Is anyone in the sentient world not witnessing the ridiculousness of “our” president’s increasingly uncontrolled, vitriolic, outrageous and completely inappropriate behaviors that he continuously exhibits each and every time he has an TV audience with a foreign leader?
He cannot control himself from using these media exposures to attack everything he can dredge up at that particular moment in time, nearly always aimed at various real Americans back home – much to the chagrin, embarrassment and, often, visual astonishment of his foreign “friend/ally” who can often be seen basically repressing, as hard as they can, their actual feelings, however non-verbal as they remain, which are now captured live in their unfortunate “15 minutes of Trump-associated fame.”
He puts these leaders in the most uncomfortable position (all cameras watching) that you could possibly imagine. Did you see the flummoxed and exasperated Finnish president Wednesday?
I can tell you that every one of these folks would like nothing more than to say, “Mr. Trump, can we address the questions and issues at hand here, and not have to experience your irrelevant venting and political obsessions back at home, please?!”
As a physician of some years of experience, I am daily confronted, and very medically concerned, with the unpredictable and truly dangerous “presidential antics” we all see in the body language, vitriolic attacks, overt gestures and uncontrolled, verbal utterances of this president.
It may be reasonably and clinically possible that he has FTD (Frontotemporal Dementia) which is the front-brain equivalent of Alzheimer’s disease, that results in an increasing lack of verbal and emotional control, including expressions and simple judgments we would all expect from a mentally capable person in such a profoundly responsible position in the world.
For the record, its signs and symptoms are poor judgment, loss of empathy, socially inappropriate behavior, lack of inhibition, repetitive compulsive behavior, inability to concentrate or plan, frequent, abrupt mood changes and speech difficulties.
Trump’s misguided efforts to move facts rapidly back-and-forth for his own “protection” have become virtually cringeworthy to any conscious being on the planet who actually hears and then compares them to his previous statements (often made just moments before).
Has there ever been a more obvious version of Shakespeare’s famously oxymoronic-like statement from “Hamlet,” The president doth protest too much, methinks.
Now we have the clearly understandable transcript of the so-called “perfect” phone call he made accosting Ukraine’s clearly inexperienced, neophyte president. And he freely gave it to us. And admitted it. Wow!
While the impending impeachment inquiries are gaining steam and are sucking the political air out of the room, we already have a process to help us besides this long, drawn-out method — the 25th Amendment which allows for a president to be removed by his cabinet.
The 25th Amendment, specifically added into the Constitution for just this type of situation, should obviously be now invoked by the president’s retinue, who we often hear through the grapevine, and from former “retired members” of this administration, are more than randomly troubled and actually sickened by his guy’s unbalanced, and, in my medical opinion, unstable, histrionic, narcissistic, megalomaniacal, and early senility-like (FTD) lack of inhibition in rambling speech, decisions and actions.
This guy is a psychiatric ICD-10 code menagerie. Essentially, our president appears to be functioning as an “escaped-from-reality TV” mental patient.
And to my first cousin, thrice removed, Sen. Mitt Romney, can you advise the GOP cognoscenti to grab the constitutional remote control (punch in the 25th) and simply, if they are really that “troubled,” change the presidential channel for the good of us all? Please!
Jeff Clawson, M.D.
Jeff Clawson, M.D., is medical director of the Division of Research, Standards and Academics at the International Academies of Emergency Dispatch, Salt Lake City. The views expressed here are his own and not necessarily those of the IAED.
