While for many it’s obvious how serious Trump’s declining mental capacity has become, for too many Americans that reality has not yet broken through. The media continues to treat Trump like a normal candidate; many Americans have baked Trump’s bizarre behavior into their perceptions of him; and many take right-wing lies about Joe Biden’s mental fitness at face value.
Given this, we wanted to hear from John Gartner, founder of Duty To Warn, a group of mental health professionals who have been raising the alarm about Trump’s increasingly sociopathic behavior since 2017. Now in 2024, Gartner has an even more dire warning about Trump: that there are increasing signs the former president is heading fast down the road toward dementia.
The President of the United States shouldn’t be praised because there was a speech that can be found that they were able to make it through. The bar should be higher than that. It used to be that people heard presidential speeches and they said “I’m inspired! That was moving!” Not just, “Hey! I found a speech where he made it to the end without embarrassing himself!”. The bar has moved, it’s no longer a pull-up bar, it’s a limbo bar.