The founder of Duty to Warn says ‘Trump is the American Hitler, and immigrants are the new Jews’

Earlier this year, MindSite News sat down for a Zoom call with Dr. John Gartner, a prominent psychotherapist and author who has practiced in Baltimore for 35 years and taught part-time at Johns Hopkins University Medical School. We focused on what he considers Trump’s dangerous dementia and mental illness as well as the psychopathology of Trump’s cabinet, Musk and DOGE’s hostile takeover of the federal government, and the administration’s sadistic war on immigrants.

As founder of the group Duty to Warn, founded in 2017 by mental health professionals and laypeople to warn the community-at-large of impending danger, Gartner has long spoken out about Donald Trump’s unfitness to be president. He has contributed to psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee’s bestselling anthology The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess  a President, appears regularly on television and shows like Meidas Touch to discuss the threat of a Trump presidency, and co-hosts the Shrinking Trump Podcast and companion YouTube show with psychologist Harry Segal of Cornell University.

On the podcast, Gartner recently celebrated the ordination of Pope Leo XIV, who he predicts will become a leading opposition figure to what he sees as Trump’s cruelty. “I love Pope Leo – he’s a radical liberal when it comes to immigration and the poor,” Gartner says. He also noted the comments made on X (formerly Twitter) by the bishop of Philadelphia, who wrote about Trump and the president of El Salvadoran laughing at the deportation of a US resident to El Salvador. Th bishop asked, “Do you not see the suffering? Is your conscience not disturbed?” Gartner ‘s respsonse: “It’s nice to see the Catholic church affirm the true values of Christianity. I’m really buoyed by his elevation.”

MindSite News co-editor Diana Hembree’s interview with Gartner has been edited for length and clarity.

MindSite News: Dr. Gartner, you’ve talked about two aspects of Trump, in particular, that make him a terrifying choice as president of the United States: What you see as his advancing dementia and his serious mental illness. Let’s talk first about Trump’s dementia in his role as president of the most powerful country in the world. 

You have said, quote, “there is absolutely no doubt” that Trump has dementia, including an ongoing deterioration in memory, thinking, behavior and motor skills. Trump used to be very articulate in earlier years, you’ve said, but now he often, quote, “degenerates into literal incoherence, where no one can tell what he is trying to say.” Could you talk about the signs of dementia you’ve observed in Trump during his most recent presidential campaign and now?

Dr. John Gartner: Certainly. When we’re diagnosing dementia, what we need to see is a deterioration of someone’s own baseline of functioning. What we see that a lot of people don’t appreciate is that when Donald Trump was younger in the 1980s, he was actually quite articulate. He spoke in polished paragraphs; now he has difficulty even finishing a sentence. His thoughts were logical and related: now they’re tangential. He goes off on these ramblings where he is confabulating things – weird things in which he’ll talk about Venezuelans and mental hospitals, and then he’ll talk about sharks and batteries or the late, great Hannibal Lector and Silence of the Lambs. And why is he talking about Hannibal Lector – a fictional character who was not great; he was a murderer, a serial killer. It makes sense in Trump’s mind but these are really random associations. And there is an accelerating rate of decline.

“There is absolutely no doubt Trump has dementia. He is losing his capacity for coherent speech and has difficulty even finishing a sentence.”

You’ve said that what is most alarming is how far Trump has declined in the last four years. In a petition signed by 3,000 medical professionals warning that Trump’s probable diagnosis is dementia, you said that sometimes forgetting a word is normal aging, whereas inventing words or using non-words is not. Could you elaborate?

He is losing his capacity for coherent speech. We’ve collected dozens and dozens of Trump’s phonemic paraphrasias, in which you use sounds in place of an actual word  (a hallmark of brain damage and dementia).  What happens is that someone is trying to say a word and then they get the first part out but they have to end it or create one because they can’t remember the rest. Trump will say something like ‘mishiz’ for missiles, or “Chrishus” for Christmas, because he can’t complete the word. Then we see also a lot of semantic paraphrasias, in which he uses a word incorrectly, as in “the oranges of the situation” because it rhymes with “the origins of the situation.” This is not within normal limits; his basic ability to use language is breaking down.

So there is that verbal deterioration. And then there is the physical deterioration. He used to be quite graceful, and now he uses a wide-based gait typical of frontotemporal dementia, sometimes he swings his right leg in a semi-circle. He also has trouble getting up the ramp; he has trouble doing physical things.

The other way we see deterioration is in his behavior. Actually, this is where people say, ‘Well, how can you tell? He’s a bad person; he breaks every rule of law and decency, what is new?’ But he is much more impulsive and erratic now. He blurts things out; he makes impulsive decisions that he has to then reverse, like his many reversals on tariffs.

Like Trump, Elon Musk is a sociopath. He feels no remorse in inflicting pain on people; in fact, he feels a sense of glee and mastery.

Now people may think that because Donald Trump is demented that he won’t be very effective in his agenda. But the problem is he has the whole Project 2025 team behind him, led by Russell Vought. And he’s got Elon Musk, who is a mental health study in and of himself. Musk is on the spectrum; like Trump, he is hypomanic, and like Trump, he is clearly also a sociopath. He feels no remorse in inflicting pain on people; in fact, he feels a sense of glee and mastery in doing it. He was joking about using a chainsaw (to cut federal jobs), holding one up and laughing about it. He’s taking away the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. He’s a monster, just as Trump is a monster, and Trump attracts monsters. Now we have a real Trump problem, because we now have a whole government that is populated by people who have some version of his personality disorder.

Could you explain what you mean by Trump’s personality disorder? I know you have said for some time that the mental disorder he suffers from is called malignant narcissism.

Yes, I was one of the first people to say he was a malignant narcissist early on in 2017. And the reason I was one of the earliest to say it was not because I was more perceptive or more knowledgeable but because I happened to have done my post-doc with Otto Kernberg, who is a famous psychoanalyst in the area of personality disorders. The diagnosis of malignant narcissism is not in the DSM; it’s actually an obscure historical diagnosis that was introduced by psychologist Erich Fromm, who himself escaped the Nazis, in an attempt to explain the psychology of Hitler and other murderous, paranoid, grandiose dictators like him.

People with the disorder are usually characterized by entitlement, manipulation, grandiosity, pathological lying, the absence of empathy and conscience, and sadism, the latter of which results in a sadistic psychopath, according to Kernberg and others. I believe that Fromm called malignant narcissism ‘the quintessence of evil.’

That’s exactly what he said. It is interesting – it’s probably one of the only psychiatric diagnoses we have, other than anti-social disorder, that really defines the theology category of evil. In other diagnoses, we generally try to take away the stigma of mental illness. But this is one that deserves to be stigmatized. 

You’ve mentioned that nuclear war is one of the most frightening outcomes of Trump’s mental illnesses while he is president. What needs to happen, in your opinion? Is there any chance this year that mental health experts could succeed in getting Trump evaluated by non-partisan mental health experts using the 25th Amendment?

No, that is not going to happen, unfortunately. I’ve been fighting for it for a decade, and I may never live to see it. But you’ve talked about nuclear war being one of the most pressing issues facing us. I don’t think Trump, in a demented haze, will press a button to attack, say, Denmark, but what people don’t understand is that peace doesn’t keep itself. 

The default option for humanity for the last thousand years has been war. Everyone has tried to attack their neighbor, take their land and their resources. And the period we’ve lived through is largely the golden age of humanity. After World War II, America banded with Europe and NATO and for the first time created a world government. And for the first time, there were international rules and consequences. Yes, we’ve had bad proxy wars and stupid wars like Vietnam and Iraq, but as David Brooks has said, that was more from arrogance and stupidity rather than malevolence. We basically set the rules of the road and helped keep the peace, even if not perfectly.

But what is happening here is that we’ve split with NATO. It is as if during World War II we had brought Churchill into the Oval Office and humiliated him and then joined Hitler. We have literally turned the international order upside down. Aside from emboldening Putin and putting Europe in danger, what it means is the safety is off. There are no consequences. This whole mutual assured destruction thing has always been so creepy, but it worked (to keep the peace). So the thing is that with all the world’s policemen gone, and no world order, somebody is almost inevitably going to set off a nuclear weapon. 

That’s a terrifying scenario.

Yes. But people are not thinking so much about those horrors, because with all the horrors right in front of our face, it’s hard to even contemplate the domino effects, the long-term implications.

You have written that Trump, quote, “rages at being persecuted by imaginary enemies, including vulnerable minority groups who actually represent no threat whatsoever. With such a leader, all who are not part of the in-group… are enemies who must be destroyed.” Is this why Trump is demonizing and persecuting immigrants, in your opinion? After all, two of his wives were immigrants, and, according to statements from German authorities, Trump’s own grandfather migrated to the US from Germany illegally.

That is correct. I’ve often said that Trump is the American Hitler, and immigrants are the new Jews. He is persecuting immigrants the way that Hitler persecuted Jews, and we are watching our society do nothing to protect them – the way Europe did nothing to protect its Jews. It’s totally being replayed. He wants to send immigrants to concentration camps. People need to understand that the definition of a concentration camp is not necessarily a death camp – that’s worse, obviously. A concentration camp is where you take an ‘undesirable’ population and you imprison them and they’re separated from the rest of the population. He wants to send them back to their countries, but they don’t all have a place to go, so he’s going to start accumulating them in these camps.

Trump is the American Hitler, and immigrants are the new Jews. He is persecuting immigrants the way Hitler persecuted Jews, and we are watching our society do nothing to protect them.

Trump started building these camps in his first administration, but then separating children from their parents blew up and he kind of backed off from that. But this time he’s not going to. I was really shocked when he was going to send immigrants to Guantanamo, but that’s now apparently too expensive. That would have been even worse – a concentration camp where we couldn’t even see what’s going on. 

In a sense he has done that in El Salvador, by sending Venezuelan immigrants there he was supposed to bring back by order of a US federal judge. But he ignored the order and the immigrants are actually in an infamous prison work camp in El Salvador known for its human rights violations.

Right. There are going to be more and more people in more and more camps. We are heading toward a constitutional crisis with that as Trump is disregarding the orders of the judge. And once the executive branch decides it doesn’t have to follow the orders of the judicial branch, then it’s game over (for democracy). It’s officially over.

In terms of bringing people into the country, the Trump Administration recently intervened in the Romanian government’s prosecution of alleged sex traffickers and dual US/British citizens Tristan and  Andrew Tate for rape, sex with minors, money laundering and human trafficking, among other charges, flying them to Florida on  Feb. 27 of this year. According to news accounts, Andrew Tate is a big supporter of Trump and contributed to his campaign.

I watched a chilling interview clip with Andrew Tate in a program on YouTube – we’ll put a trigger warning on this interview – raging about his fury at young women who crossed him. Among other things, Tate said, “This is what I learned at pimp school…. just bring out the machete, and boom!… Grab them by the neck“– here he mimes viciously punching someone over and over in the face — “her f—ing cheekbones are broken…she’s crying…“shut up, b—–!”). It was absolutely horrifying. Why do you think Trump officials intervened on behalf of Tate and his brother?

Well, as you said, Tate was a Trump supporter. I almost assume that at this point he would be. Many major Trump supporters are sexual predators. Trump is a convicted sexual predator; Hegseth is an [alleged] sexual predator; Kavanaugh an [alleged] sexual predator. We keep hearing about another Republican congressman or big contributor who is a sexual predator. It’s incredible.

One analogy for what’s happened is cancer. Our country has advanced cancer. We had a chance to remove the cancerous tumor and we didn’t. And now it has metastasized. The DNA of our country is changing because the cancer cells start infecting other cells and altering their DNA. So we’re becoming…. the whole country is becoming more Trumpian, and this is actually what happened in World War II. 

Malignant narcissists (like Trump) revel in being destructive, humiliating, insulting, degrading, laughing at other people’s pain and humiliation. They’re basically terrifying the world right now.

One of the contributors to The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump is Robert J. Lipton, a very famous Yale psychologist – he’s 95 but he is still alive and kicking. But he started writing after World War II about authoritarianism, and he coined a term I like a lot about a phenomenon that he called “malignant normality.” In the mentally disturbed world of malignant narcissists, once they gain power, their mad world becomes the conventional wisdom for the whole society. So it’s really as if the world went insane. Americans are being infected as if they were in that zombie movie to become monsters. And it’s frightening, but it’s one of the things that happens to society when the malignant narcissists have been able to gain power.

Is there a way we can combat this growing authoritarianism?

It’s very dire. They hold the levers of power, and they’re ruthless, and they’re moving at warp speed. And they have no scruples. And there really is nothing they will allow to stop them. They have no internal values or morals or fear or shame because they are psychopaths. And now, unlike the first Trump administration, Trump has really populated the whole government with people who are more or less equally sick. Or sick in the same way, even if they’re not as sick. Someone like Pete Hegseth, for example, is a mini-Trump: He degrades women; he’s a Christian racist and a nationalist. So now we’re in much bigger trouble. Because the people who were guardrails, even if they were Trumpian, at some level had a conscience, at some level were human, and they were still loyal to the United States of America. Now it’s like, what do we say, ‘Hell is empty because the devils are all here’? I think that’s from Shakespeare.

Yes, absolutely, from The Tempest. You and psychologist Harry Segal have compared Elon Musk to Darth Vader in Star Wars and Trump to the Emperor, who you mention is “always an old and shadowy figure in the background.” You describe Musk as the Darth Vader-like invader, who is actually out there, quote, “acting out and breaking laws and acting quickly, all because Donald Trump gave him permission to do so.” 

I do like that analogy (laughs).

You also recently said that Trump has “outsourced his brain, which is demented, to Elon Musk” since Musk is relatively young and has a lot of energy. Musk has already caused an enormous amount of destruction. Without being elected or appointed to the Cabinet, Musk and his young tech acolytes in the so-called Department of Governmental Efficiency, or DOGE, have been rampaging through the federal government, shuttering departments and firing tens of thousands of federal workers, many of whom who Musk claims – without any proof – are underperforming. They’re also threatening to fire hundreds of thousands more, although there is pushback from the courts.

Yes, and there was something in the New York Times about the appointments clause – you have to be appointed for a job. Musk was not elected, not appointed by the Senate – that was the basis in which the courts were going to stop Musk. (Trump critic and attorney) George Conway said that was the basis on how the courts would get rid of Musk. And I just texted him today and said ‘You were right!’ 

But now we’re in a different phase, where I think it’s going to be a bit of the hide the ball, Three Card Monte. For example, with USAID, Musk’ team cancelled the USAID contracts, and the judge said, ‘Sorry, you can’t do that; you have to honor the contracts.” The next thing [Musk’s team] did was close the building and announce they’re going to shred all the documents in the building, absolutely everything there. They said the shredder is going to be working full-time to shred everything; if it’s broken, only then will we use the burn bags, “but otherwise we’re shredding everything.” 

So now when someone says, “Now look, we weren’t kidding; you really have to honor all the contracts,” they’re going to go, ‘What contracts?’ It’s like the fake elector scheme  –  who the hell would have even thought of that? That’s what some people don’t realize. The way Trump is going to defy court orders isn’t always going to be open defiance. A lot is going to be covert defiance: ‘We are following the order, but we didn’t follow the order. We’re going to release the money, but we didn’t release the money.” And that means you have to file the suit again, and that’s another three months. Because they are so creative in their criminality and so shameless in their lying, they can do anything and call it anything. 

“It is really startling how in a matter of weeks America went from being the city on a hill to a pariah state. We’re practically North Korea right now in the eyes of the world.”

I wondered what you thought, from a psychological point of view, about Trump’s video of a dystopian Gaza made over in his own image. In it there were no visible Palestinians but a Qatar-like vibe, a lot of vulgar giant golden statues of Trump, bearded men belly dancing and small children on a beach rushing to catch dollars tossed out to them by Elon Musk.

Well, we have to remember that malignant narcissists are sadists. They revel in being destructive, humiliating, insulting, degrading, laughing at other people’s pain and humiliation. They’re basically terrifying the world right now. Everyone is afraid of losing their job and their 401-K going down or what’s going to happen to the world order. Or whether they or someone they love is going to be deported. And the thing is, malignant narcissists thrive on that fear. They love that fear. It gives them a rush, a dopamine rush, to be destructive. There’s a phrase for that: Omnipotent destructiveness. It’s feeling powerful in an excited way because you’re destroying things or people or institutions. So there is this glee, a sadistic, almost satanic glee they’re taking in all of the harm and uncertainty and chaos and fear they’re generating.

There is certainly a lot of fear and chaos following the new series of threats to Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security, and USAID and other federal agencies, as well as the attacks on diversity, schools, universities and freedom of speech. Not to mention the fear, anger and incredulity about Trump’s immigration raids and his threats to take over Canada, Mexico, the Panama Canal, and Greenland, with him telling Denmark that he wants Greenland and he intends to get it with or without their permission.

Yes! It is really startling how in a matter of weeks America went from being the city on the hill to a pariah state. We’re practically North Korea now in the eyes of the world. Canada is actually organizing a boycott of American products:  As an act of patriotism, they’re asking people not to buy American. We ended our last show on Shrinking Trump with a parody from Canada of the song “I Will Survive” (which is directed at the United States). It’s in the last three minutes of the show, and you can see us dancing to it (laughter).

“The Trump administration is on the road to fascism, and the shocking thing is how quickly it’s going.“

You had Laurie Winer of the Los Angeles Review of Books on your ‘Shrinking Trump’ show recently, and she noted that the Nazi Party seized complete power in Germany in a matter of months. She implied that the Trump administration appears to be on a similar trajectory on the road to fascism. What do you think?

The Trump administration is on the road to fascism, and the shocking thing is how quickly it’s going. It was 53 days, I believe, before Hitler seized complete power with the Reichstag, and all legislative powers were all vested in him. Of course now we don’t need the Congress to vote now, because the (Republican majority) is just doing what Trump wants.

What did you think of Chief Supreme Court Justice John Robert’s rebuke to Trump yesterday? He said, “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.” Do you see that as too little, too late?

Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett still have a vestige of a conscience. There is still humanity left. Those two people – and it’s frightening to think about it this way – are really the two thin reeds on which any possible survival of the Constitution rests. They’re the swing justices now.

It does drive me crazy how weak the Democrats have been, how naive they have been. Because two groups are playing by two sets of rules. I feel like Democrats bring an email to a knife fight. If you’re in a situation where someone is trying to murder you, you need to grab any weapon you can. But Democrats did so little to protect us. Trump put all these corrupt actors in place during his first administration, like (Postmaster General) Louis DeJoy, who cycled money to his own company. Biden could have gotten rid of him for cause. But he didn’t – he didn’t fire anybody. And now Trump is firing thousands of people, and Biden fired no one. There was also an inspector general of the Secret Service who was part of the text erasure scandals, and he had erased some texts, so he was basically investigating himself. And that violates the primary rule of jurisprudence – you just can’t have a guy in that position.

The press really ignored the signs of Trump’s dementia and his mental illness, and their sanewashing has normalized the abnormal and things that are crazy and destructive.

Do you feel that the mainstream press has been sanewashing Donald Trump?

Yes, the press has sanewashed Trump; they really have. This is another thing that has been so frustrating. Sane-washing is a great term: It’s normalizing the abnormal. Things that are crazy and destructive and not normal, if you homogenize it enough then people can accommodate to it. Suddenly that becomes the new normal. The press really ignored the signs of Trump’s dementia and his mental illness, and we had so much trouble getting the mainstream media to even report on this as a question! But they kept hammering on the issue of age with Biden, and Trump was and is so much more cognitively impaired, mentally and psychiatrically. I mean, Biden wasn’t talking about the late, great Hannibal Lector. But the mainstream media kept making it sound like it was the demented guy versus the robust Trump. Or it was ‘two old men – are they both too old to run for president?’ They never gave an honest hearing to the kind of data you and I have been talking about. 

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