To ensure that the United States will always be led by a coherent, functioning President, the 25th Amendment provides for the prompt, orderly, and democratic transfer of executive power in the event the president is incapacitated, physically or mentally.
Trump’s tariff debacle, where he thrust out his chest, flung economic incoherence at the world, then flip-flopped only two days later, was the strongest evidence yet — in a roiling sea of evidence — that he is mentally incapacitated.
Despite inheriting the strongest post-COVID economy in the world, Trump keeps insisting that the U.S. economy is broken and in need of saving. He insists global trading partners who sell us more than they buy from us — even countries that are a fraction of our size — are “taking advantage.”
Leaders of the EU are too intelligent to sneer out loud at Trump’s flip-flop on tariffs. Aware of his deranged lust for revenge, they are reluctant to utter the truth about his stubborn ignorance. But the world is aware, even if Americans aren’t, that our president is deranged.
Mental health professionals sound the alarm
Psychotherapist Dr. John Gartner, former Johns Hopkins University Medical School faculty, is alarmed. He is circulating a petition among psychiatrists and mental health professionals about Trump’s cognitive impairment. Gartner wrote that Trump shows "progressive deterioration in memory, thinking, ability to use language, behavior, and both gross and fine motor skills," adding that he felt an ethical “obligation to warn the public, and urge the media to cover this national emergency."
Trump struggles to “even finish a sentence,” Gartner said in an interview with MindSite News. “When Donald Trump was younger in the 1980s, he was actually quite articulate. His thoughts were logical and related: now they’re tangential. He goes off on these ramblings where he is confabulating things — weird things in which he’ll talk about Venezuelans and mental hospitals, and then he’ll talk about sharks and batteries or the late, great Hannibal Lector and Silence of the Lambs.”
Dr. Gartner notes that Trump is “losing his capacity for coherent speech,” identifying “dozens and dozens of Trump’s phonemic paraphasias, in which you use sounds in place of an actual word [a hallmark of brain damage and dementia].” Trump will say something like “mishiz” for missiles, or “Chrishus” for Christmas, because he can’t complete the word. Then we see also a lot of semantic paraphasias, in which he uses a word incorrectly, as in “the oranges of the situation” because it rhymes with “the origins of the situation.”
The New York Times, in October 2024, reported that Trump now uses more “negative words than positive words compared with 2016, which can be an indicator of cognitive change.” And he curses far more often, “a trend that could reflect what experts call disinhibition,” another sign of dementia. They cited a study by health care news outlet, Stat, with similar findings.
The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump
Dr. Bandy Lee wrote, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President near the conclusion of Trump’s first presidency. In the book, psychiatric experts came forward due to what they saw as their professional moral and civic “duty to warn” America about Trump’s dementia. This duty, they argued, supersedes their competing professional duty of neutrality.
Since then, more than 3,000 credentialed mental health professionals have added their signatures to the petition warning that the president has probable dementia.
They write, “Donald Trump is showing unmistakable signs strongly suggesting dementia, based on his public behavior and informant reports that show progressive deterioration in memory, thinking, ability to use language, behavior, and both gross and fine motor skills … his vocabulary is impoverished, he often has difficulty finishing a thought, sentence or even a word. Typical of dementia patients he perseverates and overuses superlatives and filler words…”
Congress needs to act before Trump gets red-button happy
Trump, who caused global destruction with his mindless tariff wars, now has the sole authority to launch nuclear weapons as the Commander-in-Chief.
Evidence of his cognitive decline is everywhere. Mental health professionals have sounded the alarm, and met their professional duty to warn the world about Trump’s dementia. Congress now has a duty to listen to the professionals. Republicans, on the whole, now have a duty to act.
Section 4 of the 25th Amendment allows the Vice President and either the Cabinet, or a body approved “by law” formed by Congress, to jointly agree that “the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Democrats need to proceed under this clause, and frightened republicans need to join in before Trump commits another, potentially world annihilating, blunder.
Sabrina Haake is a 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her columns are published in Alternet, Chicago Tribune, MSN, Out South Florida, Raw Story, Salon, Smart News and Windy City Times. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
