Nature Or Nurture?

You may have missed Ford Vox, M.D., [...] a medical journalist and commentator who practices brain injury medicine in Atlanta, typing in something called STAT:

Language is closely tied with cognition, and the president’s speech patterns are increasingly repetitive, fragmented, devoid of content, and restricted in vocabulary. Trump’s overuse of superlatives like tremendous, fantastic, and incredible are not merely elements of personal style. These filler words reflect reduced verbal fluency. Full transcripts of the president’s interviews with outlets like the New York Times and Time reveal the extent of his disorganized thought patterns.

The problem becomes especially apparent in the transcript format, where his thinking is no longer camouflaged by visual accompaniments to communication like facial expressions and gesticulations. Some outlets have sought to protect the president, forgiving his lapses by declining to publish full transcripts. When Politico published a leaked transcript of the Wall Street Journal’s July interview, we learned that the president’s intellectual curiosity rises to the level of introductory geography: “You call places like Malaysia, Indonesia, and you say, you know, how many people do you have? And it’s pretty amazing how many people they have.”

The president made that remark in response to a question about the ideal corporate tax rate, demonstrating the degree to which his thinking drifts. The problems with language expression extend to language interpretation, the likely source of the president’s gross misunderstanding of London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s message to his city in the wake of a terror attack in June.

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Episodes like these often occur because of impaired frontal lobe brain systems. These typically provide some degree of restraint from saying the first thing that crosses your mind. In a healthy brain, these ideas must make their way through multiple layers of checks and balances that take into account the social propriety and appropriateness of the audience for a given remark. Such frontal impairment often does not stop at troublesome communication, but has physical manifestations such as childlike facial expressions and physical restlessness, both features we see in Trump.

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The persistence of fixed beliefs about the crowd size at his inauguration, President Obama having a fraudulent birth certificate, or millions of undocumented people voting for Hillary Clinton suggest either a shocking willingness to lie, which falls into the behavioral dysregulation category, or a memory disorder that hobbles the president with fixed delusions that cannot be swayed by contradictory information. The New York Times opinion section has catalogued an astounding collection of the president’s lies so extensive that such lying implicates the cognitive systems that undergird one’s hold on what has happened in one’s life.

If the president is questioning whether the “Access Hollywood” videotape of himself celebrating a lifestyle rife with misogyny and sexual assault is really him, that worries me more about a memory disorder than a particularly poor effort at gaslighting.

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If an individual with these symptoms was in an average job in an average community surrounded by an average family, he or she would most likely be seen by a doctor. In the clinical evaluation of dementia, the concerns expressed by family members and the patient themselves are essential: They explain the changes observed over recent years, and that history is a prime ingredient in formulating the differential diagnosis.

The uniqueness of the megalomaniacal media personality that Trump has built himself into, followed by the presidency and its attendant cadre of fawning assistants, have most likely prevented him from getting proper assessment.

The president’s apparent symptoms are advancing and warrant medical evaluation by relevant specialists. Given the sensitivity of his case, an independent panel would be appropriate. It’s entirely possible that the president does not have predementia or is not progressing toward dementia. But he is definitely behaving as such.

In either scenario, I do not think this is an individual who is fit to serve the office.

No shit. Whether it's psychological disturbance (what once was called assholery) or physiological deterioration (what once was called syphilis) get Trump out before it's too damn late!!