A Layman’s View of Trump’s Mental State

The purpose of this post, other than to distract me from Googling more articles about how to get buns of steel, instead of the buns of My Pillow-stuffing that I currently have, is to explore Trump’s mental state.

I feel I should say at the outset that I know nothing. Or, as the British might say, “nothing”, since we pretty much speak the same language.

I have no formal psychological training. I have no informal psychological training. My wife, Jen, is a psychologist. But I’ve absorbed very little of her knowledge. I do know that there is something called the DSM-5, which is apparently the comprehensive list of all known mental disorders. According to Jen, I am suffering from “that”.

Further, I have never personally interacted or even been in the same room as Trump. And I have never examined him, although that IS on my bucket list.

I know that my lack of expertise can undermine the credability of my diagnoses. Perhaps this is why the C- I got in “Intro to Physics” caused my four-part treatise entitled “String Theory: Am I right?” to underperform on the New York Times best-seller list.

My observations are strictly those of a layman. But given that most people who will be voting in this election do not have actual psychological training, it is the laypeople who will be deciding the outcome of this race. So how Trump’s behaviors hit them is very relevant to this election

So, what does Trump’s daily presentation on the campaign trail say about his mental state to people who don’t know Capgras Syndrome from the Fregoli delusion. Or the people, like me, who are unauthorized to prescribe selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, but are certainly willing to try them if they are found in a neighbor’s medicine cabinet?

First, I think that anyone watching can agree that Trump’s behavior is, increasingly…let’s go with “odd”.

Just in the past week he has repeatedly obsessed on the relative crowd size at the speeches of himself and his opponent. He imagined a near-fatal helicopter ride with Willie Brown, conjured up a plan whereby Joe Biden “storms” (I think Biden’s “storming” days may be behind him) into the Democratic convention and reclaims the Democratic nomination, and demanded the Kamala Harris be disqualified for “election interference” for claiming that she’s had tens of thousands of people at her rallies when the actual number was closer to zero, and all the people we see are the creations of Artificial Intelligence. And this was a relatively stable week for him.

He also slurs his words, loses his train of thought and makes claims that are not only false, but easily and obviously disprovable. And his barely contained, near constant rage, causes him to spew out self-destructive, racist and nasty epithets about Harris, or anyone else he is pissed at that day. His campaign staff is publicly urging him and privately begging him to stop, but he just can’t seem to do it.

So, what are we to make of this?

I have heard TV pundits say, for years, that Trump is slipping into dementia. That doesn’t ring true to me. Again, I am not an expert on the science of dementia, but I do have some experience in watching people with various forms of that affliction. I’ve seen people with Alzheimers and my own mother suffered from Lewy Body Dementia. And I don’t see in Trump, what I saw in them.

First, although whatever Trump has is getting worse, he is not declining at the rate that I’ve seen in people with actual, diagnosed dementia. And while his vocabulary has noticeably truncated over the years, he’s not failing to recognize people or forgetting where he is in the middle of speeches. Based on what I’ve seen in other people, I feel that if he had been slipping into dementia for the past several years, we would know it.

I also don’t find his occassional physical stumbles (requiring help getting down a ramp, needing two hands to drink a glass of water) to be dramatic or frequent enough to be overly-concerning. He still seems to have a sufficient amount of energy and control over his physical being to do the job of President for the next four years. This, for me, contrasts with Biden, who did not seem to have four more years left in the tank.

That said, it is clear that Trump is becoming more unhinged than ever before, and he wasn’t ever all that hinged to begin with. He’s always been somewhat open to obviously insane conspiracy theories. But in 2016 his embrace of birtherism and Ted Cruz’s dad’s murder of JFK seemed more strategic. Now, he really seems to believe them and be angry about them.

They also seem to be the only tool left to help him cope with bad news. Easy-to-beat Joe no longer in the race? There must have been a behind-the-scenes coup. Kamala getting big crowds? They’re fake. Does it matter that the entire national press corp and thousands of witnesses were there? Nope. The feasibility or disprovability of these assertions don’t really seem to matter at all.

He’s also becoming much more blatantly racist. I know that is a bit like The Big Bopper becoming bigger and bopping more. But at least in years past Trump would express his hatred of various religions and ethnic groups in not-so-subtle dog whistles. Now, he just lets it rip. A great example happened just yesterday when Trump posted two comparison pictures on social media. The caption was “The suburbs under Trump/The suburbs under Kamala”

The Trump version looked like a typical suburban street on a sunny day. But as soon as Kamala takes her hand of the Bible, or the Book of Wican, whatever she swears herself in on, the suburbs suddenly convert to a dark hallway, overflowing with ALL BLACK PEOPLE, just generally looking black, presumably waiting to move into your den.

Trump’s discussion of the policies and solutions that he would enact has also, if this is possible, deteriorated. He never was very specific about most of his proposals. He just assured us that he had a solution to whatever problem there was, and that the solution was “Tremendous” and “you’ll get much more for less” and “everybody will love it”.

Now, he won’t even give us that. Whatever problem he is asked about “never would have happened” if he’d been president. Ukraine? Inflation? Conflict in the Middle East? Failing schools? Bad weather? They just never would have happened. And if he’s reelected, they’ll just magically go away, immediately.

To this lay person, it appears less like Trump is dementing and more like he’s shrinking. His vocabulary, his view of problems, his emotional palette, his tether to reality. All fading away.

Trump has always been your difficult and crazy Uncle Hubert who you dreaded seeing at Thanksgiving. But now it’s time to take Hubert’s car keys away and start moving him into assisted living. Because as I said about Joe Biden, who faces a different set of challenges, this isn’t going to get better in the next four years. It’s going to get much, much worse. And we can’t afford to have that running the country.