Scarborough Says People Close To Trump Worry He's 'Pre-Dementia'

[octoberlib]

92. Scarborough's mother had Alzheimer's.

If Donald Trump were your father, you would run, not walk, to a neurologist for an evaluation of his cognitive health. You don’t have to be a doctor to see something is very wrong. “He reminds me of Uncle Bruce in so many ways,” said my aunt, who nursed her brother through Alzheimer’s disease. Joe Scarborough, who has known Trump for years, said in 2017 that Trump's mental confusion reminded him of his mother, who had Alzheimer's for 10 years. “It's getting worse, and not a single person who works for him doesn’t know he has early signs of dementia,” he said of Trump last year on his MSNBC show.

To mental health professionals like me, the red flags are waving wildly. In January 2018, over 70 of us wrote a letter to the president’s physician, Dr. Ronny Jackson, urging him to administer a cognitive exam during the president’s physical because we had seen a marked deterioration in his verbal functioning, possibly due to cognitive decline.

In fact, Dr. Jackson did administer the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a screening tool for dementia, and Trump passed. But while Trump bragged that this proved his superior intelligence, this 10-minute screening test, where one must identify a camel, draw a clock and repeat three numbers backwards, only ruled out full-blown dementia.


In Alzheimer’s, as language skills deteriorate, we see two types of tell-tale speech disorders, or paraphasias:Semantic paraphasia involves choosing the incorrect words. For instance, after Attorney General William Barr released a letter on the Mueller report, Trump said: “I hope they now go and take a look at the oranges, the oranges of that investigation, the beginnings of that investigation." Phonemic paraphasia, which is linked to the moderate to severe stages of Alzheimer’s, is described as "the substitution of a word with a nonword that preserves at least half of the segments and/or number of syllables of the intended word.” For example, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu becomes “Betanyahu,” big league becomes “bigly,” anonymous becomes “enenamas” or "anenomynous," renovation becomes “renoversh,” missiles become "mishiz," space capsule becomes “capsicle,” midterm elections become "midtowm" and "midturn" elections, and Christmas becomes “Chrissus.”

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/04/09/does-donald-trump-have-dementia-we-need-know-psychologist-column/3404007002/