A clinical psychiatrist at a leading medical school says if a patient presented with the rambling incoherence that former president Donald Trump showed in his widely panned debate performance earlier this week he would refer them for a “rigorous neuropsychiatric evaluation.”
Richard Friedman, a professor of clinical psychiatry and director of Weill Cornell Medical College’s psychopharmacology clinic, wrote in The Atlantic Thursday that he watched Trump debate Vice President Kamala Harris “with particular attention to candidates’ vocabulary, verbal and logical coherence, and ability to adapt to new topics—all signs of a healthy brain.”
The Republican nominee’s brain did not win a vote of confidence from the professor.
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“Donald Trump’s expressions of those tendencies were alarming,” he wrote. “He displayed some striking, if familiar, patterns that are commonly seen among people in cognitive decline.”
As a key example, Friedman cited Trump’s answer—if it can be called that—to a question from moderator David Muir about if he has regrets over his behavior during the January 6 riots in 2021.
“I have said ‘blood bash—bath.’ It was a different term, and it was a term that related to energy, because they have destroyed our energy business,” said Trump, making virtually no sense. “That was where bloodbath was. Also, on Charlottesville, that story has been, as you would say, debunked. Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Jesse—all of these people, they covered it. If they go an extra sentence, they will see it was perfect. It was debunked in almost every newspaper.”
Friedman noted that, while it’s normal for politicians to evade questions, Trump’s response went “beyond evasion” and essentially amounted to completely irrelevant babbling, an IRL Old Man Yells at Cloud meme.
He also flagged Trump’s “compulsive” repetitions, such as bringing up gas pipelines multiple times, including when they were not relevant and, in one case, leading moderators to cut him off to go to commercial.
“If a patient presented to me with the verbal incoherence, tangential thinking, and repetitive speech that Trump now regularly demonstrates, I would almost certainly refer them for a rigorous neuropsychiatric evaluation to rule out a cognitive illness,” wrote Friedman. “A condition such as vascular dementia or Alzheimer’s disease would not be out of the ordinary for a 78-year-old. Only careful medical examination can establish whether someone indeed has a diagnosable illness—simply observing Trump, or anyone else, from afar is not enough.”
Friedman isn’t alone in his concerns. MSNBC host Chris Hayes said last week there has not been “nearly as much discussion about Trump’s diminished mental acuity” compared to President Biden’s. Trump biographer Timothy O’Brien even told The Guardian he thinks Trump is aware that he’s mentally slipping. “What we’re seeing now is a reflection of someone who’s very troubled and very desperate,” O’Brien told the newspaper.
In an attempt to recast his incoherence as a strength, Trump even flamboyantly branded his own purported ramblings as “the weave” earlier this month.
“I’ll talk about, like, nine different things that they all come back brilliantly together,” he told a rally in Pennsylvania. “And it’s like—and friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say: ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.’” At least one psychiatry professor disagrees.
