Shrinking Trump

Top Psychologists John Gartner and Harry Segal discuss with Dr. Lance Dodes the psychological fallout America will have to brace itself for, following the first conviction of an unhinged former President in history on Really American's SMASH HIT podcast, Shrinking Trump.

This special episode is an "emergency session” of the iTunes chart-topping podcast to discuss fallout from the unstable Republican presidential candidate that could have dire consequences.

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Returning to the show for this special is our friend Dr. Dodes, a retired assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. In this episode, Lance will be helping our hosts psychoanalyze Trump’s unhinged press conference from the morning after he was convicted of 34 felonies.

“Right now, Donald Trump is a wounded animal, " John said. “There's nothing more dangerous than a wounded animal. And there's really nothing more dangerous than a wounded malignant narcissist.”

Using video and direct quotes, our hosts provide you with an in-depth analysis of how Trump’s projection, narcissism, sociopathy, and dementia were on full display in his sham of a press conference. “Remember, this is a press conference to explain why he's been convicted of 34 felonies,” said Dr. Gartner. “But from the way he presents it, you'd think he was there to accept an award.”

Dr. Dodes walks us through his own diagnosis of Trump’s performance, and helps us understand the dangerous psychology of how a now-wounded malignant narcissist like Trump would respond if he were to regain power. He also gives us a rundown of the deranged cult mentality that empowers charismatic leaders like Trump, and the interpersonal effects his distorted beliefs have on his followers.

Trump’s ability to manipulate the truth rests in his ability to repeat his lies over and over. But he’s also helped by an army of surrogates who parrot his false reality. In this episode, we’ll be taking a hard look at how the conviction and these competing realities might affect the psychology of voters.

There’s also a chilling conversation comparing Trump’s malignant narcissism to Hitler’s that you are not going to want to miss. “I've been saying now for six years that Donald Trump is the American Hitler,” John explained. “And immigrants are the new Jews.”

Dr. Segal said it best when sounding the alarm. “We're not saying this as political activists,” he said. “We're talking about a very disturbed person with tremendous power and influence saying psychotic things that are organized around evoking rage and fear in his supporters.”

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Top Psychologists John Gartner and Harry Segal are joined by Emily and Mitchell Clionsky, experts in dementia, to outline the specific symptoms of Trump's mental decline on Really American's SMASH HIT podcast, Shrinking Trump.

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Mitchell Clionsky is a PhD, board-certified in clinical neuropsychology. Emily is an Internal Medicine doctor and psychiatrist as well as a diplomate in the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. They are both specialists in dementia and are co-authors of the book Dementia Prevention: Using Your Head to Save Your Brain.

You will not want to miss what they have to share from their observations and analysis of Trump.

Emily presents our listeners with informal medical observations of Donald Trump to guide our future diagnostic questions and testing. Some of the insights she shares about his physical and mental well-being are shocking.

Mitchell takes us on a unique, deep-dive into an evaluation of Trump’s deteriorating executive functions from the viewpoint of a hiring officer at a major corporation. “We evaluated him eight years ago,” Mitchell said. “And again four years ago because he was ousted by the Board of Directors representing the shareholders for this corporation.”

This week, we’re also introducing a new feature called Bad News Good News, where we bring you the best and worst of the week’s media coverage of Trump and Biden’s cognitive health. “In addition to our mission of analyzing Trump, we have another mission - and that is to monitor how the mainstream press covers this issue,” John told us. “I think it's time to name and shame. And I think it's time to organize our voices and speak back, speak up. We've listened to enough of their bullshit. I think it's time for them to hear from us.”

Listen in as John and Harry dissect a major dishonest headline from the Washington Post this week regarding Biden’s mental health and call out the editors for refusing to issue a correction or retraction of the article.

Harry says, “Even if we laugh sometimes, we are judicious in trying to think about what we're hearing, and analyzing the language and how it becomes distorted, which we recognize is from patients we've worked with early onset dementia.”

Tune in and be sure to let us know what you think about this fantastic episode in the comments.

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Top Psychologists John Gartner and Harry Segal are joined by Dr. John Talmadge, one of the first to have written about Trump's dementia, as they address Trump's fixation on vengeance and peel back the layers of his rapid cognitive decline.

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Welcome to another addition of Shrinking Trump, where we meet each week to present the mounting evidence of Trump’s mental decline and early onset dementia. This week was particularly telling for Trump, as he attempts to deal with the reality of his conviction on 34 felony counts.

Our guest Dr. Talmadge is a Dartmouth University grad and former clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Texas. His article from 2015, described Trump as demented, and suffering from malignant narcissism. “Trump's dementia is generally overlooked because of the florid, colorful, and newsworthy nature of his malignant narcissism,” Talmadge wrote.

In this episode, Dr. Talmadge explains how Trump’s mental deficits and his attempts to conceal them are laid bare in the way he communicates. “With my background, I was struck very quickly by his language, his inability to handle complex ideas, and his difficulty adapting to novel situations,” Dr. Talmadge said. “The fact that he doesn't talk with people, he talks at people, which is called compensating for your deficits.”

You are not going to want to miss Dr. Talmadge’s diagnosis, in detail, of four of the most significant psychological symptoms that serve as evidence of Trump’s mental decline.

On today’s show, our hosts give us their diagnosis of a pandering, lie-filled, interview the Fox and Friends “B Team” gave to Trump over the weekend. They’ll break down Trump’s wildest statements from the interview and explain why that kind of unchecked, biased presentation of his lies is so dangerous. “He told lies about the conviction,” Harry said. “They asked him not one question about the charges. Not one question about the substance. They accepted his story that it's all made up.”

Our hosts will also examine how Trump’s paranoia and malignant narcissism allows him to energize his supporters by creating false threats based on generalities. “He said that there was someone with a machete in a McDonald's,” Dr. Segal said. “It turns out there was once someone with a machete outside of McDonald's. So Trump reads this one little clip, and now suddenly it's an invasion of criminals who are going to chop you to pieces with their machete.”

And finally - I hope you’ll enjoy this week’s segment of Good News, Bad News, where our hosts absolutely rip apart WSJ journal coverage of Biden’s mental health, based on statements made by, as Dr. Segal said, “Kevin McCarthy, a pathological liar and psychopath.”

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Co-hosts Drs. John Gartner and Harry Segal discuss the presidential debate with famed psychologist David Dunning, co-author of the “Dunning-Krueger Effect. The nation must deal with the shock, panic, and trauma created by Biden’s poor performance. But what caused it? Age, stuttering, illness, cognitive decline, poor debate preparation and strategy, or some combination? How concerned should we be?

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We started this show to call out the media for failing to recognize Trump’s early signs of dementia and to contrast that with Biden’s normal aging. “It’s what John referred to as, ‘the aging brain versus the dementing brain’,” Dr. Segal said. “And our goal is really to raise clinical awareness and sophistication on the part of you, our viewers, but also of the media.”

Week after week we have offered a series of progressive hypotheses to explain Trump’s behavior, his language, and even his physical bearing. And now, after the debate sent shockwaves through the media and the public, we thought it important to look at what actually happened that night.

“As far as a performance and as far as the political impact, I would say it couldn't have been worse,” Dr. Gartner said. “In terms of understanding what happened, however, I think we are actually going to have a very interesting discussion today because it's actually quite complex.

You’ll hear our hosts share their very relatable personal reactions to the debate and help us all understand the trauma Americans suffered that evening. “I felt like the walls were closing in,” John said. “I felt the floor actually fall beneath me like I was falling into the void.”

“I felt that I had just experienced a trauma - like my whole world had changed,” Dr. Segal said. “This was not normal functioning. This was terrifying and traumatizing.”

We’ll run through some of the clips to analyze how the candidates’ body language made Trump’s answers sound better than they were - and Biden’s WAY worse than they actually were.

While Trump had a more commanding performance, our hosts argue that he had a clever way of hiding his cognitive decline. “Trump is stringing together his slogans - he gums them together,” Harry said. “We've been watching him do this in rallies. But through the forcefulness of his tone and his ability to create rhythm in his speech, it seems to make sense in a cohesive, coherent way. This is a way that Trump is managing his own decline, which is not being expressed through a weakness in his voice, but in other ways.”

We’ll also analyze the physical signs of advanced aging Biden displayed, and discuss what role the debate prep likely played in his delivery. And we weigh the impact of Biden’s traditional stutter on his performance and how that can often be confused with actual signs of aging.

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Join hosts Dr. John Gartner and Dr. Harry Segal for Shrinking Trump, a hit new weekly show dedicated to analyzing Donald Trump from a psychological point of view. As John puts it, “This is a place you'll be able to come and hear frank, honest, intelligent, educated discussions among professionals about Trump's mental health.”

In this episode, our guest is psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Dr. Lance Dodes, a retired assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Lance was also one of the original contributors to the book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a collection of essays from psychiatrists and psychologists describing Trump’s mental health as a clear and present danger to the nation and individual well-being.

As a psychoanalyst, Dr. Dodes is focused primarily on the personality disorder component of Trump’s mental health. He explains to our listeners how dementia interacts with personality disorder, particularly when compounded with narcissism. As the dementia worsens, Dr. Dodes says, Trump “knows less and less because he can't add to knowledge or correct the things that he doesn't know, because that would be a narcissistic blow.”

Lance also warns our listeners that some of the greatest character defects Trump exhibits, like the lack of empathy, are made exponentially more dangerous by his worsening dementia. “And then, of course, if there was ever a chance to correct it, he can't,” Dodes said. “Because that would mean acknowledging that he had done something wrong.”

Why is Trump falling asleep in court? Will he actually attend the debates? What would a second term for Trump look like once he’s lost all impulse control? You won’t want to miss the team's psychological approach to answering these questions and more in this fantastic interview.

You’ll also want to buckle up for another wild segment of “Dementia Roundup,” where John and Harry analyze video clips of Trump’s most bizarre statements and behaviors from the week. Their conclusions, although often terrifying, help listeners better understand the nature of Trump’s rapid mental decline and why he says, and acts, the way he does.

Harry said it best to close out the show. “To understand someone, It takes a while to build a model of who they are. So I'm hoping that over time with each of our podcasts, everyone will start to have a more complex and integrated sense of who Trump is and how this process of mild cognitive impairment is affecting him.”

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