Trade chaos with a side of dementia

Joshua Lott/The Washington Post

Trump didn’t end his ill-conceived tariff drama, he only postponed it. Again. It’s not good news, it’s just a prolonged conclusion.

Economists know that the best conduit to a healthy economy is stability. Yet the most reliable commodity from the Trump administration to date has been instability. To strategize on the coming volatility—economic, climate, military, and everything in between— experts should use the next ninety days to consider what’s really driving the mayhem. The emerging consensus is that Trump doesn’t have buyers’ remorse, he has dementia.

Mental health professionals sound the alarm

Psychotherapist Dr. John Gartner, former Johns Hopkins University Medical School faculty, is alarmed. He is circulating a petition among psychiatrists and mental health professionals about Trump’s cognitive impairment. Gartner wrote last year that Trump shows "progressive deterioration in memory, thinking, ability to use language, behavior, and both gross and fine motor skills," adding that he felt an ethical “obligation to warn the public, and urge the media to cover this national emergency."

Trump struggles to “even finish a sentence,” Gartner said in an interview with MindSite News. “When we’re diagnosing dementia, what we need to see is a deterioration of someone’s own baseline of functioning. What we see that a lot of people don’t appreciate is that when Donald Trump was younger in the 1980s, he was actually quite articulate. His thoughts were logical and related: now they’re tangential. He goes off on these ramblings where he is confabulating things – weird things in which he’ll talk about Venezuelans and mental hospitals, and then he’ll talk about sharks and batteries or the late, great Hannibal Lector and Silence of the Lambs.”

Dr. Gartner notes that Trump is “losing his capacity for coherent speech,” identifying “dozens and dozens of Trump’s phonemic paraphasias, in which you use sounds in place of an actual word (a hallmark of brain damage and dementia).” Trump will say something like ‘mishiz’ for missiles, or 'Chrishus' for Christmas, because he can’t complete the word. Then we see also a lot of semantic paraphasias, in which he uses a word incorrectly, as in 'the oranges of the situation' because it rhymes with 'the origins of the situation.'”

Main stream media sounds the alarm

Main stream media, including the New York Times, have also questioned Trump’s mental state. In October 2024, the NYT reported that Trump now uses more “negative words than positive words compared with 2016, which can be an indicator of cognitive change.” And he curses far more often, “a trend that could reflect what experts call disinhibition,” another sign of dementia. They cited a study by health care news outlet, Stat, with similar findings.

Newsweek’s “Donald Trump Dementia Evidence 'Overwhelming,” cites New York psychologist Suzanne Lachmann. Lackmann describes how Trump "seemingly forgets how sentence began and invents something in the middle" resulting in "an incomprehensible word salad"—a behavior she argues is observed "frequently in patients who have dementia."

The Dementia Society notes that “forgetting names and dates is normal for people who are aging. But "confusing people and generations" is a sign of advanced dementia. During the campaign, Trump confused Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi on eight separate occasions, and said he was running against Obama. He said his father was born in Germany, when it was his grandfather.

World trade policy driven by unfounded paranoia

The only explanation Trump has offered for causing economic mayhem is his claim that the EU and other advanced economies "owe" the United States for trade imbalances. His tariffs show that he does not understand the basics.

If Americans buy more from another country than that country buys from us, Trump sees that as proof that we are being “ripped off.” It’s a paranoia-driven claim that borders on gibberish. Countries don’t buy and sell the same dollar amounts from one another in part because they don’t have the same needs: a country that is 1/10^th the size or population of the US can’t import the same amount we import, because what would they do with ten times more tires and machinery than their population needs? Trump also ignores that currency valuations vary widely, making dollar value comparisons idiotic. Last Econ 101 point, some countries produce coffee and sugar while others produce cellphones and robots, and the import/export costs of each are driven by many variables. These basic trade realities eluded Trump’s simplistic, ChatGPT-generated “tariffs chart.”

In response to bond yields crashing over his tariff scheme, Trump came out with a plan this week to “negotiate” with more than 75 countries, but his aim remains nonsensical: he wants to flatten trade deficits with every country that imports lower amounts of American goods than they export. Trump’s failure to grasp that trade numbers don’t match because they cannot match due to differing size, needs, currencies, and commodities, is driven by his deep, persistent conviction that he is being ripped off, an agreed sign of advanced dementia.

Trump’s tariffs debacle also suggests he drinks his own Kool-aid. Trump, with the help of fact-free news, convinced 49% of US voters that the Biden economy was a catastrophe. In fact-based reality (a phrase no longer redundant), based on all standard metrics including GDP, labor and wage growth, investment levels, and retreating inflation, Biden rebuilt an historically strong economy from the covid ashes he walked into.

Both the foundational belief- that the US economy is struggling and in need of Trump to “save it,”- and the belief that our allies are “ripping us off” reflects the same underlying pathology of delusion and paranoia that drove Trump to insist that the 2020 election was “stolen” despite all evidence to the contrary.

The art of the squeal

Mental health professionals sounded the alarm over Trump’s dementia during his first term; their professional alarm continues to grow with mounting evidence in his second. But it shouldn’t take an expert. In both word and deed, Trump’s behavior is bizarre even to lay observers.

At the National Republican Congressional Committee meeting this week, Trump belittled every world leader whose economy he was intentionally harming, bragging, “These countries are calling us up. Kissing my ass… They are dying to make a deal. “Please, please, sir, make a deal. I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything, sir. And then I’ll see some rebel Republican, you know, some guy that wants to grandstand, saying: ‘I think that Congress should take over negotiations.’ Let me tell you: you don’t negotiate like I negotiate.”

Aside from the fact that he caved the next day, evidently kissing his own ass, only a mentally impaired man would belittle allies and political colleagues this way. Trump and his uneducated supporters may think his comments look strong, but to any honest observer, including those ‘grandstanding Republicans’ who want Congress to perform its constitutional duty, the comments look unhinged. They suggest Trump thinks trying to bully and degrade world leaders, with their own elections and political reputations to consider, is an effective way to manage relationships. As China’s vow to fight his trade war to the bitter end shows, his impaired judgment is a formula for disaster.

Evidence that Sir has dementia is everywhere; where is the 25^th Amendment?

Trump’s disastrous commentary on world trade tracks with his other unhinged conduct, with evidence so compelling any lay person can interpret it for themselves:

• He deluded himself about the 2020 election; for every state Trump lost, he claimed he was “cheated,” demanding that supporters “find” additional votes to cancel his loss;

• Just before the election he claimed on Fox News that the audience went “crazy” during his “crushing” debate performance against Kamala Harris. There was no audience during that debate, and by all national accounts, Harris trounced him.

• He insists he is not joking about serving a third term, despite the clarity of the 22^nd Amendment which bars a president from seeking more than two terms;

• He wants to develop Gaza into a resort for the wealthy, invade Mexico, take the Panama Canal, annex Canada, and buy Greenland.

• For his 79th birthday, he is now planning a massive military parade through the streets of Washington, DC, with an estimated cost of over $92 million, at a time when DOGE has gutted federal agencies to “cut costs.”

These examples are just the tip of a fast-melting iceberg. More than 3000 credentialed psychiatrists, psychologists and mental health professionals have now added their signatures to the petition, stating that Trump has probable dementia. They also concluded that their duty to warn the nation outweighed their duty to refrain from diagnosing in absentia.

Their warning prompts the next question: What other dangerous insanity will we endure before Republicans locate their missing spines and join Democrats in invoking the 25^th Amendment?

Sabrina Haake is a 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. Her columns are published in Alternet, Chicago Tribune, MSN, Out South Florida, Raw Story, Salon, Smart News and Windy City Times. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.