Salon just published the fourth in a series of Chauncey DeVega interviews with clinical psychologsit Dr. John D. Gartner: “Experts are desperate to warn the public”: Hundreds sign Dr. John Gartner’s Trump dementia petition.

Below are links to the other three interviews:

• Dr. John Gartner: The world is watching “a fundamental breakdown in Trump’s ability to use language”
• “Like someone pulled the metaphorical plug”: Dr. John Gartner on Trump’s “accelerating dementia”
• Dr. John Gartner on a tale of two brains: “Biden’s brain is aging. Trump’s brain is dementing”

RawStory sumarized the article here: ‘It’s perverse’: Psychologist hits media for ‘normalizing’ Trump & ‘pathologizing’ Biden.

This article in RawStory Opinion+ (subscription) by neuroscientist Bobby Azarian, A neuroscientist reveals how Trump and Biden’s cognitive impairments are different, references John Gartner’s agument.

The course of dementia varies. With one type, Lewy Body Dementia, the downslide can be steep going from diagnosis to death in 3-5 years. Cognitive impairment and decline can become more and more severe from minor symtpoms to major symptoms at various rates. It may take years for some people to need specialized treatment in memory care facilities.

At this point we’ve observed Trump’s cognition change fairly gradually from his not showing obvious signs of dementia 10 years ago to become more gradual, and escalate quite dramatically over the past few years. This is how John Gartner put it:

Trump’s a classic case of dementia. He ticks all the boxes. He’s shown a precipitous decline from his baseline—He once had a rich vocabulary and spoke in polished paragraphs. And he shows the classic disturbances in memory, language, behavior, and motor performance that we see in dementia patients. If Trump were their patient or my family member, they would urgently refer him for an emergency neuropsychiatric evaluation. And under no circumstances would a patient showing this level or organic cognitive decline be capable of being president.

Salon

The course of Trump’s cognitive decline is impossible to predict. Right now we see smoke. This could turn into the fire of full-blown dementia.

The Politics

If Trump is reelected he has assured us that he will install absolute loyalists to every position from the While House to goverment agencies, but there are only two positions that count. They are vice president and members of the Cabinet. This is because they are the only officials who can remove, albeit temporarily, him under provisions of Section 3 of the 25th Amendment:

Section 3. Whenever the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that he is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, and until he transmits to them a written declaration to the contrary, such powers and duties shall be discharged by the Vice President as Acting President.

Wikipedia

If Trump’s dementia is so bad invoking Section 3 of the 25th Amendment is only the first step. The final decision about his being removed rests with Congress. How this is done is spelled out in Section 4.  Congress must determine by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. If they decide that the President must be removed the Vice President continues to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President resumes the powers and duties of his office.

The invoking the 25th Amendment is just step one. Trump’s dementia will have to be so severe that enough Republicans recognize this that a 2/3rds vote in both the House and Senate can be achieved. Because of this the outcome boils down to public opinion.

If Republicans see that their constituents strongly back the removal of a demented Donald Trump they will see that Trump’s base have accepted the harsh reality that the president they revered has, through no fault of his own, succumbed to a tragic disease. This povides a face-saving out for both Trump cultists and the politicans who previously bowed down to him.

Those who were blind to the smoke of Trump’s dementia would not be able to deny the fire.

Of course this leaves us with whoever was his Vice President and his Cabinet and all the thousands of loyalists running the country from various government agencies with only the Congress, hopefully controlled by Democrats, and the Supreme Court to rein them in.

We can only hope that this would be a like a nightmare and wouldn’t be like a night terror which is even worse (as this website explains).

Addendum:

This is an accidental juxtaposition on the RawStory main page but note how the article about Trump thinks Hillary Clinton used real acid to delete material on her computer is under one article about Trump’s dementia and next to another.

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