One aspect of President Trump’s Iran message that I have yet to comment on concerns the words he stumbled on during its delivery. While Trump came across for the most part more or less normally, he mispronounced several words in a very odd way, completely bungling the words “tolerated,” “accomplishments,” and “shape.” He was huffing and sniffing as he talked, and his breathing and speech were labored, as though he had dry mouth and his nose was plugged. It seemed like something more than a cold.
The president’s noticeable impairment comes after an unscheduled and unexplained weekend visit he made to Walter Reed Medical Hospital outside Washington less than two months ago.
Changes in the president, coupled with the administration’s unexpected and destabilizing military action against General Suleimani of Iran, have stimulated new concerns about the president’s state of health and fitness to govern. Trump guards facts about his health carefully, a secrecy that only heightens alarm and fuels speculation.
Some observers on Twitter, including Tom Joseph of Chicago and others writing under the handle @Duty2Warn, tweet regularly about the President’s apparent medical and psychological condition. In the absence of direct information, they attempt to assess the President’s health by scrutinizing video footage of his public appearances: his speech, affect, and gait. They look at what he says and how he says it for signs of undisclosed illnesses such as dementia, stroke, or personality disorder.
In a related development, a group of psychiatrists and other mental health professionals sent a letter to Congress this week, urging that Trump undergo a psychological evaluation to ascertain that he remains fit to exercise the powers of commander-in-chief. According to the Independent, the letter warns that the stress of impeachment could drive an already tempestuous president to act in ways that are unwise and detrimental to the nation’s security.
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I’ve read quite a few articles about Trump’s mental health. The authors always interview respected and well-known psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and psychologists. All agree that he is a very, very unstable person, suffering from mental illness of one sort or another. The stuff written about him by Bill Kristol and Bob Woodward (both of whom interviewed and collected information from many, many people close to the president) both came to the same conclusion: he needs to see mental-health experts. The descriptions of the diatribes, outbursts of anger, constant delusional behavior (living in his “own” reality) and always the lying, lying, lying that folks remark on after meeting with him at times in the Oval Office do indeed suggest and imply that he is NOT fit to hold office. . . .Me, it won’t bother me at all to see him taken out of the White House on a gurney headed for Walter Reed Hospital.