Trump Shows ‘Unmistakable’ Signs of Serious Dementia, Experts Say. Why Isn’t Congress Invoking the 25th Amendment?

Yet many of the same outlets that focused obsessively on Biden’s age and cognitive deterioration continue to write about Trump as if he were a competent, functioning politician.

Meanwhile, many U.S. mental health experts have been warning for years that Trump not only fits the profile of a dangerous psychopath, but has numerous hallmark signs of dementia. Today, we revisit their findings – a reminder that the future of the world is at risk if we continue to deny that the emperor has no clothes.

Plus, inspiration from the great Dr. King, and the pros and cons of fawning. 

Trump Appears Ill and Demented, Say Experts. So Why Is He Still in Office?

In 2017, early in Trump’s first term, a coalition of mental health professionals warned that Trump’s mental health posed a “clear and present danger,” threatening both the nation and individual well-being. They set out their case in “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” a book edited by forensic psychiatrist Dr. Bandy X. Lee. Many fears set out in the book – as well as in subsequent expanded editions – have already come true.

Among other things, contributors argued that Trump’s malignant narcissism, cruelty and pathology would put the country at grave risk of involvement in war. Indeed, Trump’s recklessness, including killing people on fishing boats, an illegal invasion of Venezuela, threats to Mexico and numerous other countries, and now a fixation with Greenland, puts our country – and the world – at grave risk. He pushes responsibility for this escalated tension onto others – in the case of Greenland, onto Norway’s Prime Minister, for not giving him the Nobel Peace Prize (the prize is awarded by a committee independent of the Norwegian government.) Or, as Substack columnist Jeff Tiedrich summarizes: “Spite-fueled toddler claims he gets to have Greenland because he didn’t get a Nobel Peace Prize.”

Contributors to “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” also warned that Trump would seek to undermine democracy at home, and we’ve seen that bear out in his attempted January 6 coup and then throughout his second presidency, from the rampages of DOGE to the lawlessness of ICE. 

But the authors did not just warn that Trump was dangerously callous, mentally disturbed and showing clear psychopathic tendencies. In later interviews, petitions and editorials, Bandy Lee and others pointed out that he was showing hallmark signs of cognitive decline, including in a statement on the World Mental Health Coalition’s website. Their concerns included not only Trump’s incoherence, impaired memory, and “confabulation, where memory gaps are filled with false or fabricated details,” but also an “amplification” of his paranoid, narcissistic, and antisocial personality traits, which they described as “criminal and dangerous.” The experts also noted Trump’s aggression, disinhibition in behavior and vulgar, hateful language. 

Former Johns Hopkins professor Dr. John Gartner has raised similar concerns, both in media appearances and a 2024 petition saying that. “Donald Trump is showing unmistakable signs strongly suggesting dementia, based on his public behavior and informant reports that show progressive deterioration in memory, thinking, ability to use language, behavior, and both gross and fine motor skills.” 

​​In an April 2025 conversation with MindSite News, Gartner explained his conviction that “there was absolutely no doubt” that Trump has dementia. “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),” said Gartner in one of the many examples he gave. “Trump will say something like ‘mishiz’ for missiles, or ‘Chrishus’ for Christmas, because he can’t complete the word. He is losing his capacity for coherent speech…Then there is the physical deterioration. He used to be quite graceful, and now he uses a wide-based gait typical of frontotemporal dementia.” In a recent appearance on The Daily Beast Podcast, Gartner notes that “the paranoia is becoming more grotesque, more primitive.”

You don’t need to have taken care of a loved one with Alzheimer’s disease to imagine how terrifying it is to have someone with dementia in control of nuclear weapons – someone perhaps lacking the wherewithal to resist coercion from those around him, or the impulse control to behave responsibly. Yet this is exactly where we find ourselves. In September, according to The Guardian, Trump gathered military commanders, praising a potentially illegal bombing of Iran before describing how President Obama went down the stairs: “Da da da da da da, bop, bop, bop.” 

The 25th Amendment includes a provision to remove the President when they are “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” The governor of Illinois, J.B.Pritzker, specifically mentioned dementia when calling for the use the 25th Amendment in September, a comment that came after the president said cities like Chicago should be used “as training grounds for the military.” 

Most Republicans seem determined to keep their head in the sand, but Trump’s increasingly erratic activity this week has promptedmore calls to have him removed, including from Senator Ed Markey, as well as Representatives Eric Swalwell and Yassamine Ansari, the latter of whom wrote on X that “The president of the United States is extremely mentally ill and it’s putting all of our lives at risk. The 25th Amendment exists for a reason – we need to invoke it immediately.”

In other news….

Is fawning a trauma response? It’s timely question, according to Katy Waldman of The New Yorker, who examines the habit (also called “people pleasing”) in a recent review of two books on the subject.”Well, the dirty secret is that we all do this – especially women,” explains Waldman, in an interview with a colleague about the story. “I think I got this assignment because my editor was, like, You do this all the time. It’s so annoying.” But fawning may originate as a defence against threats to one’s survival, say therapists, based in part on work with women who have been kidnapped, or victims of persistent domestic violence. “By some interpretations,” Waldman writes, “the fawner resembles Scheherazade, forestalling death through creative feats that appease the men around her.”

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Sticking with love: In light of authoritarian violence that may inspire hatred in some of us, I’m reminded of a lesser-known quote from the great Martin Luther King, who said, “I say to myself that hate is too great a burden to bear. I have decided to stick with love.”

The sentiment – that hatred hurts the hater, too – echoes  his Nobel Lecture, given at the University of Oslo on December 11, 1964, in which Dr. King said: “Violence is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding: It seeks to annihilate rather than convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends up defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.”