Donald Trump's Speaking Style Shows 'Potential Indications of Cognitive Decline' and 'Dementia,' Top Doctors Claim

Donald Trump's constant slip-ups and gaffes continue to get called into question, and now top doctors are analyzing his prior speeches and concluding that his mind could be slowing down at 78 years old.

Speaking to Stat, experts in memory, psychology and linguistics said there's been a decline in the ex-president's verbal complexity since 2017. The outlet asked four experts to review four clips of Trump's recent speeches and compare them with ones he gave years ago.

Trump has been known to mix up Joe Biden and Barack Obama in his speeches, in addition to Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi, but Ben Michaelis, a clinical psychologist who has carried out cognitive assessments for the New York Supreme Court, didn't seem put off by the mistake.

“Everyone to some degree has some level of mixing up of names,” he said. “It’s a bit of a red herring.”

Zenzi Griffin, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin agreed, saying Haley and Pelosi's names sound alike. “That level of similarity really makes it an easy error to make,” she said.

According to Michaelis, he thinks it's unusual that Trump jumps from topic to topic while speaking. “There’s reasonable evidence suggestive of forms of dementia,” he said. “The reduction in complexity of sentences and vocabulary does lead you to a certain picture of cognitive diminishment.”

“Tangentiality certainly amped up and it’s difficult to follow him,” Michaelis pointed out. “You’d expect some cognitive diminishment of course, he’s 78 years old — if he was your grandfather you wouldn’t expect anything different. He just happens to be running for president.”

Michaelis also said that Trump using words in the incorrect order and making up words could also be some sort of cognitive issues, which could come from aging or diseases including Alzheimer's.

When Trump jumps from topic to topic, it's likely related to the front lobe, "the part of the brain involved in executive function such as planning and problem-solving, said Andrew Budson, a neurology professor at Boston University and author of Seven Steps to Managing Your Aging Memory," the article reads. "Such a habit could also reflect ADHD or poor sleep, he said, though it can also be a sign of impending Alzheimer’s."

James Pennebaker, a social psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, looked at transcripts of 35 interviews Trump gave from 2015 to 2024 and found that there's an increase in "all-or-nothing thinking" since he left office in 2021. “I can’t tell you how staggering this is,” Pennebaker bluntly said. “He does not think in a complex way at all.”

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This is hardly the first time Trump has been accused of having dementia.

In March, another doctor commented on Trump's recent activity.

"Unlike normal aging, which is characterized by forgetting names or words, Trump repeatedly shows something very different: confusion about reality," Dr. Lance Dodes, a supervising analyst emeritus of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and retired Harvard Medical School professor, said in a statement, referring to Trump confusing Obama and Biden.