An expert psychiatrist is sounding the alarm in the wake of Donald Trump’s bizarre presidential debate performance against Kamala Harris.
“Tuesday’s presidential debate was, among other things, an excellent real-world test of the candidates’ cognitive fitness,” Richard A. Friedman, a psychiatry professor at Cornell Weill Medical College in New York, wrote for The Atlantic, “and any fair-minded mental-health expert would be very worried about Donald Trump’s performance.”
Acknowledging that he is not “offering any specific medical diagnoses” and has never examined either Trump or Harris, the psychiatrist said he watched the debate with keen attention on the candidates’ vocabulary and logical coherence. While the 60-year-old vice president “certainly exhibited some rigidity and repetition,” his judgment is that her performance seemed normal. The 78-year-old Trump’s, on the other hand, was “alarming.”
“Much of the time,” Friedman wrote, “following Trump’s train of thought was difficult, if not impossible.”
To be fair, this has to an extent always been the case with this candidate. His rhetorical style has long been considered “unique” by linguistic standards, and transcribing his “incoherent” speeches has been extremely difficult since long before his current rival became her party’s nominee.
In response to moderator David Muir’s question about his statements about the January 6, 2021 insurrection, for instance, Trump rambled about “blood baths,” Charlottesville, and the US-Mexico border, taking his tried-and-true evasion tactics to dizzying and often confusing new heights.
“Circumstantial and tangential speech can indicate a fundamental problem with an underlying cognitive process, such as logical and goal-oriented thinking,” the psychiatrist explained. “Did Trump realize that his answer was neither germane to the question nor logical?”
In the mental health world, this sort of repetition of concepts and terms is known as “perseverance,” and it can be linked to a host of disorders ranging from Parkinson’s to schizophrenia that may result in a lack of cognitive clarity, Friedman noted.
https://futurism.com/neoscope/psychiatrist-donald-trump-speech-debate