IS TRUMP IN COGNITIVE DECLINE?
The view from inside is that the president has been slipping
Perseveration is a medical term used in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, and speech-language pathology to describe a particular response such as a phrase that is repeated or a gesture that is inappropriate. It’s a symptom most commonly seen in patients who have PTSD, autism, traumatic brain injury, or dementia. I thought of the term, which I heard many times over several years when a close relative was experiencing the degeneration of dementia, while viewing President Donald Trump’s seventy-one minute speech to an estimated eight hundred US military leaders who were assembled, for reasons still not clear, at the order of Pete Hegseth, the Army National Guard reserve major who is now the secretary of war, at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, on September 30.
After a rah-rah opening speech by Hegseth, the president delivered his usual mixture of personalized history and complaints—most notably, he has repeatedly claimed credit for solving international crises that he did not solve—that some of his close aides in the White House understand to be yet another sign of his increasing mental disorganization and inability to focus at high-level meetings.
Most significantly, I was told, Trump, always masterful in dealing with crowds, large or small, is no longer able to “read the room”—quickly size up the audience and let his instincts as a showman take over and get the audience engaged. It would have been refreshing, and perhaps unprecedented, for Trump to outline his views on foreign policy and give the assembled generals and admirals a chance to ask questions of their president. Instead, they got a reprise of Trump’s greatest triumphs. The president returned to one of his most misguided views—that of himself as a settler of wars. “I have settled so many wars since we’re here,” he said. “I’ve settled seven and yesterday we might have settled the biggest of them all,” referring to ongoing talks between Israel and Hamas. “Although,” Trump added, “I don’t know. Pakistan, India, was very big, both nuclear powers. I settled that.” There have been many newspaper reports from around the world disputing Trump’s accounts of the issues at hand, as well as his definition of what it means to “settle” a conflict.
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