add. Now we get into calculus here, not just arithmetic. Then we have to add an increase in the rate of acceleration, which is that, I mean, or an increase in the rate of speed, which is that what happens with people who get dementia, when it starts to get to this point, the progress starts to catch up, it starts to get faster and faster till finally, at some point, they really fall off a cognitive cliff. You know, he kind of gave the game away again, as he often does. He said, you know, the MOCA or that screening, I've passed it now three times in front of a whole bunch of doctors. Well, you could maybe justify giving someone the MOCA once, just on their age, just as part of a physical. If you're giving it to him three times, that means you're not assessing dementia. That means you're monitoring, monitoring dementia. Because if you keep feeling like he's still got the symptoms. We've got to see how bad he's doing now. Oh, we got to check again, see how bad he's doing now. I think they're giving him cognitive tests and MRIs every six months to monitor the progress of his dementia and. Or strokes.
- [38:33]
Joanna Coles
Oh, goodness. And we know that he doesn't sleep at least normal hours, whatever. Normal hours.
- [38:41]
Dr. John Gartner
And that's his hypomania.
- [38:43]
Joanna Coles
That's his hypomania. Is it? And isn't sleep disorder also a symptom of dementia?
- [38:50]
Dr. John Gartner
Well, I think he's always been a low sleeper because his hypomanic temperament, that's a lifelong biologically based thing, and it isn't always necessarily bad. Most of the high achievers in our world are on the bipolar spectrum, have some hypomania, but it also can inform some of their mistakes. They can be irritable and arrogant, impulsive, you know, impatient, but they can also behave a lot of confidence and charisma and energy and creativity and draw people to them as politicians need to do. So he's had that temperament. But now, and to be honest, he's always been hate tweeting long into the night. I mean, you know, he's produced tens of thousands of vile tweets. But so again, it's sort of like that numbers thing. You know, if somebody has done 180 angry tweets in the middle of the night, it's kind of diagnostic that some kind of bipolar process is going on. So I think if that has been in plain sight as well. But now when we combine it with everything else, now he's being hypomanic about being disorganized and crazy.
- [40:02]
Joanna Coles
Dr. Gartner, we're going to take a quick break for some sponsors.
- [40:07]
Dr. John Gartner
Hey, Ryan Reynolds here wishing you a very happy half off holiday because right.
- [40:12]
Adam Grant
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- [40:16]
Dr. John Gartner
To be clear, that's half price, not half the service.
- [40:20]
Adam Grant
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- [40:36]
Joanna Coles
Cmn.
- [40:39]
Adam Grant
Hey, it's Adam Grant from Ted's podcast Work Life and this episode is brought to you by ServiceNow. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into. That's why it's no surprise that more than 85% of the Fortune 500 companies use the ServiceNow AI platform. While other platforms duct tape tools together, ServiceNow seamlessly unifies people, data workflows and AI connecting every corner of your business. And with AI agents working together autonomously, anyone in any department can focus on the work that matters Most. Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people@servicenow.com AI agents are everywhere, automating tasks and making decisions at machine speed. But agents make mistakes. Just one rogue agent can do big damage before you even notice. Rubrik Agent Cloud is the only platform that helps you monitor agents, set guardrails and rewind mistakes so you can unleash agents, not risk. Accelerate your AI transformation@rubrik.com that's R U B R-I K dot com. You know what's faster than your paycheck? Literally everything. It's time to get your pay up to speed with earnin. You can access your pay as you work. Instead of waiting days and weeks for a paycheck, get up to $150 a day with a max of 700 between paydays. No interest, no credit checks and no mandatory fees. Because I mean, hey, it's your money. Download the Earn it app now to get it and join millions of people making any day payday. That's E a R N I n. Earn it is not a bank. Access limit are based on your earnings and risk factors available in select states. Expedited transfers available for fee terms and restrictions apply. Visit earn.com for full details.
- [42:21]
Joanna Coles
And Dr. John Gartner and I are back talking about Donald Trump's mental health. So I asked you what it was like to be married to a malignant narcissist. What is it like to have them as a parent? What is the sort of knock on effect? We know that Ivanka has sort of removed herself from the situation and her brothers are more around, but what can it be like to have someone like Donald Trump as your father?
- [42:49]
Dr. John Gartner
Well, a nightmare. You know, one of the things you mentioned, the comments that we've gotten on the show, one of the more common comments, people say, you know, oh that reminds me of my husband or that reminds me of my father. You know, I've had to live with that. And then they kind of sometimes will go through a whole, you know, short biography in the comments to talk about what they've been through. But it's a nightmare. You know, I think to some extent this may have helped shape Trump himself. Cuz his father was a very malignant character. You know, he himself was a racist, he was part of the Ku Klux Klan. He cheated all these people that he, he who rented apartments from him. He cheated the government with their, you know, plant with their rules and regulations. And his grandfather was a known crook, an illegal immigrant, by the way, who used to build whorehouses on land he didn't own and then try to expropriate the land. So a lot of flim flam characters. And so I guess in answer to your question, part of what happens is for some people, people, they basically internalize that personality and then basically bring it into the next generation. And I think that's what's happened with him.
- [43:57]
Joanna Coles
And is there any significance? I noticed twice this week he was giving speeches Melania, unusually, was in the room. And he would refer to Barron as Melania's son. And he would say, she has a lovely son. You know, Melania has a son, and obviously Barron is also his. His son. Is there anything. Is that also a sort of symptom of something?
- [44:22]
Dr. John Gartner
Well, I think it is, actually. I mean, at one level, it could just be, you know, that he has no empathy, he feels no connection to other human beings, so he doesn't feel like it's his son. But also, there's all these subtle ways in which we see, I think, his memory being affected by dementia, and it's affecting the way he describes his interpersonal relationships. Like he describes. Described Susie Wiles as Susie Trump. He introduced her as Susie Trump. Susie Trump. And then later he said, or otherwise known as Susie Wiles. I think he may have caught himself there. Now, maybe I'm totally wrong. Maybe he's been calling her Susie Trump forever. And that's like. Because she's part of the family and nickname and we just didn't know about it. And that's possible. But it's also true that he got confused about whether it was his father or his grandfather, you know, who emigrated from Germany. You know, when you start having those kinds of basic confusions, like, for example, my uncle had dementia, and before he died, he would frequently ask my aunt, are we married? And they've been married for 60 years.
- [45:19]
Joanna Coles
Right.
- [45:20]
Dr. John Gartner
You know, are we married? Is this our house? And then at one point, I thought this was sort of funny. He announced at the table, I don't care what anyone else thinks. As far as I'm concerned, we're married.
- [45:32]
Joanna Coles
Who are the other people and what are they thinking? How intriguing. So if you were. I mean, and the holidays are stressful times for all people, do you think the holidays are stressful for Donald Trump?
- [45:47]
Dr. John Gartner
I don't know. Is it stressful for the Grinch?
- [45:53]
Joanna Coles
Well, he looked pretty stressed on Wednesday night when he was giving his speech, as you say, at twice his normal speed.
- [46:00]
Dr. John Gartner
Yeah, well, you know, it's funny because he's really always been this sort of Grinch. If you look at his Trump tweets around every single major holiday, you know, it's always like, happy Christmas to the liars and the losers. You know, like peace and goodwill to all men.
- [46:19]
Joanna Coles
Oh, goodness. Dr. Gartner, thank goodness you're around to both explain what on earth is going on and what we can see, in fact, in plain sight, but don't have the words and the terminology that you have. So thank you for explaining it to us. And thank you for also giving us a sense of humor about it because we're stuck with him. Do you have any predictions for 2026?
- [46:44]
Dr. John Gartner
Only that it'll be worse than 2025.
- [46:49]
Joanna Coles
Oh, my goodness. We shouldn't be laughing, but what else there is, you know, if we don't laugh, we will cry. Dr. John Gartner, thank you so much for joining us. Have a very peaceful holiday. And please, please keep observing the President as you do and come back in the new year and tell us what you've learned.
- [47:07]
Dr. John Gartner
I'd be happy to.
- [47:08]
Joanna Coles
Thank you very much.
- [47:10]
Dr. John Gartner
You're welcome.
- [47:15]
Joanna Coles
I never fail to find Dr. Gartner's conversations completely fascinating. And again, it's this thing of having been able to observe Donald Trump, Trump in plain sight on our televisions, on our radios, all over Truth Social. No one has colossus like strode the media landscape in quite the same way. And of course, he's left clues for us. Clues of who he used to be and who he is now and how power and age and frankly, family history have changed him. If you have been thankful you for joining us, don't forget to leave your comments for Dr. Gartner on our comment section on YouTube. Don't forget to subscribe to the Daily Beast podcast. We're independent media. We really appreciate your support. You can become a Beast tier member and get access to all sorts of exclusive content. And of course you can subscribe to the Daily Beast, where we chronicle the Trump presidency in real obsessive detail. Anyway, as our first lady would have us say, be beast or be bista. Be very beast. Be more beast. So big. Thank you to Sandra Clark, methinks travels with Carl, Andrew Beaver, Capinator, Harry Clark, Dawn McCarthy, Daniel Dogler, M. Griner, Fulvia Orlando Herbie, Andrew Mellor or Melore as Michael always says. Laz Conde, Bons Oval Love Francisco, Andrea Hodel Bocock, D.C. sharon Shipley, Connie Rutherford, Karen White and Heidi Reilly. Thank you to our production team, Devon Rogerino, Anna Von Erson and Jesse Millward.
- [49:05]
Adam Grant
Hey, it's Adam Grant from Ted's podcast Work Life. And this episode is brought to you by ServiceNet. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into. That's why it's no surprise that more than 85% of the Fortune 500 companies use the ServiceNow AI platform, while other platforms duct tape tools together, ServiceNow seamlessly unifies people, data, workflows and AI connecting every corner of your business. And with AI agents working together, autonomously anyone in any department can focus on the work that matters Most. Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people@servicenow.com AI agents are everywhere, automating tasks and making decisions at machine speed. But agents make mistakes. Just one rogue agent can do big damage before you even notice. Rubrik Agent Cloud is the only platform that helps you monitor agents, set guardrails and rewind. Find mistakes so you can unleash agents, not risk. Accelerate your AI transformation@rubrik.com that's R U B R-I K.com you know what's faster than your paycheck? Literally everything. It's time to get your pay up to speed with Earn in. You can access your pay as you work. Instead of waiting days and weeks for a paycheck, get up to 150 a day with a max of 750 between paydays. No interest, no credit checks and no mandatory fees. Because I mean, hey, it's your money. Download the Earn it app now to get it and join millions of people making any day payday. That's E A R N I N ernin is not a bank. Exercise limit are based on your earnings and risk factors available in select states. Expedited transfers available for fee terms and restrictions apply. Visit Earnin.com for full details. Blood Donation is now more Inclusive More people are able to donate blood with the American Red Cross through FDA guidelines that eliminate eligibility questions based on sexual orientation. Occasion the Red Cross celebrates this historic change and welcomes those who may be newly eligible to donate blood. There's a place for everyone in the mission of the Red Cross. The Red Cross is committed to achieving an inclusive blood donation process that treats all potential donors with equality and respect while maintaining the safety of the blood supply. Join us and help save lives. To learn more and make your appointment to donate blood, visit redcrossblood.org LGBTQ that's redcrossblood.org LGBTQ want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast the Last Laugh and our Star Studded the Daily Beast podcast@thedailybeast.com podcasts if you enjoyed this.
- [51:40]
Dr. John Gartner
Episode, consider becoming a Daily Beast subscriber.
- [51:43]
Joanna Coles
Subscribing is the best way to feed.
- [51:45]
Dr. John Gartner
The Beast and support all of your podcasts as we cover what might become the darkest timeline. Head to thedailybeast.com membership podcast and sign up today.