Harry Segal, clinical psychologist and senior lecturer in the Psychology Department at Cornell University, thinks Donald Trump may be exhibiting behavior consistent with "sundowning."
The term is defined by the Mayo Clinic as "a state of confusion that occurs in the late afternoon and lasts into the night." Segal explained that it's a form of dementia.
Speaking to progressive talk radio host David Packman, Segal explained that he wasn't looking at Trump or at President Joe Biden from a political perspective but only from a psychological one, and what he has observed through gait, speech patterns and other things over time.
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The host cited examples of Trump confusing Joe Biden with Barack Obama and mistakenly referring to Nancy Pelosi as Nikki Haley. But Segal sees Trump as "having more and more difficulties at night."
"The other thing is that because it's intermittent, it's not difficult to see two or three minutes of him speaking what seems to be normally," continued Segal. "And I do think he does speak normally in the sense of not calling people's concern, like mixing up Nancy Pelosi with Nikki Haley."
The psychologist said he has observed that the "complexity of his language has changed" overall since the 2020 campaign.
"So, when he is speaking what appears to be coherently, it's almost like he's gumming together phrases that he repeats over and over again," Segal explained of Trump's speeches. At one Ohio rally in March, Trump appeared to trail off in the middle of a sentence. "Now he's always had a tendency to do this, but if you go back, as I have, to looking at interviews in 2016, he was clearly more crisp. He was more complex than he is now."
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"The decline in the complexity of language" and "intermittent slippage" are what causes Segal to be concerned because they generally get worse over time. It means that in a year, Trump could be president and exhibiting serious signs of dementia, he said.
While it may have been politically advantageous to rise above the other candidates and refuse to debate them, chances are he did it because it could only draw attention to his potential sundowning, the expert said.
"I think we can surmise that he was afraid of debating," Segal said. "Are you kidding me? Two hours on stage in the evening with someone like Chris Christie coming after him?"
Segal said now that the general election approaches, it's important for Americans to see how a potential commander-in-chief behaves. The Republican convention speech will be at night, and it will certainly be a test for Trump.
"I don't know how he's going to get out of debating Biden, but he's going to try, is my guess," Segal anticipated. "So will we see the increase in these problems?"
See the segment from the show below or at the link here.
