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.”

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