Kerby Anderson

Consider this scenario. Your organization (it could be a business or ministry) has as its leader someone who shows what looks like early signs of dementia. He has a family history of Alzheimer’s disease and gets key facts confused and has language skills that are starting to deteriorate. It’s not so hypothetical. I had to face it with my own father and later with a leader of a Christian ministry.

What if that leader is the president of the United States? The examples authors and psychologists are citing these days may merely be the result of an exhausted president misspeaking. But as these examples keep adding up, voters might become concerned. Before we get too far into the 2020 election, people around the president should advise him to get a neurological evaluation. Yes, Dr. Ronny Jackson did administer a short test when he was the president’s physician, but it only ruled out full-blown dementia.

Omarosa Newman in her book describes how President Trump does not have the same mental faculties he did years earlier when he was taping The Apprentice. Michael Wolff writes in his book (Fire and Fury) how President Trump did not recognize old friends at Mar-a-Lago. The other day, President Trump told an audience that his father was born in Germany. He was born in the Bronx. Trump’s grandfather was born in Germany.

Listen to how the president puts words together. Professional psychologists point to examples of semantic paraphasia (choosing incorrect words in a sentence) and phonemic paraphasia (where a non-word is used that only has part of the intended word). Perhaps the most telling to me is how the president (like my father) jumps from one idea to another in free association by jamming together a long list of non-sequiturs.

One question that will likely surface in the 2020 election is, does the president have dementia? The best way to answer that question is to get an evaluation.