Is America governed by demented presidents?

Written on 13 April 2025.

Ronald Reagan was lucky. He had a clever wife, Nancy, who could run the government on his behalf when Alzheimer had started to spread fog in his brain.

Joe Biden was less lucky. Had he refrained from running for a second term for whatever reason (health, age) he would be admired as a wise, elderly gentleman enjoying retirement.

His predecessor and successor Donald Trump is now in the focus of attention. And the opinion of the psycho pundits is less than flattering. Some are even poking fun at him. 

Trump, dementia, and the duty to warn

Haake doesn't mince words: Analysts at notoriously conservative Wall Street Journal wrote on Friday that another Trump impeachment is “already in the bag.” Calling Trump’s tariffs stunt “neurotic,” a WSJ op-ed said Trump, clearly divorced from reality, had “fabricated a gratuitously ambitious mission to meet his misguided sense of importance… Nobody in Mr. Trump’s orbit actually shares his belief in the magical efficacy of tariffs.

She quotes a petition signed by 3000 credentialed mental health professionals warning that the president has probable dementia:

“Donald Trump is showing unmistakable signs strongly suggesting dementia, based on his public behavior and informant reports that show progressive deterioration in memory, thinking, ability to use language, behavior, and both gross and fine motor skills….  his vocabulary is impoverished, he often has difficulty finishing a thought, sentence or even a word. Typical of dementia patients he perseverates and overuses superlatives and filler words…”

Haake arrives at a sad conclusion:

Leaders of the EU are too intelligent to sneer out loud at Trump’s flip flop on tariffs. Aware of his deranged lust for revenge, they are reluctant to utter the truth about his ignorance. But the world is aware, even if Americans aren’t, that our president is deranged.

--ed

Demented Presidents: Risks and Side-Effects:  Intellectually challenged heads of state have had a remarkable impact on the course of history and the problem of age-associated impairment in politicians appears to increase with growing life expectancy. Lenin, Paul Deschanel, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Heinrich Lübke, Urho Kekkonen, Mao tse tung, Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II., and Robert Mugabe were still in power while showing signs of cognitive impairment.

We may have had a dozen or more presidents with dementia throughout history, but we will never know. Even if a proper diagnosis could have been performed and confirmed, chances are that those closest to the President and the press would be mum about it. It would be disrespectful.

Right now, the only confirmed case of dementia (in this case, Alzheimer’s) was Ronald Reagan. He went public in 1994, but his son and others admit he was showing symptoms ten years earlier. He was making more that the typical slip-ups that we all make. I distinctly remember an instance when members of the press caught he and Nancy coming from/going to an event and Reagan paused to answer a question called out to him, but he froze. Nancy murmured in his ear, and he gave the canned response.

In 1964, a magazine article was written about presidential candidate Barry Goldwater that carried the headline “1,189 Psychiatrists say Goldwater is Psychologically Unfit to be President!” The article quoted an informal poll of US psychiatrists, none of whom had actually met the candidate.

Goldwater lost the election and successfully sued the magazine for making untrue allegations. Out of this case came the ‘Goldwater Rule’, which to this day strongly discourages psychiatrists from trying to diagnose a person without ever meeting them or doing a proper assessment.

The rule states: “...it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.”

Although the Goldwater Rule is often broken, it remains an essential piece of ethical guidance for any health professional or expert who might be tempted to diagnose a person without ever meeting them.

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