At 81 years old, president Joe Biden has attracted significant voter misgivings over his age and mental acuity.
But his rival in the upcoming presidential election, Donald Trump, may be dealing with much more acute cognitive issues.
Experts are becoming increasingly worried over Trump's condition, Salon reports, with the former president struggling to form coherent sentences and even once again confusing Biden with his predecessor Barack Obama during a rally in North Carolina this month.
"Not enough people are sounding the alarm, that based on his behavior, and in my opinion, Donald Trump is dangerously demented," psychologist and former Johns Hopkins Medical School professor John Gartner, who wrote a book about Trump's mental health, told Salon.
"This is a tale of two brains," he added. "Biden's brain is aging. Trump's brain is dementing."
"In my opinion, Donald Trump is getting worse as his cognitive state continues to degrade," Gartner said. "If Trump were your relative, you’d be thinking about assisted care right now."
Others agreed.
"It is meaningful because the confusion of people, in contrast to the occasional forgetting of names, is a sign of early dementia, as noted by the Dementia Care Society," licensed psychologist and founder and executive director of the Washington Center For Cognitive Therapy Vincent Greenwood told the publication.
As for Trump mispronouncing words like "Venezuela" or "migrant crime," experts tend to agree he's exhibiting early signs of "paraphasia," speech disturbances caused by brain damage, and "not just aging," as Greenwood argued.
And others, like clinical psychologist and Cornell University senior lecturer Harry Segal, who specializes in mental health disorders, offer a more nuanced assessment — though not one that inspires much confidence in Trump.
"Since this is an intermittent problem, it suggests that when Trump is especially stressed and exhausted, he suffers cognitive slippage that affects the way he associates words or their meaning," he told Salon. "Note, though, that Trump’s pathological lying is itself a form of mental illness, so these cognitive lapses are literally sitting atop what appears to be an already compromised psychological functioning."
And at the end of the day, Trump is still contending with dozens of criminal charges.
Needless to say, none of this bodes well for the future of the country.
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