The Daily Beast Podcast - Trump Mental Decline Is Accelerating: Psychologist

Episode Date: December 22, 2025

Psychologist Dr. John Gartner joins Joanna Coles to dissect Donald Trump’s latest White House speech and explain why its manic pace, rigid teleprompter discipline, and sheer velocity alarm mental health professionals. Drawing on decades of clinical experience, Gartner argues that Trump’s hypomania, malignant narcissism, and advancing dementia are no longer abstract theories but visible patterns—accelerating, measurable, and increasingly unmanaged. They examine why repeated cognitive tests suggest monitoring decline rather than routine screening, and how sleepless nights, impulsive decisions, and compulsive posting point to a leader edging toward a cognitive cliff. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You know, he kind of gave the game away again, as he often does. He said, you know, the mocha, that over that screen, I've passed it now three times in front of a whole bunch of doctors. Well, you could maybe justify giving someone the mocha once just on their age, just as part of a physical. If you're giving it to him three times, that means you're not assessing dementia. That means you're monitoring dementia. Because if you keep feeling like, no, he's still got the symptoms, we've got him see how bad he's doing now. oh, we got to check again, see how bad he's doing now. I think they're giving him cognitive tests and MRIs every six months to monitor the progress of his dementia.

And or strokes. I'm Joanna Coles. This is the Daily Beast podcast. And today we're going to get into analyzing what is going on with Donald Trump's mental health. Let's think about this. We've got the angry Santa speech hastily called. even interrupting the finale of Survivor. We've got the crazy alcoholics personality that Susie Wiles, his chief of staff, was describing.

We've got the manic truce socialing in the middle of the night. Dozens of true social posts, including the horrifying one on Rob Reiner. We've got the renaming of the Trump Kennedy Center, the grandiosity of that gesture, his own Christmas gift to himself, who better to analyze what this actually says about Donald Trump and how he's getting on in the White House right now than Dr. John Gartner. Dr. Gartner, for those of you who've watched the podcast before, will know he is a clinical psychologist. He was 28 years as an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins. He's been in private practice for a long time.

and he has been watching the 40 years of Donald Trump performing in plain sight on all of our televisions in the public eye. And so he's got an incredible base case against which to look at Donald Trump now. And his diagnosis and his observations are fascinating. You do not want to miss this. Dr. John Gartner, it is thrilling to have you back with us. to give us an update on the president's mental health. And I will say that we had an outpouring of interest, thousands of comments with questions for you about what stage of dementia is he in. Can he be on drugs? How can he manage this? But let's kick off with what felt like an angry Santa speech yesterday from the White House by Donald.

Trump hastily called. I think he called it on Tuesday. We know that Mark Burnett, the producer of Survivor, called up the White House pleading that they didn't interrupt the finale of Survivor with one of the president's rambling speeches. But it seemed to be fair to Donald Trump, given some of the behavior we've seen recently, him sleeping, he's falling asleep in cabinet meetings, that he actually seemed pretty much on message. He seemed pretty high functioning last night. That's what I saw. What did you as a clinical psychologist who spent years studying this behavior, what did you see? He was high functioning in the verbal sense. He wasn't showing the kind of breakdown and thinking that we've been talking about because he stuck very closely to the teleprompter.

I think what we did see, you know, if people have been talking about this manic pace is what they're calling it. He literally spoke at double the velocity and speed that he normally speaks, which is telling. You know, I said for a long time, what is it telling? Well, it's telling that this is, we have to judge people against their own baseline. And if somebody doubles their, the rate of speed, that's a mental status change of some kind. I've always said that Trump is on the bipolar spectrum. He's not manic. He's hypomanic. Hypo is Greek for less then. So he's not fully manic. But, you know, when he's, I think this month, he's had one night where he put out 180 truth social posts. I mean, that's crazy. Just the quantity of it is crazy. I mean,

think about this scenario. You go out on an internet date and you come back home and the person you just left to the restaurant has left you 45 texts. Without reading a single text, you already know this person is crazy. Okay. So two women in the office with me who are listening to this are both nodding like, oh, they're like, he's that guy. He's that guy. You stay away. You never respond. Do not engage. Exactly. Exactly. So the quantity is telling us something about one aspect of his mental illness, which is being on the bipolar spectrum. I think the reason that he was speaking so quickly here, he was like a gaffling gun of gish galloping, was because he's scared. He's scared. You know, I think Susie Wiles told him, you've got to give this speech because you're losing the country.

You know, they can read the polls. They can see that he's losing the country on every issue. They'll never admit it, of course. And so this was his attempt to kind of make a comeback. And so the anxiety stimulated his hypomania, which then made him speak at this hypomanic pace that isn't even typical of him. So he's basically panicked. And that's what you're seeing. in the speech. He's frightened.

Is it possible... Like a manic panic. A manic panic. Is it possible that he's taken some kind of performance drug to be able to do this? Because normally he wanders off the teleprompter, too. Absolutely. He could have taken some Adderall beforehand. And that may be part of what we're seeing.

If you've ever interacted with people when they're on Adderall, they'll tell you that they're really able to concentrate much more, but they're speaking very quickly. they're very pressured or they're very irritable and impatient. So it very well could have been chemically induced. And there's been rumors before that he has taken Adderall before major speeches to stay focused. So what did you think of the content of the speech? Well, it was like I said, it was a machine gun of lies.

They were, it wasn't kind of a gish-galp. And because he was so rapidly punching out the lies, he almost couldn't mentally process, much less rebut, each one at a time. But they were, you know, of course, completely at odds with reality in every situation, almost everything he said, the one that I thought was ironic. And he was saying, you know, it's the Democrats who want to raise your health care premium. The Democrats are doing it. They want to do it. Don't blame the Republicans. Well, the Democrats shut down the government to protect the Obamacare subsidies. So we can hardly say they're the ones that want to raise the prices. But, of course, reality has now.

ever been a constraint for him. And is that you have previously diagnosed him as a malignant narcissist and now he's got a layer of dementia on top of that. Is that the dementia that we're talking about or is that the malignant narcissism? Yeah, that's the malignant narcissism because one component of malignant narcissism is psychopathy and the first diagnostic criteria for psychopathy is frequently lies. And as I like to point out, Donald Trump is the most documented liar in all of recorded human history. And I challenge anyone to show me a close second.

So, and does he know that he's lying? Or is this his own truth, which is different to the truth that the rest of us experience? Well, his own truth, that's a very nice way of putting it. But what I'm asking is because I think sometimes people who have. mental health struggles, don't believe what the rest of us believe, but they don't believe it. I'm trying to give him the benefit of the doubt here. They're not trying to deceive. They actually live in a different world.

I think Donald Trump is actually complex, and I've discussed this with a lot of other mental health professionals. I think there's almost three kinds of lies that Donald Trump tells. One are the ones that are simply bald-faced lies meant to deceive. The other ones are places where he's really lied to himself to the point, to your point, that he's starting to actually believe what he says. I mean, at a certain point, maybe he actually believes the election was stolen. You know, he said it so many millions of times.

And the third type of lie, I'm putting this in air quotes, is the result of his dementia, where he's misremembering events that just didn't take place. And the example I like to use is the one that actually the New York Times quoted in their article about him, is his assertion that his uncle, you know, John Trump, had the Unabomber in his class, and they had this whole conversation about him. It was like, oh, what was he like, Uncle John? Well, you know, he was a big know-it-all. And the other students didn't really like him because he was such a know-it-all. And, you know, he goes on and on about this whole kind of character study of the Unabomber.

Well, the Unabomber was never in John Trump's class. He went to Harvard, not MIT. He never could have had a discussion with his uncle about it because Unabomber, we didn't even discover who the Unabomber was. until his uncle had died. So this is an invented story, but it's not like saying inflation is going down, and it's the Democrats that want to raise your prices. This is actually, there was no political benefit to him in telling this, you know, ambling, rambling tale that he's remembering from his past.

This is something you see a lot with people who have dementia. We call it confabulation, which is there's gaps in their memory, and nature of whores a vacuum. So they fill it in. They fill it in with things that might be kind of adjacent. So he knows the Unabomber went to Harvard. He knows his father taught in Boston. His uncle taught in Boston.

So he kind of merges them. And he's done this in ways that are very serious. He said that his father emigrated from Germany. Well, no, it's his grandfather who emigrated from Germany. But you see, when you have dementia, you kind of mush things together in a way that makes sense to you with the time. And you're not lying. You're actually misremembering. You're misremembering, and then you're constructing a reality which actually isn't real at all.

Exactly. Okay. So I think perhaps the most astonishing example of what I think you will say is malignant narcissism is his response to the tragic death of Rob Reiner, where he puts himself center stage where he says that the reason Rob Reiner, the film director, whose son, whose middle son has now tragically been arrested. for his death, that he had died of Trump derangement syndrome and that he was so whipped up in a fury about Trump that this had caused his death. Can you just sort of take apart this statement for us that he made and analyze it for us from your point of view? Yeah, it's a little more even nefarious than you're saying because he implies, if you put it in sort of mob boss languages. He got what was coming to him. Right. You know, because he's saying, well, he made a lot of

people angry with this trumped arrangement syndrome. And that's what happens. You know, I actually have the tweet somewhere here. I can read the exact wording. I'll read the whole thing. A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star has passed away together with his wife, Michelle, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding and incurable affliction with a mind-cripling disease known as Trump derangement syndrome, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people crazy by his raging obsession of Donald Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the

golden age of America upon us, perhaps never like, like, Never before, may Robin Michelle rest in peace. So he's saying he made people angry with his Trump derangement syndrome, and it drove people crazy. And that's the cause of his death. I mean, what do you, have you ever read anything like that before? I mean, you may have done that. You may well have done with people like this before. I think the one thing is that, you know, I think for all of us mental health professionals, we have to admit, this is a case that like,

The likes of which, you know, likes of which no one's ever seen before. Well, this is a mentally ill person, the likes of which very few of us have ever seen before. Because it's so extreme. And who's also in a position of unfathomable power? That's what's really frightening. He's in the position of unfathomable power. He has no guardrails because he's surrounded by fanatical true believers and synchophants, right, who will not set any limits on him whatsoever.

So we really have the worst case scenario. We have someone who is a malignant narcissist, someone who is fundamentally evil, in a state of dementia. So he is disorganized, impulsive, primitive. Even this tweet itself is more grotesque and more disorganized than even his very low standard. I like what David Fromm said about it. He said, the post is deranged, pathologically narcissistic, crude, stupid, and cruel. No adult outside a psych ward expresses such thoughts to have it all as evidence of a twisted soul. So he has a twisted soul. This is what he thinks. But now it's kind of vomiting it on the page in this completely unmediated way.

You know, even King Henry the Eighth, you know, had a little bit of, you know, restraint when he wanted to get rid of Thomas Moore. He just sort of looked into the air and said, who will rid me of this meddlesome priest? You know, that's kind of what he's doing, though, in this post. Trump has been encouraging stochastic terrorism. He's been encouraging people to attack and kill his enemies and his opponents. And some of them are doing it. Like that couple was killed in Minnesota, like the people that wanted to kidnap Governor Whitmer. This is a green light encouraging people to act on those impulses.

Okay. I just wanted to come to another line. I like David Frum's line very much. there's a very good line from Ben Schwartz in The Nation, which I was going to read, which said Trump gloated over Reiner's murder, the way he did about Stephen Colbert's show getting cancelled, and Jimmy Kimmel's getting suspended, as if Reiner's murder were another media victory for him. And I thought that was also an interesting way of, again, not being able to understand the gravity of the Reiner's murder and attributing it to something. similar to a victory in the media. Well, look, if you're a mob boss, which is really what he is, a glorified mob boss, when they rub out the rat, it's something to celebrate. He got what was coming in him.

You dirty rat. You, James Cagney. I remember. I remember. All right. So moving swiftly on, Susie Wiles this week, but it turned out was the subject of 11 interviews with the journalist Chris Whipple. in a piece for Vanity Fair. And she refers to Trump as having an alcoholic's personality.

Yeah. What do you think she meant by that? What is an alcoholic's personality? Well, first of all, I think it's very interesting that her father was an alcoholic. He was a famous football player and sportscaster Pat Summerhall. So she's used to dealing with these types of explosive, toxicly male personalities. It's probably the only reason she can be chief of staff. for Donald Trump because it kind of fits

her repetition compulsion in some psychodynamic way. But what he's talking about is, yeah, Trump doesn't drink, but he's demonstrating these same personality traits, the explosiveness, right? The rage, right? The irritability,

the unpredictability, the impulsivity, the sort of dangerousness of how he could lash out at any given moment. So, you know, there actually is a link between alcoholism and these severe personality disorders in the sense that alcoholism can, first well, aggravate a severe personality disorder, but also having alcoholic parents can create

severe personality disorders in their children because essentially they're experiencing this very volatile, violent personality shifts in their parent. And so they internalize a very chaotic, shifting and unpredictable. personality themselves. So the fact that she's saying he's an alcoholic personality is really her way of saying he's got a personality disorder. So, John, you just discussed there what it's like being the child of alcoholics. What is it like being a colleague or being a cabinet member around Donald Trump if he

has an alcoholic's personality? I think everyone who works in his cabinet, maybe with the few exceptions are afraid of him. I think they try to avoid him, and I think they try to mollify him as their strategy. Of course, we haven't gotten to his repetitive falling asleep. We've been talking about this. You and I have been talking about this for weeks, months, actually. But every time you have me on the show, there's been new incidences of his falling asleep.

But one of my favorite ones is where he falls asleep in the cabinet, and they show this screen of, you know, Marco Rubio going on and on, prostrating himself, falling all over himself to talk about how wonderful he is, you know, oh, if it weren't for you, the world would be falling apart. You've saved the world. You're so wonderful. So it has an effect of, as you said, it's an unpredictable environment. So people don't want to provoke the temper. Right. Exactly. They're all walking on eggshells. And I think actually trying to avoid him, to be honest, as much as they And I think that Oval Office is like a hot zone. You know, it is not a safe space.

Right. It's the opposite of a safe space. And in terms of Susie Wiles' own role, what was interesting, we interviewed Chris Whipple, who did these 11 interviews with her earlier this week on the Daily Beast podcast. And he was saying that she's actually unlike a traditional chief of staff who is supposed to be the person that can close the door to the Oval Office and confront the President with what they're about to do and say, Mr. President, are you sure that this is a wise decision? It becomes very clear over his series of 11 interviews with her that Susie Wiles does not do that for the President, that actually

it's impossible to do that. Do you see her, or is it possible? And I was contemplating this as I was listening to Chris, that she's actually much more of a caretaker. And, you know, Melania Trump is nowhere to be seen. Ivanka has disappeared, has decided that her comment was politics is too cruel. She doesn't want to be a part of it. But we have spoken before on this podcast about how difficult it is being around relatives who are displaying dementia symptoms because it's exhausting. It requires the patience of Job. And it's distressing.

You know, all of those things. And look, nobody who's ever been able to control. Donald Trump even before he got dementia. Okay, that's in part his hypomania. You know, people on the bipolar spectrum cannot be controlled. In part, it's his personality disorder. And in part now, it's also the distrault that comes from his dementia. So he's wildly uninhibited or disinhibited and out of control.

And so if nobody can control him, they just kind of try to manage him, which is sort of like what you're saying people do when someone has dementia. They're not going to be able to cure it. They're just trying to get through the day. Dr. Gardner, could you hold on one second? Let's just take some ads. And I'm back with Dr. John Gartner, clinical psychologist, who is diagnosing what's going on with Donald Trump's mental health. So one of the things that people point out about Donald Trump is that he has zero attention span.

And he rolls from one policy to another very quickly. I mean, it's astonishing to think that the Rob Reiner, truth social at the beginning of the week, seemed so remarkable. Everybody seemed to be talking about it. Even Maga was coming out and saying, Mr. President, this is inappropriate. And yet we've already rolled on through two new cycles since then. We've got the renaming of the Trump Kennedy Center, the grandiosity of it. We've got the angry Santa speech. The sort of telling us off for not appreciating him more. Is the thing, in terms of managing someone like this in a position of power, is the goal to just keep them onto the next thing? so they don't get stuck on something?

Well, I think that kind of distract him a lot with these little sort of aesthetic projects. He's very involved with what paint they're using in the White House and exactly what kind of lamps they're using and what grass they're using. He can go on and on about these things. He loves to point them out. And you talk about his grandiosity. You know, the other thing, and I think you're right, it's hard for us to focus on the outrage de jour,

and this is the gish galloping, because then there's five more by the next news cycle. The other thing, not only is he renaming the Kennedy Center, but he put in those, you know, he has that walk of fame now with every president's picture. He himself put in these explanations under the pictures that sound like a deranged truth social post. You know, so under Joe Biden, it says, oh, Crooked Joe was sleepy and, you know, Obama, his most divisive figure in American history. Oh, yeah, and Joe Biden was the worst president in American history.

And he said, and Ronald Reagan was okay because he was a fan of mine. You know, these are not official plaques that you would expect to see anywhere, much less in the White House. It's just his ramblings, his grandiose ramblings. And it's part of a larger narcissistic picture, which is malignant narcissists want to erase history. They want to erase everyone that came before them so that the world began. with them. And that's what he's really doing. If you look at it, that's why he's tearing down the East Wing of the White House and trying to build a ballroom that dwarfs the White House. That's why he paved over the Rose Garden and put up a parking lot, essentially. That's why he wants to rename

the Kennedy Center, the Trump Kennedy Center, and he wants to rename Reagan Airport, the Trump airport. And, you know, it's all about everything has to be about me and anything that even has any resonance or hint of any of the people that came before me has to be destroyed. So how does this normally end for someone with such strong strains of malignant narcissism? Well, it almost always ends badly, you know. I mean, the Hitler's always end up in the bunker. The problem is the collateral damage along the way, collateral damage being us. Right. So, and if you were working alongside Donald Trump, if, for example, you're the custodian of the White House and you see these little remarks going up about previous presidents, which you understand are, you know, they're immature apart from anything else and they're unhelpful and they're divisive and I'm sure they're offensive to other members of the cabinet. how would you negotiate removing them or not getting them put up there in the first place?

Would you say, what a good idea, Mr. President, we should do it next month? Or, oh, Mr. President, that's a genius idea. I'm going to have them done in lettering and it'll take a few months for them to get here. But when they do, it'll be marvellous. In the assumption that he will have moved on and forgotten all about it by then. I mean, we've all had to humor elderly relatives who get stuck on something. Well, you make a good point. You know, it's sort of like the way we work with infants, too, right?

We sort of distract them. Right. And I think that's sort of what you're saying is he's very distractable and infantile. So maybe we could just distract him and tell him we'll do that later. But the bottom line is there really is no way to manage him. They're really, you know, his disorder, his malignant narcissism is an untreatable disorder. It's interesting. He described Reiner as having untreatable trump derangement syndrome.

Maybe he's heard us talking about him having an untreatable disdemeanor. disorder. Because he projects everything, you know. So when you start using language that you're using, you have to wonder if he's recycling it. And then dementia is a deteriorating illness for which we have no cure, although there is that rumor that he's getting, you know, infused with some kind of anti-Alzheimer's drug. And that's why he has those bruises on his hands. We really have no facts to back that up. But it would certainly make sense. But even with such a drug, it's only going to slow down the progress of the dementia, it's not going to stop it. So the core problem is not treatable in terms of management strategies. I don't know. Maybe after the Trump presidency, we can have a

whole other strategy where we interview the people who were in the cabinet. It's like, well, how did you manage him? What was your idea? What was your strategy? What did you come up with? Well, I'm sure they must all be talking behind his back about sort of how they manage him and the madness of some of the things that he says and how they try to diffuse some of his his stranger ideas. I wanted to ask you, too, about impulse control. Because that's something that goes as people struggle with mental health issues. Do you think the tearing down of the East Wing was a symptom of that?

I mean, it suddenly went. Well, it was very impulsive, right? I mean, it didn't go through any process at all. It's like one day we just woke up and it was gone. Right. And he tore it down in the night. I mean, the construction. I think the people in charge of the construction, or at least according to Michael Wolfe,

this is what he heard from inside the White House, that, you know, they came to the, they came to Trump and said, you know, we're going to have to, this is going to take some time, blah, blah, blah. And he was like, can you just do it at night? Right, he wants, just do it now. Let's just do it now. That's the impulsivity. Right, right.

So don't go through any, don't go through any process. You know, Michael Wolf, who's been on your show or with your joint show, has talked about how people, in the White House are talking about how aghast they are, how repulsed they are, that they talk about the 25th Amendment. There used to be in his last administration that we found out there was like a text chain where people would just text to each other 25. You know, that was code for he's added again. Right.

Right. So I think 25 for the 25th Amendment. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So it was code for, you know, he's off the leash again. So the sad thing is the people who are closest to him. know better than anybody, how disturbed he is. So, Dr. Gartner, what is it like being married to someone like this?

We know that the First Lady is really not around. Just talk to us about what on earth it can be like to be married to someone with malignant narcissism and a layer of dementia. Yeah. To be honest, I think she hates him. I think she truly hates him. He's very hateful and hateable. and if you can imagine being married to someone so vile, you would eventually hate them. That's a normal response to someone like him.

And it really shows, I mean, when he tries to grab her hand, she slaps it away. She's, as you say, basically AWOL completely from his whole administration. So I always say to know Donald Trump is to hate him. That's the natural human reaction to someone so vile. And one of the other symptoms you hear about, and you certainly hear about it when you talk to people who've got relatives in care homes, senior care homes, is a sort of hypersexuality or a lack of inhibition that kicks in. Have you seen any evidence of that with Donald Trump? Well, I mean, of course he's been disinhibited in one way about a sexuality for his whole lifetime because he's a sexual predator. and that just goes with his personality disorder.

You know, is he more impulsive or disinhibited about sex now? I'm not sure. There aren't really examples coming to mind. I don't know who he might be carrying on with at the White House right now. I think there's some rumors about some of the people caring for him. But I wouldn't be surprised or we shouldn't be shocked if he starts making, blurting out very sexually inappropriate things. just like he's been blurting out curses and then being much more coarse with the press, calling them piggy and stupid and everyone's stupid, everyone's an idiot.

But I haven't seen that. Have you seen anything to that effect? No, I haven't, but I'm conscious of listening to friends whose parents are in care homes. And you hear, I mean, you know, in Florida, I think the fastest group getting STIs are all sort of post-80. because people become very disinhibited. It's a sort of strange and very unappealing characteristic of people, I think, as they get older when they have dementia. So in terms of your own observations, and as you say,

we have a very good base case against which to judge Donald Trump because he's been in the public eye for so long. And there are various phases of dementia. Where would you say he was on the scale of, say, if one is pretty functional to 10 where you're really needing 24-hour care? I think he's right on that edge. I think he's right on the cusp of being able to function independently and actually requiring care. I mean, I guess we could say the White House is the world's biggest nursing home because he does have a lot of people taking care of him.

But the other thing people need to understand is, look, if, look, if we're going to. we were to chart the rate of acceleration on a graph, if you just follow that line with your finger, there's no way he's going to make it to the end of his term, compassmentus. And then you have to add, now we get into calculus here, not just arithmetic, then we have to add an increase in the rate of acceleration, which is that, I mean, or an increase in the rate of speed, which is that what happens with people who get dementia when it's, starts to get to this point, the progress starts to catch up. It starts to get faster and faster. So finally, at some point, they really fall off a cognitive cliff. You know, he kind of gave

the game away again, as he often does. He said, you know, the mocha, that, that, over that screen, I've passed it now three times in front of a whole bunch of doctors. Well, you could maybe justify giving someone the mocha once, just on their age, just as part of a physical. If you're giving it to him three times, that means you're not assessing dementia. That means you're monitoring dementia. Because if you keep feeling like, you know, he's still got the symptoms. We've got to see how bad he's doing now. Oh, we've got to check again, see how bad he's doing now.

I think they're giving him cognitive tests and MRIs every six months to monitor the progress of his dementia and or strokes. Oh, goodness. And we know that he doesn't sleep, at least. least normal hours, whatever normal hours. And that's his hypomania. That's his hypomania. And isn't sleep disorder also a symptom of dementia? Well, I think he's always been a low sleeper because he's, his hypomanic temperament, that's a lifelong biologically based thing. And it isn't always necessarily bad. Most of the high achievers in our world are on the bipolar spectrum,

have some hypomania. But it also can inform some of their mistakes. They can be irritable and arrogant, impulsive, you know, impatient. But they can also have a lot of confidence and charisma and energy and creativity and draw people to them as politicians need to do. So he's had that temperament. But now, and to be honest, he's always been hate tweeting long into the night. I mean, you know, he's produced tens of thousands of vile tweets. But so, again, it's sort of like that.

numbers thing. You know, if somebody has done 180 angry tweets in the middle of the night, it's kind of diagnostic that some kind of bipolar process is going on. So I think that that has been in plain sight as well. But now when we combine it with everything else, now he's being hypomanic about being disorganized and crazy. Dr. Gartner, we're going to take a quick break for some sponsors. and bathe records of with the form of the pay for

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and And Dr John Gartner and I are back talking about Donald Trump's mental health. So I asked you what it was like to be married to a malignant narcissist. What is it like to have them as a parent? What is the sort of knock-on effect? We know that Ivanka has sort of removed herself from the situation. And her brothers are more around. But what can it be like to have someone like Donald Trump as your father?

Well, a nightmare. You know, one of the things, you mentioned the comments that we've gotten on the show, one of the more common comments, people say, you know, that reminds me of my husband or that reminds me of my father. You know, I've had to live with that, and then they kind of sometimes will go through a whole, you know, short biography in the comments to talk about what they've been through. But it's a nightmare. You know, I think to some extent this may have helped shape Trump himself because his father was a very malignant character. You know, he himself was a racist, he was part of the Ku Klux Klan, he cheated all these people that he, who went to departments from him. He cheated the government with their, you know, with their rules and regulations.

And his grandfather was a known crook, an illegal immigrant, by the way, who used to build whorehouses on land he didn't own and then try to expropriate the land. So a lot of flim-flam characters. And so I guess in answer to your question, part of what happens is for some people, they basically internalize that personality and then basically bring it into the next generation. I think that's what's happened with him. And is there any significance? I noticed twice this week he was giving speeches. Melania unusually was in the room. And he would refer to Baron as Melania's son.

and he would say she has a lovely son, you know, Melania has a son, and obviously Barron is also his son. Is that also a sort of symptom of something? Well, I think it is actually. I mean, at one level it could just be, you know, that he has no empathy, and he feels no connection to other human beings, so he doesn't feel like it's his son. But also, there's all these subtle ways in which we see, I think, his memory being affected by dementia, and it's affecting the way he does. describes his interpersonal relationships. Like he described Susie Wiles as Susie Trump. He introduced her

as Susie Trump, Susie Trump. And then later he said, well, or otherwise known as Susie Wiles. I think he may have caught himself there. Now, maybe I'm totally wrong. Maybe he's been calling her Susie Trump forever. And that's like, because she's part of the family, and that's a nickname, and we just didn't know about it. And that's possible.

But it's also true that he got confused about whether it was his father or his grandfather, you know, who emigrated from Germany. You know, when you start having those kinds of basic confusions, like, for example, my uncle had dementia. And before he died, he would frequently ask my aunt, are we married? And they've been married for 60 years. Right.

You know, are we married? Is this our house? And then at one point, I thought this was sort of funny. He announced at the table. I don't care what anyone else thinks. As far as I'm concerned, we're married. Who are the other people and what are they thinking? How intriguing.

So if you were, I mean, and the holidays are stressful times for all people. Do you think the holidays are stressful for Donald Trump? I don't know. Is it stressful for the Grinch? Well, he looked pretty stressed on Wednesday night when he was giving his speech, as you say, at twice his normal speed. Yeah. Well, you know, it's funny because he's really always been this sort of Grinch. if you look at his tweets around every single major holiday, you know, it's always like,

Happy Christmas to the liars and the losers, you know, like peace and goodwill to all men. Oh, goodness. Dr. Gardner, thank goodness you're around to both explain what an earth is going on and what we can see, in fact, in plain sight, but don't have the words and the terminology that you have. So thank you for explaining it to us. And thank you for also giving us the sense of humor about it because we're stuck with him. Do you have any predictions for 2026? Only that it'll be worse than 2025.

Oh, my goodness. We shouldn't be laughing. But what else there is? You know, if we don't laugh, we will cry. Dr. John Gartner, thank you so much for joining us. Have a very peaceful holiday. And please, please keep observing the president as you do. come back in the new year and tell us what you've learned.

I'd be happy to. Thank you very much. You're welcome. I never fail to find Dr. Gartner's conversations completely fascinating. And again, it's this thing of having been able to observe Donald Trump in plain sight, on our televisions, on our radios, all over truth social. No one has colossus-like strode the media landscape in quite the same way. And of course, he's left clues for us, clues of who he used to be. and who he is now and how power and age and frankly family history have changed him.

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where we chronicle the Trump presidency in real obsessive detail. Anyway, as our first lady would have a say, be beast or be beast, be very beast, be more beast. So big thank you to Sandra Clark, me thinks, travels with Carl, Andrew Beaver, Cappinator, Harry Clark, Dawn McCarthy, Daniel Dogglover, M. Griner, Fulvia Orlando, Herbie, Andrew Meller, or Melor, as Michael always says,

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