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Donald Trump hit with disturbing cognitive claims: 'Weekend at Bernie's White House'
NEWS
Donald Trump hit with disturbing cognitive claims: ‘Weekend at Bernie’s White House’
Updated: Jul. 01, 2025, 5:42 a.m. | Published: Jun. 30, 2025, 5:00 a.m.
President Donald Trump pauses before speaking during a media conference at the NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands, Wednesday, June 25, 2025. (AP Photo/Matthias Schrader)AP
By Brian Linder | blinder@pennlive.com
Donald Trump’s second term as president of the United States could turn into “Weekend at Bernie’s White House” an acclaimed psychologist and former Johns Hopkins professor warned.
Dr. John Gartner made the disturbing claims during a recent appearance on “The Dean Obeidallah Show,” revealing that he believes the president is suffering from dementia and will “fall of a cliff” cognitively before the end of his term. … “Here’s the thing, will he become impaired enough that they need to invoke the 25th amendment? Yes,” Gartner said. “Will they invoke the 25th amendment? No.
“We are going to have a Weekend at Bernie’s White House,” he added. “They’re going to be wheeling him around, but don’t think that he can’t get into trouble. He will. It’s going to go from a farce to tragedy or from tragedy to farce, but it is going to get more and more absurd.” … Gartner told Obeidallah he is convinced that Trump has dementia.
“Basically, what we see are the classic signs of dementia, which is gross deterioration from someone’s baseline and function,” he said. “That’s very important because one of the areas that we can most physically see this is in his verbal productions. And, if you go back and look at film from the 1980s, he actually was extremely articulate. He was still a jerk, but he was able to express himself in polished paragraphs, and now he really has trouble completing a thought and that is a huge deterioration. His vocabulary has deteriorated, but also he has started to show very specific signs of phonemic paraphasia for example where he routinely can’t say an English word so he substitutes a non-word that is easier to pronounce that sounds like it.”
{snip}
Donald Trump hit with disturbing cognitive claims: ‘Weekend at Bernie’s White House’
Updated: Jul. 01, 2025, 5:42 a.m. | Published: Jun. 30, 2025, 5:00 a.m.
President Donald Trump pauses before speaking during a media conference at the NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands, Wednesday, June 25, 2025. (AP Photo/Matthias Schrader)AP
By Brian Linder | blinder@pennlive.com
Donald Trump’s second term as president of the United States could turn into “Weekend at Bernie’s White House” an acclaimed psychologist and former Johns Hopkins professor warned.
Dr. John Gartner made the disturbing claims during a recent appearance on “The Dean Obeidallah Show,” revealing that he believes the president is suffering from dementia and will “fall of a cliff” cognitively before the end of his term. … “Here’s the thing, will he become impaired enough that they need to invoke the 25th amendment? Yes,” Gartner said. “Will they invoke the 25th amendment? No.
“We are going to have a Weekend at Bernie’s White House,” he added. “They’re going to be wheeling him around, but don’t think that he can’t get into trouble. He will. It’s going to go from a farce to tragedy or from tragedy to farce, but it is going to get more and more absurd.” … Gartner told Obeidallah he is convinced that Trump has dementia.
“Basically, what we see are the classic signs of dementia, which is gross deterioration from someone’s baseline and function,” he said. “That’s very important because one of the areas that we can most physically see this is in his verbal productions. And, if you go back and look at film from the 1980s, he actually was extremely articulate. He was still a jerk, but he was able to express himself in polished paragraphs, and now he really has trouble completing a thought and that is a huge deterioration. His vocabulary has deteriorated, but also he has started to show very specific signs of phonemic paraphasia for example where he routinely can’t say an English word so he substitutes a non-word that is easier to pronounce that sounds like it.”
{snip}
6 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
BUT SERIOUSLY, FOLKS,
He's already a chatbot!
Check it out:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100220281483
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/04/29/the-hallucinating-chatgpt-presidency/
Judge for yourself.
Tue, Apr 29th 2025 09:34am - Mike Masnick
We generally understand how LLM hallucinations work. An AI model tries to generate what seems like a plausible response to whatever you ask it, drawing on its training data to construct something that sounds right. The actual truth of the response is, at best, a secondary consideration.
snip
But over the last few months, it has occurred to me that, for all the hype about generative AI systems “hallucinating,” we pay much less attention to the fact that the current President does the same thing, nearly every day. The more you look at the way Donald Trump spews utter nonsense answers to questions, the more you begin to recognize a clear pattern — he answers questions in a manner quite similar to early versions of ChatGPT. The facts don’t matter, the language choices are a mess, but they are all designed to present a plausible-sounding answer to the question, based on no actual knowledge, nor any concern for whether or not the underlying facts are accurate.
snip
This is not the response of someone working from actual knowledge or policy understanding. Instead, it’s precisely how an LLM operates: taking a prompt (the question about job losses) and generating text based on some core parameters (the “system prompt” that requires deflecting blame and asserting greatness).
The hallmarks of AI generation are all here:
• Confident assertions without factual backing
• Meandering diversions that maintain loose semantic connection to the topic
• Pattern-matching to previous responses (“ripped off,” “billions of dollars”)
• Optimization for what sounds good rather than what’s true
snip
But over the last few months, it has occurred to me that, for all the hype about generative AI systems “hallucinating,” we pay much less attention to the fact that the current President does the same thing, nearly every day. The more you look at the way Donald Trump spews utter nonsense answers to questions, the more you begin to recognize a clear pattern — he answers questions in a manner quite similar to early versions of ChatGPT. The facts don’t matter, the language choices are a mess, but they are all designed to present a plausible-sounding answer to the question, based on no actual knowledge, nor any concern for whether or not the underlying facts are accurate.
snip
This is not the response of someone working from actual knowledge or policy understanding. Instead, it’s precisely how an LLM operates: taking a prompt (the question about job losses) and generating text based on some core parameters (the “system prompt” that requires deflecting blame and asserting greatness).
The hallmarks of AI generation are all here:
• Confident assertions without factual backing
• Meandering diversions that maintain loose semantic connection to the topic
• Pattern-matching to previous responses (“ripped off,” “billions of dollars”)
• Optimization for what sounds good rather than what’s true
Great article and hard to summarize, because the author gives so many spot-on examples.