Becoming the oldest presidential candidate in history, the former president appears incapable of dispelling speculation about his well-being and health.
ADVERTISINGSince donald trump ran for the first time in the presidential elections in the United States, his detractors have raised questions about his mental state. Detractors of his behavior have pointed out multiple aspects that they describe as alarm signals: a style of speaking erratic and disorganized, lies seemingly compulsive statements, a constant stream of overly grandiose statements and declarations, and a visible difficulty regulating your temperament.
This is evident in their behavior in the social networkswhere he often lashes out at his opponents in late-night and early-morning insults. In response to these concerns and criticisms over the years, Trump has repeatedly described himself as a “very stable genius.” In the last year of his presidency, he began to boast that he had “passed” a basic cognitive test designed to detect signs of early dementia, although he has not answered questions about why he underwent the test in the first place.
But, as much as Trump has denied it, the point is increasingly pressing in his presidential campaign. In recent weeks, Trump has behaved particularly strangerambling and slurring his way through increasingly longer speeches and, at one point, remaining on stage after a performance to spend half an hour dancing to a dreary playlist.
In one particularly strange appearance, he delivered a more than five-minute monologue about the late golfer Arnold Palmer, during which he alluded to other golfers’ astonishment at the size of Palmer’s genitals. Trump seems to be aware that people are discussing the strangeness of his monologueswhich he has begun to describe as “the plot.”
The Trump campaign has also refused to make his medical records public and has removed him from numerous public events and interviews, fueling speculation. speculations what is “exhausted” and that they try to limit the opportunities for him to give a particularly poor performance.
Meanwhile, the campaign Kamala Harris leans strongly toward the idea that Trump is unfit to be president not only because of his past behavior, but because is not psychologically prepared for homework.
“It is clear: Donald Trump is increasingly unstable and unhinged“Harris said at a recent campaign stop. “And he seeks uncontrolled power.” He said the same thing in an interview with the Trump-friendly ‘Fox News’ network, in which he linked the former president’s alleged mental deterioration to his rhetoric increasingly dark, including proposals to shut down critical media outlets, deport millions of people, and use the US military against its critics.
Trump’s predecessor has also recently joined, Barack Obamawho has been campaigning for Harris. “Along with his intentions, there is also the question of his competence,” Obama told a crowd in Arizona. “Have you seen him lately? He’s out there giving two-hour or two-and-a-half-hour speeches, they’re just mixes.” of words“.
“You would be worried if your grandfather acted like that. I’m not kidding, you would be, right? You would call your cousins and say, ‘Have you noticed?’ Well, imagine coming from a guy who wants to give uncontrolled power“he added. “We don’t need to see what a Donald Trump is like older, crazier and without limits.”
But while Harris and her allies make sure to use the word “increasingly“along with”unstable“Adding some urgency to his argument, concerns about Trump’s mental fitness for the job date back to the early days of his presidency, and even earlier.
the first time
While Hillary Clinton was running against Trump in 2016, she directly attacked his character as a danger for the US. “It’s not hard to imagine Donald Trump leading us into a war just because someone got under his very thin skin,” he said in a speech, calling him “temperamentally unsuited” for the role of commander in chief.
“Donald Trump’s ideas are not just different. They are dangerously incoherent. They are not even really ideas: just a series of strange rantings, personal squabbles and outright lies.” “I’ll let the psychiatrists explain their affection for tyrants.”
Once Trump entered the Oval Office, the debate about his mental state only escalated. The incendiary 2018 book ‘Fire and Fury’, an exposé of the goings-on in the Trump White House during his first year in power, it featured deeply sourced reporting on the president’s unstable moods, his extreme difficulty concentrating and assimilating information, and his obsessive repetition of often false stories.
According to the book’s author, Michael Wolff, many of those who worked in the White House at the time told him that they frequently discussed whether Trump’s behavior justified his removal by invoking the 25th Amendmentunder which a president’s cabinet can remove him if he is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”
Outside the White House, Trump’s niece, the clinical psychiatrist Mary Trumpdescribed Trump’s psychological makeup in dire terms. In his book ‘Too Much and Never Enough’, published in 2020, he detailed how his uncle’s personality problems were rooted in his family education and argued that they should be taken extremely seriously.
ADVERTISING“The fact is that the Donald’s pathologies They are so complex and their behaviors so often inexplicable that reaching a precise and exhaustive diagnosis would require a complete battery of psychological and neurophysical tests to which he will never submit,” he wrote.
There was also a great debate in the psychiatric and psychological establishment American over whether or not it was ethical for clinicians to diagnose Trump with a personality disorder from afar without examining him in person.
This is a discussion that dates back to the 1964 elections, when more than 1,000 psychiatrists said in a survey that, in their professional opinion, then-Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater He was not suitable for the position.
After Goldwater won a defamation suit Against the magazine that published the survey, the American Psychiatric Association adopted what is now known as the ‘Goldwater Rule’, according to which members should not present their opinions about candidates as a substantiated clinical opinion or diagnosis.
ADVERTISING“Although it is perfectly fine for a psychiatrist share your experience on psychiatric issues in general, it is unethical to offer a professional opinion about an individual without conducting an examination,” the association’s president wrote in 2017.
“The healthiest individual ever chosen”
Since he first ran for president, Trump has hit back harshly against claims that he is not a health model. During his first campaign, in 2015, he had a doctor publish a report on his health in which he described his test results as “astonishingly excellent,” stating that “his physical strength and their resistance is extraordinary” and declared that “if elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the Presidency.”
However, the doctor who wrote this letter later revealed that Trump had dictated it to him. In 2020, as he prepared to campaign against Joe Biden, four years his senior, Trump repeatedly boasted that he had obtained perfect results on a test designed to detect early onset dementia. He did not explain why he had undergone the test.
Among the questions of standard test There is one in which the subject is asked to remember five words and another in which they are asked to identify images of different animals.
ADVERTISINGAfter losing the Presidency to the man he derided as “Sleepy Joe,” Trump continued his campaign against Biden this year by repeatedly attacking the mental acuity and advanced age of his rival, stating that Democrats were ignoring a marked deterioration in Biden’s capabilities.
When Biden struggled In a television debate with Trump in the summer, struggling to finish sentences and sometimes staring into space, it briefly seemed that it would be the president’s cognitive problems, not Trump’s, that would become the story of the election.
However, when Biden dropped out and was replaced in the candidacy by HarrisTrump suddenly found himself with a much younger and more vigorous opponent, making him the oldest presidential candidate in history.
Both he and his running mate, J.D. VanceHarris is frequently mocked as intellectually subnormal, and Trump goes so far as to call her “crazy” and “crazy”. While this may please her voters, there is so far no sign of any serious debate about Harris’ mental health status.
ADVERTISINGThe vice president has also done make your medical history publicwhich shows that he is in excellent physical health, apart from mild myopia and seasonal allergies, and despite all the speculation about his physical and mental exhaustion, there is so far no indication that Trump will make his public.