Medical professor sounds alarm on Trump’s “deterioration almost week over week”

A medical professor and an expert in psychiatry is sounding the alarm about Donald Trump’s quickening mental decline, saying that Trump’s mind is going so fast that he can see signs of “deterioration almost week over week.”
“The rate of decline is accelerating.”
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The British publication iNews has a long article about the mounting evidence that something is both physically and mentally wrong with the U.S. president, discussing the weird bruising on his hands, the medical tests whose purpose he can’t explain, his excessive consumption of aspirin, his repeated cognitive evaluations, his increasing forgetfulness, and his public confusion.
“The main way to diagnose dementia is that we see a deterioration from someone’s own baseline in these four areas: language, memory, behavior, and psychomotor performance,” Dr. John Gartner, former professor at John Hopkins Medical School and a psychologist and psychiatrist, told iNews.
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“First of all, if you look at tapes of him in the 1980s, he was actually quite articulate. He was still a jerk… but he was speaking in polished paragraphs,” Gartner said. “Now he has trouble completing a sentence, a thought, and sometimes even a word.”
“That’s a huge deterioration from his baseline, and he also used to be quite physically coordinated, and now he can barely walk a straight line,” he continued. “He’s also showing signs of tangential speech. He goes from one topic to another in a way that’s really just kind of a loose association.”
Gartner pointed to Trump’s increasingly unbalanced walk, something noticeable during his recent trip to Switzerland.
“On the red carpet at Davos, you may have noticed him weaving,” Gartner said. “That relates to one of the signs of what I think he has: frontotemporal dementia. That walk is called a wide base gait where he swings his right leg in kind of a semicircle, and that drives him to the left.”
“That seems to have gotten dramatically worse recently. It may be related to the stroke I think he’s had on the left side of his body,” Dr. Gartner added.
Gartner also discussed Trump’s “confabulation,” or making up stories based on memories of events that didn’t happen, such as when he claimed his uncle taught the Unabomber at MIT, even though the Unabomber didn’t go to MIT and his identity was made public well after Trump’s uncle died.
Gartner also cited Trump’s increasing aggressiveness. Trump has engaged in either physical attacks or saber-rattling against Venezuela, Iran, Greenland, and Nigeria just in the past month, and has become more vindictive with his rhetoric against his political and personal enemies. Gartner noted that Alzheimer’s “does produce tremendous disinhibition of behavior because it’s the frontal lobes that are the brakes of the brain. So that’s what inhibits us from acting out.”
“He’s deteriorated since his last administration noticeably, but now we’re seeing deterioration almost week over week. The rate of decline is accelerating,” he said, adding that a “high-pressure job can also accelerate cognitive dysfunction.”
Gartner has not examined Trump personally, and experts caution against diagnosing patients from a distance. But he is far from the only mental health expert sounding the alarm. Another professor of medicine, Prof. Bruce Davidson, said last month he also believes Trump had a stroke in 2025.
“So I do not see dementia, for which I’m glad, but it is common after strokes for people to behave, as some people say, more like they were beforehand,” Davidson said at the time. “So if President Trump had a brash personality, I think everyone would say, long ago, he appears to have become even more so.”
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