If Trump has early dementia there is a good chance he will flame out during the first debate when he’d be sundowning, by Hal Brown, MSW

This was the top story on HUFFPOST this morning.

Here’s my coment:

My takeaway is based on this excerpt:

″[They were] a bit questioning, I don’t want to say his mental fitness but questioning just how meandering. How, in some cases one said to me, he could not keep a thought straight,” Sorkin said.

“He would go in one direction and then go into another direction and that there wasn’t really necessarily a through line to the way he spoke and what even he was talking about.”

Andrew Ross Sorkin is a journalist with a CNBC show and with a BS degree and not a mental health expert and the CEOs present presumably don’t have expertise in any area related to assessing dementia. But common sense ought to lead people to be able to differentiate between normal cognition and abnormal thought process.

This is a man who aspires to be president of the United States. If anyone has even been casually paying attention to the news they know abouthow he interjects unreleated comments into his remarks. For example his sharks and electric boats story and his “joke” about eating with Hannibel Lector. The man is not trying to make it as a stand-up comic.

As I have been writing I have seen more and more indications that my mental health colleagues and associates have been writing (and in the case of Drs. John Gartner and Harry Segal, talking about in podcasts) …

In the above podcast John Gartner reminds us that Trump’s appearances are scheduled early in the day (on friendly media on weekends on “Fox and Friends” with the B team who won’t ask tough questions and rather ask puffcake questions).

I am sure that they and other Trump observers in our field will be watching the first debate which will be in prime time when Trump could very well exhibit paraphasia, progressive aphasia (read article), wandering thought process, paranoia (read article), and other signs of early and worsening dementia.

It must be recognized before it is too late and Trump is elected that if he does have dementia that this is a disease that while it’s course is unpredictable it always gets worse and ultimately is fatal. What may be written off by his supporters that symptoms may just represent Trump being Trump they are really as serious as someone ignoring a large melanoma on someone’s face. I’ll spare you photos but it you see something that looks like this on yourself or others it needs immediate treatment as this is at life threatening skin cancer.

Unlike with melanoma there is no life saving treatment for dementia (and the form of dementia called Alzheimer’s). There is no pill that can hide the symptoms entirely although there are medications a doctor may prescribe to slow down the progression of the disease read artcile). There isn’t a pill that can make you as with-in as the makers of Prevagen want people to believe with their sharper mind and sharper memory commercials (the product is a hoax but I wouldn’t be surprised if the medically ignorant and gullible Trump takes it).

I wrote about Trump and sundowning here.

I also wrote about how the media is by and large avoiding covering this here.

Update.. and then there’s this:

Addendum: I took the photos during a weekend at Oregon’s Cannon Beach when even local residents were marveling at how beautiful that sunset was. I never thought I use so many of them in blogs. The first debate will be in Atlanta. Fani Willis is the DA for Fulton County which includes most of that city. That won’t be lost on Trump. The sundown on June 27th on June 27th in Atlanta is 8:57 PM just as the debate will be starting. It may not come with a beautful sunset, but whether it does or not Trump won’t see it. The weather report predicts that conditions will be conducive for a lovely sunset. It doesn’t say anything about how Trump will respond to it.