In the aftermath of the presidential debate this week, a mental health professional has suggested that former president Donald Trump is showing signs of “cognitive decline.”
Richard Friedan, a psychiatry professor at Weill Cornell Medical College, provided an analysis of the GOP nominee’s debate performance to The Atlantic on Thursday September 12. Trump drummed up some concern after he took on Vice President Kamala Harris on September 10 in their first and final debate.
The former president has expressed confidence that he won the debate and even rejected the possibility of having another one before Election Day. But according to Freidman, the 78-year-old nominee did not perform as well as he says he did—nor is he as “cognitively better now” compared to the past, as the former president has previously claimed.
In his article assessing the Republican’s debate performance, the professor noted that he would “almost certainly refer” a patient to “rigorous neuropsychiatric evaluation” if they displayed some of the signs that Trump did. The red flags for “cognitive illness” evaluation he mentioned noticing during the debate were “repetitive speech,” “verbal incoherence,” and “tangential thinking.”
Freidan said that Trump “now regularly demonstrates” these symptoms, although much attention has been given to President Joe Biden and his obvious cognitive decline, which ultimately led him to suspend his re-election campaign back in July. He noted that Harris “certainly” displayed some signs of “rigidity and repetition” but she was still inside what he called the “normal realm for politicians.”
Trump, however, showed “alarming” extremes of the same typical political tendencies. More specifically, Freidan said the former president showed “striking” characteristics of those “in cognitive decline,” adding that it was “difficult” but “not impossible” to follow Trump’s responses.
Some conservatives agreed with the professor’s assessment that Trump was not at his best on Tuesday. Attorney Andrew McCarthy wrote that the former resident was “a disaster,” “unhinged,” and “incapable of completing thoughts.” Conservative editor John Podhoretz also said that people blaming the moderators for bias can “complain about the refs” all they want but added that the “play is dead” once the “pass is incomplete.”
