The Daily Beast Podcast - Why Ailing Trump’s Erratic Ego Has World on Edge

Episode Date: February 23, 2026

Dr. John Gartner joins Joanna Coles for a bracing deep dive into what he argues are the accelerating signs of cognitive and behavioral decline in Donald Trump—from garbled words and meandering stories to grandiosity, paranoia, and the spectacle of falling asleep at his newly formed Board of Peace. As they dissect Trump’s escalator conspiracy tale, obsession with looks, fixation on naming landmarks after himself, and late-night social media tirades, the conversation widens to the real stakes: nuclear codes, Middle East brinkmanship, the midterms, and what Dr. Gartner calls the dangerous mix of narcissistic injury and unchecked power. With references to Greenland, Gaza, Iran, the Justice Department, and even the shadow of the Epstein files, Coles presses on whether any institutional guardrails still hold—or whether impulse now drives policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We have a constitutional crisis of sorts, right, where our president has really disregarded all of the checks and balances. But we have someone with a brain disorder, okay, a deteriorating brain disorder, so they have no internal controls or judgment. Donald Trump's id is now sort of in control of the world because he has no frontal lobes. He has no advisors. We have no constitution. We have no checks and balances. It's like everything just radiates from his id, and there's not a single thing. thing to sort of stop an impulse in his disturbed brain from becoming a war. I'm Joanna Coles. This is the Daily Beast podcast. And nobody has chronicled the president's health, I think, with more meticulously than the Daily Beast. We've chronicled his cancels,

his chronic venous insufficiency, his strange gait, his inability to pronounce certain words. And certainly nobody has paid more. attention to the president's mental state and his psychological state than Dr. John Garner. He's a fan favorite here at The Daily Beast. And I love talking to him because he always makes the point that Donald Trump is a man who is hiding in plain sight. He's been with us in public life for 50 years. We've got so many recordings of his to judge his current form against. And that's why I think Dr. John is unparalleled in his ability to analyze what is going on with the president. He's a former assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University.

He's a clinical psychotherapist. And he brings such attention to detail. I always love talking to him. So we get into the Board of Peace and his speech there. We get into his inauguration anniversary speech where he suddenly goes off. on some random train of thought about how he was a kid and he was playing baseball and there was this big building with bars on the window. And Dr. John knows how to analyze this with such perception.

I find every conversation I have with him super invigorating. So no time to waste. Let's get into it. And I'm proud to officially name the undisputed, when did this come out, Mr. Speaker, the undisputed champion of beautiful clean call. We have to proceed. Always, I don't use the word call. You know, it needs a PR job because it had a bad reputation for a while.

So we're not allowed to say the word call anymore. It has to be preceded by beautiful, clean call. Okay? We're cleaning it up. Very good. Dr. John, first of all, fantastic to have you back. And please tell us, what was going? on there. I mean, we all mispronounce words, but that felt like something so much more than

just a mispronunciation. It's much more than a mispronunciation. You know, we've been talking for really months, actually years, about his what we call phonemic parapherasias, which is the inability to use, to form a whole word. And so instead, you form a kind of garbled version of the word, or there's a root of the word, and you can't finish it. So this is something that has been happening recurrently, and it's been something that's been happening repeatedly, and it's happening more and more often because it's a sign of his frontotemporal dementia, and dementia gets worse. And so we're going to continue to see this inability to form words is going to get worse as time goes on. And of course, Dr. John, what does it look like in the brain? I'm mindful of those brains, you see, with kind of like white patches in them. is something sort of missing? Have neural pathways just collapsed?

What's physically what's happening? What's so dangerous about the form of dementia that he most probably has frontotemporal dementia is that it attacks the frontal lobes and the frontal lobes are actually what separate us from animals. It's what inhibits our behavior, forces us to kind of think it through, to have some judgment, right, to be able to evaluate conceptually what we're thinking or seeing or

talking about. As that deteriorates, the main manifestation is not in memory. It's in behavior. That as the breaks, the inhibition, the self-awareness, right, of the frontal lobe starts to deteriorate, people start to act out in an aggressive and chaotic, impulsive way. that can be very dangerous and gets very quickly out of control. So if you think about it, if he did have Alzheimer's, and actually I would recommend people look at Dr. Frank George's substact called the Gaslight Report. He has a long discussion of why it's frontotemporal dementia and not Alzheimer's in terms of the symptoms. He's a neuropsychologist.

If we're Alzheimer's, we would see more gross deterioration in his memory as the primary symptom. Instead, what we're seeing is gross deterioration in his just. judgment and impulse control as the primary behavior. The worst possible deficit you could have in someone who has control of the nuclear arsenal, who makes decisions about going to war or peace, and he's making these decisions in an arbitrary, confused, and paranoid way. It's like the Queen of Hearts is in control of our military. He's going to make some kind of impulsive decision, you know, and actually, you know, at that Board of Peace, you know, where he, it's interesting, these are not the thought-disordered parts of what he said at the Board of Peace. We'll get to that.

This is what he actually meant to say. He says, so we have to take it a step further, or maybe we don't. Maybe we're going to make a deal. You're going to find out sometime probably in the next 10 days. So in other words, we might go to war, we might not, we'll let you know. We're not even telling you on what basis we're going to war, or when we'll go to war or what criteria would make us not going to war. You'll find out if we can't make a deal and we feel like it's wrong, we're going to bomb. So, you know, look, I mean, Joanna, we've all been through this, right? Sometimes you just, the atmosphere is right, the lighting's right, the chemistry's right, and just feel like it's time to bomb.

In what other ways does this play out? And if you are around someone like this, and Susie Wiles, his chief of staff, famously talked about him, not drinking, but nevertheless having an alcoholic's personality, given the stakes are so unbelievably high, what is the best way for people around someone like this to try and contain them? Well, you know, I don't work in a nursing home. And I'm saying that because I've never had to manage people like this. It's not been part of my professional METI.

I think you should talk to a good head nurse. Okay. Well, we can do that. We can do that. I just thought you might know because you've certainly had people wrestling with dementia in your own family. when someone is expressing the grandiosity that our president is and with a war pending, which he can't decide if he wants to go in or he can't, he's going to make the decision just whether or not there are ways of coping with people like this

that address the sort of slow deterioration of the frontal lobe or if there's nothing you can do. Well, it's hard to have anything you can do when the person has absolute power and all the people around them are slavish toadies. You know, one thing we... I mean, in theory, he shouldn't have absolute power, right? That's why we have a Congress. That's why we have a constitution, right? Right. I mean, actually, in point of fact, practically speaking, in most nursing homes, what they do is they drug them into oblivion.

And it's actually a trend I've been fighting in the field. But we give them these very powerful antipsychotic drugs that put them into... more or less of a stupor, but keep them from, you know, raging through the ward when they're sundowning at night. So basically, I don't know if this is an option, but we would have to medicate him to the point where he was practically drooling to contain him from acting out. And I don't... We're not going to do that. That's not going to happen. I'm very selective when it comes to skincare products, but I'm glad I found one skin.

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Forward slash beast. That's 15% off at one skin.com with promo code beast. Again, that's 15% off at one skin.com forward slash beast. Use the code beast and don't forget to tell them we sent you. And can you explain exactly what happens with sundowning? It's a term that's now sort of banded around and I've never fully understood. What does it actually mean? when people sundown.

Well, to some extent, they're reversing night and day. Look, he's really losing control over the basic biological functions that regulate his body. So sleep, wake. Okay, so with sundowning, they suddenly become very animated and disinhibited and start acting out as it starts to get towards evening, when it should be the opposite. They should be falling asleep and getting sleepy.

And then during the day, they're passing out and falling asleep. So that basic architecture of sleep, right, sleep in the night, be awake in the day, is breaking down. So he's losing control of that function. He fell asleep at the Board of Peace. I think we're going to show a piece of tape of that. Before that, this week he fell asleep at an environmental event. But he's been falling asleep every other week at all kinds of ceremonious public events.

And he hates the fact that it's pointed out in public. So he has every reason to try to suppress it. He can't. He can't suppress it. He can't suppress it. And it's not even just sleep. It's other biological functions. He's having trouble. walking. He's having trouble talking. Let's talk about the board of peace, where as you pointed out,

he fell asleep. And I mean, I would have fallen asleep at that too. Those rooms are always, they're overheated. And obviously, it was a room of people that he kept saying no one's ever put a room together of people as amazing as this. It's the best board of peace ever. It's an incredible room. Obviously, it wasn't true. There was nobody representing northern or Western Europe there at all. and also, you know, he told everybody it was going to be a billion dollars to be a member of this board of peace. He seemed to have raised five billion,

so perhaps people were hedging their bets a bit. But it clearly wasn't a room full of the top premieres in the world. I mean, it simply wasn't. And in fact, ironically, the UN was actually having another meeting that Antonio Gutierrez was overseeing where there were far more impressive people. But I'm sort of fact...

It's a mafia meeting of the five families. Yes. Right. It was all the bad guys getting together in one room. Yeah, that's interesting. Or as you said before we started, the bar from Star Wars. Yeah, the Star Wars bar. It was a bit like the Star Wars book.

But I was very struck when he started. He said it's a big day, big day, lots of people watching. And then he said they're watching by closed circuit. They're watching by open circuit. And I was like, what are you talking about? And then just the idea that he was so excited that there were lots of people watching him. And again, this sense of him as performer, him saying words, which feels sort of empty and hollow, they're repetitive. He hasn't done the work.

He was reading brief statements, but he would go off the whatever notes he had. So he ended up sounding utterly banal about these other people. You know, they're great. He's a great guy. He's a strong guy. I like this guy. And as if the only thing that matters is whether or not he likes them. Well, in this foreign policy of one, I guess that is the only thing that matters.

And it sort of also, it changes, you know, depends whether he likes you today. You know, tomorrow he might put a tariff on you if you annoy him in some way. Right, right. So it just feels very student UM. You know when you were, I mean, I never was in the student UN because we have. actually didn't do them at my school, but we would have sort of debates and things. And it just reminded me of how unpresidential and how, I don't want to say unintelligent, because he's clearly very smart in all sorts of ways, but how unrefined his introduction was.

And in theory, the informality of it might be a good thing, that we don't need everything to be so highfalutin. But it just struck me as under-research. love the attention. I think that you could say that about him in general. I mean, he has very little intellectual curiosity, very little capacity to concentrate, very little interest in anything, in anything having to do with the country. He's only interested in himself, in aggrandizing himself and putting his name on things, his picture on things. He recently unfurled a giant banner of his face on the Justice Department. What could be more creepy, right? It's the Trump Justice

Department. It's the Big Brother Justice Department. I miss that. Where did you? did he put the picture? This just happened. He unfurled a gigantic like, like, multi-story picture of himself on the front of the Justice Department. He had one with the USDA and a couple of other agencies. The Labor Ministry. I remember there was a cabinet meeting where the Labor Secretary said, Mr. President, I hope you've seen the enormous portrait that we've put a few up at the Labor Department. But the Justice Department makes particularly creepy because, of course, he's persecuting his enemies and shielding his friends and taking their name out of the Epstein files. And so, you know, it's Big Brothers Justice Department.

Justice is what Big Brother says it is. Well, he may not feel that today. We're recording this on Friday morning. And of course, the Scotus has just come back with the decision knocking back his tariff. So I'm sure he's going to go after Scotus at some point today. But there was something else that struck me in his introduction at the Board of Peace, which was the things that impressed him. So at one point he's talking about a world leader

and he says he's good looking. He's young, he's good looking. And he's not into boys. He's not into men. He's into women. He's not into men. But the fact that he singled out, it was President Pinner from Paraguay.

And he was like, he's young and handsome. Men, I don't have any interest in men. So he's very clearly signaling that he's interested in young, good looking women. which I think we know. And a strange thing to say while the country is devouring itself with the Epstein files. And then a little bit later,

he talks about the Emir of Qatar and he says, you know, the Emir is incredible. We know he thinks he's incredible because he's given him an amazing plane. And then he says, I only tell the truth. I mean, again, a president familiar

with torturing the truth, torturing the truth. So why does it? he say these things which give such clues as to who he actually is? He's always been obsessed with looks. It's a narcissistic thing. And I think what's interesting is he always has to be the best. And so it's driving him crazy that he is now, you know, really at the lower end of the attractiveness spectrum. Okay. So he can't stand it when he's in the presence of people who are more attractive than him. You know, he also said it, remember, when he

was on some destroyer, the USS Ford or something, where he said something like, oh, all these handsome sailors. You know, I don't like handsome people. You know, I'm not allowed to, I'm not supposed to say that, but now I'm allowed to because the Supreme Court said I'm immune. He said that? Yeah.

And I'm struck by your point about the night and day and his sense of the world, or his own sense is being dysregulated, given the way he tweets and or truth socials in the middle of the night. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's very disturbed. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, you know, he's, a hundred, 150 posts in the middle of the night and then be passing out in the oval office at 10 in the morning. Uh, you know, he's really, his, his, his, his whole sleep wake cycle is, is, is, is, or is, and, and also, of course, because he's malevolent, what comes out is just this pure bile, right? Right. Right. It was one of those one of those middle of the night's, where he's, he's, where he's out that tweet about Obama and Michelle the Obama's being monkeys, right? This is what I mean about the frontotemporal dementia, right? He's disinhibited and acting out these grossly racist impulses in ways that don't really help him. They're not even appealing to his base. It's not even like

he's playing to the crowd. It's just like he's literally just having diarrhea. You know what I mean? He's not even holding it in. He's just explosively spreading out every bilious, you know, destructive hateful thought that goes through his disturbed head. And so it's getting worse. It's getting more gross, more aggressive, more frequent, more untamed. And we're just, you know, the frog is now boiled. I think now the frog is basically on fire, you know, because it just gets worse and worse. Right. And that terrible image of the frog that's in the pot and then gets heated up.

And I would like to point out that frogs don't actually stay in the water. When that happens, frogs are intelligent enough to know this. temperature is too hot and they jump out, but it's still a fantastic. They're smarter than us. They are definitely, they're definitely smarter than us. I don't know who the president of the frog community is, but I suspect he's a communitarian. So what do we make also of, we know that sort of J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio are in a very

public at this point, bake off for who replaces Donald Trump. And he was playing them off against each other yesterday. And it may be that neither of them do. but in terms of what people are expecting. And, you know, he said, Marco, don't do any better or you're out of here. You know, J.D. Vance, you married someone more intelligent than you. You married Ushah. I couldn't have done that.

If you're either J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio, how are you taking those comments? Yeah. Well, neither of them have a chance, I think, because they're, because they've already shown themselves to be little beta males who, you know, suck up to Trump. So no one's ever going to respect them. And, you know, they have shame so they can be shamed and humiliated, and they will be, you know, when they become into the spotlight more. But what's interesting about those comments is he is so narcissistic, right? He can't stand if someone else is handsome.

He can't stand if someone else is smart. He can't stand if someone else married someone's smart. I know later you're going to show the tape from the Board of Peace where he's meandering and talking about the escalator incident, which he sounds, he describes the same. being sort of like a harrowing near-death experience because the escalator stopped because of some mechanical failure that he assumes in his paranoid way with some sort of, you know,

assassination attempt. But, you know, one of the things he says, yeah, Melania, you know, she's a big star with this movie, which, of course she isn't. Because, you know, but there's a problem. There's a problem because, you know, you can only have one star in a family. And so she's a star, well, you know,

it's not good. It's not good. But it's good because she's got all these people coming to the, to see the movie. And, you know, some people are seeing it three or four times. They're crying. They love it. Of course, all that's a lie. But the point is, is he's again revealing he couldn't stand the idea that Melania could get

any attention or accomplish anything. And if you saw him at the film debut, he was really grumpy and sort of disinterested during the entire debut of his wife's failed documentary that he claimed was such a success. Right. And of course, because it wasn't about him. Well, let's play the clip. We've got a couple of clips, I think, from the board. of peace meeting, which are very revelatory, not least the one way he is asleep. And again,

I just want to say, I have often wanted to sleep at these kind of events when you're in a formal environment, the room is always overheated. And unfortunately, you have people going on at length because they've got the microphone and they're speaking in accents which aren't familiar to you. So it requires more effort to understand them. Although I think in this particular instance, the speaker is very clear. And the successful implementation of the second phase of the Gaza peace plan. Well, we can very clearly see that the president has closed his eyes. His team insists that he hears better if he closes his eyes.

But he seemed to be completely asleep, as frankly I would be if I had to sit there and listen to that speech. Well, I think you're being very sympathetic. The problem is this is happening. repetitively, right? It's happening in the Oval Office. It's happening at big events. It's speaking to this breakdown in his fundamental capacity to regulate his biological functions. I mean, it's just crazy. We're really watching this person melt down physically and mentally in real time and acting as if nothing is happening. And there's so many layers to what was happening at that Board of Peace meeting. You know, that part about Gaza, you know, he's already

teasing up another Middle Eastern War in that Board of Peace speech. Let me just read you one of the things that he said. But together we're committed to achieving a Gaza that is properly governed throughout the whole area is going to be, you know, many countries at the Middle East, but there may be

somewhat close by, they're all involved, they all want to go all the time. We'd like to send soldiers to fight if it's necessary, but I don't think it's going to be necessary. We have two countries that want to go in and do a number on Hamas. I said, I don't really think, I hope it's not going to be necessary because they made a promise. They promised me to get rid of their weapons.

Looks like they're going to be doing that, but we'll have to find out. It's no longer a hotbed of radicalization. So we'll have to find out, well, guess what? Hamas isn't getting rid of their weapons. So what he's saying is, we're going to allow Israel to reinvade Gaza. So we're going to bomb Iran. We're going to attack Gaza. We're blockading Cuba. I mean, this guy is starting three wars at once. And there were another, I think, three boats attacked in the Caribbean this week, which just went completely under the radar, several people killed. And again, this sense of no one's stopping anybody that he has just gone through the usual obstacles. The obstacles to acting out as president are many, and he seems to have ridden through all of them.

And it's such a terrible combination because we have a constitutional crisis of sorts, right, where a president has really disregarded all of the checks and balances. But we have someone with a brain disorder, a deteriorating brain disorder, so they have no internal controls or judgment. So think about this. Donald Trump's id is now sort of in control of the world because he has no frontal lobes. He has no advisors. We have no constitution. We have no checks and balances. It's like everything just radiates from his id and there's not a single thing to sort of stop an impulse in his disturbed brain

from becoming a war. Well, we have some checks and balances. I think we have to just remind ourselves that the Supreme Court just threw out his tariffs. So there are some checks and balances that are holding. And there's some very brave judges that are making all sorts of opinions that are halting all sorts of American policy, which seems to have been made on the hoof and very ad hoc.

So let's talk about the grandiosity, which you have mentioned before on this podcast, his insistence on naming things after himself. So Dulles Airport, Penn Station, which he held up a whole, a massive billion, of dollars building a new tunnel between New Jersey and New York on the grounds that it could only go ahead if they renamed Penn Station after him. Palm Beach International Airport, he once named as the Donald Trump Airport. We saw him say, well, we saw, we woke up. We all woke up one morning to find Donald J. Trump chiseled into the marble above the Kennedy Center, above John F. Kennedy's name. And he said, well, I was almost assassinated. So I deserve.

to be to be there. What do you make of this obsession with naming things after himself? Well, the grandiosity, frankly, goes back to his fundamental personality disorder, which is malignant narcissism, right? But as Eric Frome said, when malignant narcissists get power, their grandiosity quickly escalates to psychotic proportions. So he's had all these successes, which only encourage him, right, to reinforce his grandiosity and to make it even feel it should be even more supreme. But you're right with some of the, the, the, um, uh, with his, uh, dementia, he's also doing it in a way which is more impulsive, more erratic, more like, you know, threatening New York. They won't get a tunnel unless they name the train station after him. I mean, it's so ham-fisted, uh, and sort of

ridiculous. But, and, and as I mentioned, he recently unfurled a picture of himself in front of the justice department. So now it's the Trump justice department. But it, it's his base. So it's his basic personality, but this is what happens with frontotemporal dementia or any form of dementia. Whatever personality disorder or kinks or problems you have get 10 times worse. And they become more gross, more disinhibited, more confusing, more erratic. And so we have someone who was an egomaniac to begin with. Now we have someone with an egomaniac who has very little behavioral external controls and whose internal controls are melting. Oh, goodness. So if he was in a nursing home. Is this the old man who would be groping the nurses?

Absolutely. Right. Especially the younger ones. Right. Goodness me. So Dr. John, we're going to hear from the president with his Board of Peace speech. And let's just, let's focus on the sort of grammar and the logic of what he's saying. And perhaps we can break it down into a few clips so we can actually examine what's going on.

And last month in Davos, we welcomed over two dozen members to this very important new organization. And we are very closely working with the United Nations. In fact, I'm going to speak to the Secretary General in a little while as a good man. And I've had a good relationship. Other than, in my last speech, they did turn off my teleprompter. I got up there. My teleprompter didn't work. I'm sitting in front of all of you people and more.

I had no teleprompter. I knew I was in trouble because I'm walking up, you know, the teleprompter's a row. He had the most beautiful speech ready. I was all set to knock them dead. First I had an escalator that stopped. You know that. It's going up. Boom.

It's lucky my movie star first lady was in front of me because I put my hand on a certain part of her body and I was able to stop my fall. I mean, what do we make of that? Yeah. This is fascinating. at so many levels. So the first level is, and this is something that we've actually kind of grown accustomed to this, but we shouldn't. His meandering into completely irrelevant stories, some of which are completely confabulated, some of which may have happened, some of which happened,

but have his weird spin on them. But this has nothing to do with what he's talking about, right? So he's just breaking off into this irrelevant reminiscence, okay, and this happens all the time. Secondly, the thing about the reminiscences, it's a whole paranoid story, right? Because, you know, he thinks they were out to get him and they turned off his teleprompter. It turns out that was an error of someone on his staff. And then they stopped his escalator. It turns out that was just a mechanical issue. I think, again, that was someone on his staff.

I think someone put a bag on the stop button, unfortunately. But it turned, he thought it was a conspiracy against him. In fact, it was actually his own team, especially the teleprompter. competence, not some conspiracy against him. And yet he's still encoded it as a conspiracy against him. And he's going to tell this story. The third thing that I think is interesting about it is, I think, obviously, at some level, Trump knows how frail he really is. Because he's talking about this escalator incident as if it was some kind of harrowing near-death experience, right? And, you know, thank God, the first lady's butt was there, you know, for me to grab. Because if I hadn't been able to grab her ass,

you know, I could have been killed. It was like, another assassination attempt. It's like, what kind of an old man is so frail that if an escalator stops, you know, this is some kind of life-threatening injury? Well, someone who is very frail, who could fall. And, you know, I mean, there are people who, for whom that could be something a dangerous potential to do. I'm not trying to make fun of them. But he's describing, look, if you and I run an escalator and it stopped, we might go, well, what the heck's that about? But we wouldn't go, tell this story as if it was like a war story, you know, where we, but But is there, Dr. John, is there something about the cumulative effect of having suffered?

I mean, he certainly had one incredibly violent assassination attempt. We know that there have been at least two or three others. He constantly lives with the fear of an assassination attempt. Is there a point at which it's just so cumulatively present with you that you can't help feeling that everything might be, might be the last moment? I don't know if I'd, I mean, sure, I guess there could be some post-traumatic reaction to that, but he's been paranoid his whole life. He's felt like he was a victim of outrageous and outlandish conspiracies his whole life. And he's constantly talking about all these false conspiracies against him. He's obsessed with them.

Okay, okay. All right. Let's pick up some more of the speech. Because she had no trouble. I said, boy, that was a very sharp stop, Johnny. So I said, that was strange. I've been on a lot of escalates that's never happened before. Usually it stops very slowly.

This was just, boom. But our first lady was right in the proper location for me. I'm waving to people. And she was holding it a little tighter. She knew what was happening. She did. She said, it's a very successful movie out right now. Like, number one, can you believe this?

And there's a big movie star. And I always say, trouble because I always say there's not room in one family for two stars. I told them. We can't have two stars in one family, so I don't know what that means, but it's not good. But it is good because we're proud of her. She did a people in the United States love the first lady, and she did the movie and has become the biggest selling documentary in 20 years. Can you believe? The theaters are all packed. Women especially, they go back and they see it two or three times, four times.

I mean, we referenced that speech a little earlier, but again, you can see him grasping for words in that clip. And also, it's not good, it is good. It's like, what are you trying to say? He's unable to understand, I think, what he's trying to say. Well, actually, what's interesting is he's got two competing areas of grandiosity, you see, because his wife's movie has to be the best movie in 20 years, but his wife can't be as good as him because that would be a problem.

And we know that because he's already, right, and he's just said to J.D. Vamps, you married someone who's more intelligent than you, your wife, I couldn't have done that. Right. So he really has to have his cake and eat it too, you see. So he asked on one hand say, well, you know, if she got attention, she was a star, because there could only be one star. That would be not good. That would be not good. But it's good.

He literally says, that would be not good. But it's good because it's the best documentary in 20 years. And people are crying and they're going back to see it three or four times.

Everyone loves it. The theaters are full. Of course, the theaters are empty. No one's going back to see it even once. Plus, they put it on in 2000 theaters. So, you know,

if you have five people go see it in each theater at some point, it's going to be a well-watched documentary. I would like to point out my bucket from, my bucket of popcorn from the movie.

I went to see it. The theatre was, there was probably 15 of us in the movie, theatre of probably 90 seats. But at the end of it, someone came up to me, two women who were Russian who came up to us and they said, you're like a movie? Morvi, very good. Very good movie, huh?

And I thought that, oh my God, it's like being in Russia. They're Russian agents who come to test us on our loyalty. Yeah, exactly, on our loyalty for Melania. I quite enjoyed the movie, actually. I know I'm the only person that has said that out loud. But it's like watching a sort of ad. And she's very foxy and unknowable. So when you see the movie, she's sort of squinting into the camera and things.

And you don't have any sense of her whatsoever by the end of it, other than she wants to make it clear she does not live with this man and she does not sleep with this man. Everything is pointing towards that. They arrive at things separately at the end of the night he's been. inaugurated, they go separate ways. It's very clear they are not, as we think of, a man and wife, which is fair enough. Everybody has their own marriage situation. Zero judgment, except don't try and present it to us as if this is a usual, you know, president and first lady. I don't think most people consider it a positive review of a documentary. If you said at the end of

the film, I knew nothing about the main character, except that she hates her husband. I'm not even sure if she hates him. It's just she doesn't want to spend any time with them. I think we want a little more character development from a documentary than that. Well, there's zero character development. You don't know her at the beginning. You don't know her at the end. But I still found it kind of fascinating because she's interesting to watch.

And her face is interesting. And the whole thing is just like sort of, it's got high production value. So it's a good ad. And it's constantly moving. You're always in the motorcade or the helicopter or Air Force One. So it's sort of sexy environments. It's just what's not sexy is Donald Trump is in the middle of it. You know, the other thing about that piece that you played, we kind of cut the tape up twice.

But again, he's going on more about the elevator conspiracy, you know, and escalator. Because there was a like he's saying, well, you know, I've been a lot of escalators. They don't usually stop like that. Yeah. The whole thing is just it's the most fantastic. entertainment, were there not the possibility of nuclear war at the end of the episode? So Dr. G, if you were writing this as a series, and it's hard not to think of Trump playing the central character in a series of America, where does this go next? Do we just get more of same?

Well, I think what has been concerning me for a long time is this pivot that he's making towards international adventurism and imperialism. I don't. see him stopping. I don't think people understand that because we got off pretty easily with these last military interventions, he captured Maduro. There was really no price to be paid. We bombed Iran's nuclear facilities probably just damaged them, but again, they didn't retaliate. They're making it very clear they're going to retaliate. This is going to be a war. And I don't think people realize. Iran has one of the biggest militaries in the world. I forget what rank they are nine or seven. People are going to correct me. I don't know it, but it's up there. It's not a small

country. It's not a small military. American soldiers will die as a result of this. Well, I think, I mean, one of the other things that struck me about his Board of Peace speech was when he was talking about the president of Indonesia, and he says, and I want to find the quote, quote, he says, you know, the president of it, he's, I'm sorry to laugh about this, because it is serious. But he talks about the president. of Indonesia and he says how many people live in Indonesia and you know he's told 240 million and obviously it's a massive it's a massive country it's the biggest it's the biggest Muslim country in the world and and he says say it again as if he can't believe it and just that sense

of absolutely zero work zero preparation for this you know he hasn't read the notes you can tell he hasn't read the notes as he's talking he's not quite sure which president he's talking about which premier he's talking about. He knows nothing about the countries that he's talking about. And he's sort of frantically, I think, trying to big it up because he knows Western Europe and the northern European countries aren't there. They've just bypassed it. So this is someone who has no information, no judgment, right, no human decency, right, who makes decisions of war and peace based on delusional, paranoid and grandiose thoughts. that run through his head in the middle of the night, right?

I mean, it's really that bad. I mean, it is laughable, except that the lives of everyone on planet Earth are really in the balance. The other thing I want to point out, too, psychologically, what I think is so dangerous. I've talked to you about this privately, but I feel like to say this,

is that the more his support crumbles at home, the more he feels humiliated and threatened by the Epstein files, or by his increasing disability, which is now being increasingly paid attention to. All those things are what we call in our field a narcissistic injury, right? When someone feels like their basic self-esteem or narcissism is pierced, okay, and how people respond to a narcissistic injury can vary.

But the way a malignant narcissist responds is by and it is way a massive attack, a massive aggressive behavior that shows that they are dominant. Okay. And so what he's discovered is he can't control the, the news cycle about the Epstein files at home, but he can blow up some fishing boats in Venezuela. You see, he's compensating psychologically, right, for his narcissistic injuries he's experiencing at home. So, for example, when people are asking him, why do you need Greenland? Why, it's very important psychologically. In other words, psychologically, I need the ego boost, right, of controlling Greenland.

And so the problem is that, and I've said this to you, is that, you know, in some ways, who knows? Like, we could have some indirect responsibility for World War III because he's raging at those people at the Daily Beast talking about how I'm cognitive. I'm not cognitive. I pass lots of cognitive exams, you know, that Jasmine Crockett couldn't pass. And meanwhile, he's agitated, and so he has to lash out in a way to feel powerful again. And as the commander-in-chief with no restraints, this is a way that he can lash out and feel powerful again. I want to reflect on the speech that he gave on January 20th on the anniversary of his achieving power because it shows, first of all, what I've been talking about in terms of his

not only digressing into irrelevant stories, but that these stories are what we call in the field confabulation. It's a symptom of dementia. And in confabulation, there are holes in the memory, but people, sort of, it's called honest lying, because their memory fills in the stories and they tell these anecdotes as if they happened, but they didn't happen. So here's an anecdote. He's talking about his growing up. He's talking about his year in office. Somehow he gets to his growing up. Because, you know, we used to have when I was growing up, we had in my area in Queens. I grew up in Queens. We had a place called Creedmore. Did anybody know that? Creedmore? It was a big guy said, a mom. Why are those bars on the building? I used to play Little League baseball there, a place called Cunningham Park. I was quite the base. You wouldn't believe it, but I said to my mother, mom, she would be there, always there for me. She said, son, you could be a professional baseball player. I said, thanks, mom. I said, why are those bars on the windows? Big building, big powerful building. It loomed over the park. Actually, it was,

she said, well, people there were very sick in that building. I said, boy, I used to always look at that building and see this big building, big tall building. It loomed over the park. It was sort of now, I think it was pretty unfriendly site, but I'll never forget it. I don't know if it's still there because they got rid of most of them. You know, the Democrats in New York, they took them down and the people live in the streets now. That's why you have a lot of people in California and other places. They live on the streets. They took the mental institutions down. They're expensive. But I say, why does that building have those bars? Boy, it didn't, it wasn't normal. You know, you used to looking at a window, but this one, you looked at the steel, vicious steel,

tiny windows, bars over the place. Nobody was getting out. It's called a mental institution. That was an insane asylum. Now, so first of all, it's so much in that. So much to unpack there. Crazy digression. Crazy digression.

Okay, he can't even complete a sentence, right? There's about 18 incomplete sentences there, right? Where he can't even veer within his own digression, right, to maintain a thought. Within the digression, there's digressions, essentially. Okay. The other thing is it's clearly a confabulation because I'm sure his mother never told me a professional baseball player. His mother was incredibly cold and distant. So I doubt she ever went to any of his baseball games. And the way we know it's a confabulation is you can't see Creedmore from Cunningham Park. Now, I wouldn't have known this, but I was on a show and all these people from

Queens wrote to me telling me, you cannot see. You can't see it. It's miles away and you can't see it. So the whole thing is made up. And again, it's a lot of. And again, it's. It's confabulation. It's not lying. Because why would you tell this crazy story about playing in the park and looking at a mental hospital? It's not like saying that, you know, that eggs are down 500 percent, okay, where he's... Well, it's a little bit like when he said his uncle taught the Unabomber. I mean, the Unabomber didn't go to the same university, but his his uncle was a teacher. He didn't teach the Unabomber. Right. Exactly. It's very similar to that. And similar also in the sense that there was no political advantage to his telling that story. He wasn't wanting

himself in any particular way. But he was just telling it like it was kind of a down-home anecdote, kind of a funny little anecdote, that we know physically could not possibly have happened. And so this is the level that we're getting to. This is someone who's having made up memories. Okay. His empty head is being filled with fantasy. And also, you know that no speechwriter, and obviously he's got access to incredibly capable speechwriters. No speech writer could possibly write that. I mean, it was just, it was so obviously off the top of his head. It didn't fit in with anything to do with his one year inauguration, you know, anniversary. It was just like some flying Jetson

that had come into his brain and then went out the other side and everybody was just like, What's a flotsam and jetsam just kind of spewing out of his brain randomly. Right. Because also the other reason a speechwriter couldn't write that is I remember when I was in graduate school, they would say, you can't make up thought disorder. Like if I wanted to sound like a schizophrenic and talk in a thought or disorder way, I really couldn't do it. I mean, I could tell a lie. I know how to tell a lie. But I don't know how to talk in this interrupted random sort of way.

It goes against the way our brains are organized. So really no one could write this, right? This is the product of a disturbed and deteriorating brain. And also I think we see his anxiety about the midterms approaching it. And there seems to be a sense of potential comeuppance if the Republicans lose the midterms. The Democrats retake the House. And he said, you know, they'll impeach me. Steve Bannon has said they'll send me to jail.

They'll send all of us to jail. I think people have to be prepared for the fact that he's going to take some kind of truly dramatic action to interfere with the election. Either he'll have ICE agents surrounding the polls or he'll have his Confederates say that the results are fake and these people can't be seated. He is going to use the full force of his power to stop these 2026 elections. from giving the people the choice about what to do with Congress. Well, people cannot say they haven't been warned by Dr. John Gartner and by The Daily Beast, where we chronicle the president's health on a minute-by-minute basis. Dr. John, you have to come back next month and we will analyse more of the president's own words.

Because what I find fascinating about what you do is you interpret the words the president is giving us. And as you've always maintained, he's a man that's been in the public view for the last 50 years. So we have a lot to compare him against. And it's very clear that his vocabulary, his use of words, his grammar, his memory is all much less effective than it used to be. And that's documented by actual empirical studies. Yeah. And that's what makes it so agonizing to watch. Yes.

So there you have it, an analysis of frontal temporal dementia layered on top of a personality which is suffused with malignant narcissism. And I love talking to Dr. Gartner because he has all the terms. I think many of us watch the president and can see things that concern us, especially in the leader of the free world. And you can see his cabinet members reacting to it around him and not knowing quite what to do. And what I love about Dr. John is he just articulates what's happening and what we're dealing with and what the president is dealing with here. So if you have been, thank you for joining us, leave your comments. What do you think? Do you think the president is displaying symptoms of just old age? Is it some kind of dementia?

Does it make you anxious? Whatever. Let us know. You can fill in the comments at YouTube. Also, sign up for the Daily Beast, because as I said at the beginning, we really do chronicle the president's health with enormous care because it impacts all of us. Have a wonderful rest of your weekend. I'll be back with Michael Wolf on Tuesday inside Trump's head. And until then, be beast.

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