Trump’s Advanced Dementia Isn’t Just a Problem— This Cognitive Collapse Is A National Emergency

He’s Not Just Unfit. He’s Unraveling— & They’re Pretending It’s All Fine

Trump keeps claiming the U.S. donated $60 Million towards ameliorating the famine in Gaza. As with virtually everything Trump says, that isn’t remotely true. The U.S. has pledged $30 million and given $3 million. That’s the kind of Trump exaggeration and gaslighting he’s used his entire life. And it’s worked for him— albeit not for his victims. Karen DeYoung wrote that “Using nearly identical wording, Trump has at least three times this week made the $60 million claim, disparaging what he said was media inattention to his administration’s generosity. ‘We gave $60 million a couple of weeks ago,’ he told reporters at the White House on Thursday. ‘Nobody said anything about it. … Nobody said thank you. I just wanted to get the people fed,’ Trump said. Is this a sane person?

Chris Truax asserts he isn’t. Although he gives Trump the benefit of the doubt as a confabulist: someone who believes his own lies, even if they are obviously and patently false, like most of what Trump says. “A person confabulates when they are telling completely invented stories that don’t provide them any particular tangible benefit. In other words, it’s not like lying to try and get out of a speeding ticket… In older people, confabulation is one of the clearest early signs of dementia. The day you witness someone confabulate is often the day you are forced to admit to yourself that a beloved parent needs help, and that all the little slips and oddities you’ve been seeing can no longer be rationalized away.”

Difficulty with mathematical concepts is another early warning sign of dementia. Now watch Trump attempting to explain how he is going to make drug prices go down by “1,000 percent, 600 percent, 500 percent, 1,500 percent.” That’s complete nonsense, unless drug companies will be paying patients to accept prescriptions, since reducing drug prices by 100 percent would mean they were free. Certainly, someone who got a business degree from Wharton and has spent his life running a company would know how percentages work.

Or take his insistence that former President Obama and his FBI director, James Comey, made uptime Epstein files, even though they were long out of office by the time Epstein was most recently arrested  in 2019. Again, that’s very troubling, because being unable to correctly process when past events took place is a common feature in confabulation. The same goes for being unable to remember that he himself appointed Jerome Powell as the chair of the federal reserve. And then, of course, there are all the little lapses in judgment that Trump has been displaying recently. 

… If you aren’t comfortable with labeling this as dementia, that’s fine. But there is no question that the president— the man tasked with making critical life and death decisions for both the country and the world— is struggling with mathematical concepts, has vivid “memories” that are not rooted in reality and has an increasingly foggy grasp of past events that did happen. That’s not a medical diagnosis. These are facts we can see for ourselves and we all know, even those of us who voted for Trump three times, that this can’t be allowed to continue. 

Whatever dementia issues Joe Biden may have, there is no denying that his staff was superb at managing them and protecting both Biden and the country. Trump, however, doesn’t have those guardrails. That’s one of the reasons we are seeing what we are seeing. Can you imagine Pete Hegseth or Kristi Noem managing Trump’s dementia or even simply telling him “no” and threatening to resign? 

Given this lack of independence in Trump’s Cabinet, I’m not sure what the ultimate solution is. But I know that the first step is for Trump’s most loyal supporters to admit, even if only to themselves, that there is a problem, just as Biden’s supporters did for him. 

Donald Trump is showing all the signs of suffering from dementia. If this were a neighbor, a parent, or a family friend, you would have no trouble seeing it. We should not turn our heads just because it is the president. 

“Trump’s frequently bizarre public appearances,” wrote Adam Gabbatt over the weekend, “which this month have seen the president claim, wrongly, that his uncle knew the Unabomber and rant unprompted about windmills on his recent trip to the UK, have once again raised questions about his mental acuity, experts say. For more than a year Trump, 79, has exhibited odd behavior at campaign events, in interviews, in his spontaneous remarks and at press conferences. The president repeatedly drifts off topic, including during a cabinet meeting this month when he spent 15 minutes talking about decorating, and appears to misremember simple facts about his government and his life… The White House removed official transcripts of Trump’s remarks from its website in May, claiming it was part of an effort to “maintain consistency”. It is worth reading Trump’s remarks in full, however, to get a sense of how the president speaks on a day-to-day basis.”

At the beginning of July, Trump was asked, “What is the next campaign promise that you plan to fulfill to the American people?” He then rambled about meeting foreign leaders and removing regulations, adding: 

“I got rid of— just one I got rid of the other night, you buy a house, they have a faucet in the house, Joe, and the faucet the water doesn’t come out. They have a restrictor. You can’t— in areas where you have so much water they don’t know what to do with it. Uh, you have a shower head the shower doesn’t uh, the shower doesn’t, you think it’s not working. It is working. The water’s dripping out and that’s no good for me. I like this hair lace and [sic]— I like that hair nice and wet. Takes you— you have to stand in the shower for 20 minutes before you get the soap out of your hair. And I put a, a thing— and it sounds funny but it’s really not. It’s horrible. And uh, when you wash your hands, you turn on the faucet, no water comes out. You’re washing whole— water barely comes out it’s ridi… this was done by crazy people. And I wor… wrote it all off and got it approved in Congress so that they can’t just change it.”

“Any fair-minded mental-health expert would be very worried about Donald Trump’s performance,” Richard Friedman, a professor of clinical psychiatry and the director of the psychopharmacology clinic at Weill Cornell Medical College, wrote in The Atlantic, after a stumbling performance from Trump in his debate against Kamala Harris last September.

He added: “If a patient presented to me with the verbal incoherence, tangential thinking, and repetitive speech that Trump now regularly demonstrates, I would almost certainly refer them for a rigorous neuropsychiatric evaluation to rule out a cognitive illness.”

At a recent cabinet meeting called to discuss the flooding tragedy in Texas, the war in Ukraine and Gaza, the bombing of Iran, and global tariffs, Trump went on a 13-minute monologue about how he had decorated the cabinet meeting room.

After talking about paintings which he said he had personally selected from “the vaults,” Trump said. “Look at those frames, you know, I’m a frame person, sometimes I like frames more than I like the pictures,” and added he had overseen the cleaning of some china.

…“What we see are the classic signs of dementia, which is gross deterioration from someone’s baseline and function,” John Gartner, a psychologist and author who spent 28 years as an assistant professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, said in June.

“If you go back and look at film from the 1980s, [Trump] actually was extremely articulate. He was still a jerk, but he was able to express himself in polished paragraphs, and now he really has trouble completing a thought and that is a huge deterioration.”

Gartner, who during Trump’s first term co-founded Duty to Warn, a group of mental health professionals who believed Trump had the personality disorder malignant narcissism, warned: “I predicted before the election that he would probably fall off the cliff before the end of his term. And at the rate he is deteriorating, you know … we’ll see.

“But the point is that it’s going to get worse. That’s my prediction.”

But what does it mean when someone this impaired still holds immense, unchecked power? His confabulations, after all, aren’t harmless tall tales. When a person in his position repeatedly invents events that never happened—i nsisting, for instance, that he gave tens of millions more in Gaza aid than he actually did, or that Obama and Comey were involved in Epstein’s final arrest years after leaving office— it’s not just evidence of dishonesty, it’s a clear and present danger. A commander-in-chief who believes his own delusions is a national security risk. If Trump confuses fact and fantasy in front of a camera, imagine what he's capable of behind closed doors, making decisions based on imaginary provocations or fabricated grievances. My bigger fear is that unscrupulous fascists like Stephen Miller know hoot manipulate him fortheirown purposes.

And we shouldn’t forget that this isn’t just about memory lapses or harmless eccentricity. Trump’s speech patterns— his erratic syntax, constant digressions, obsessive loops and word-salad rants— reflect something deeper: the collapse of his ability to organize thought. He’s not just forgetting names or dates. He’s unraveling. There’s a reason why people with aging parents recognize something familiar in his public appearances— because this is exactly how dementia looks when it starts to take over. The tragedy is that we’re all supposed to pretend this isn’t happening, because the people around him are too afraid to say it out loud.

The silence of the Republican Party in the face of this obvious decline is its own form of complicity. They know what they see. Everyone does. But admitting the truth would mean giving up their shot at power, and so they nod along, enabling a man unfit for office to stumble toward another six months. It’s cowardice pretending to be loyalty, and the cost isn’t just political— it’s existential. We’re not watching a strongman rise. We’re watching a man fall apart before our eyes, and an entire political party pretend it’s fine. It’s not fine.