President Donald Trump made a “big mistake” during a recent media appearance, with a professional pathologist revealing the signs of dementia and decline that he accidentally exposed.
Trump this week made an appearance on Usha Vance’s web series, “Storytime with the Second Lady,” which was noted by many for his odd comments about John F. Kennedy being the most handsome past president. The president made that comment as he flipped through the children’s picture book, Presidents Play, by Jonathon Pliska and John Hutton.
Beyond the strange comments, however, Trump may have made another “big mistake” during the appearance, according to speech-language pathologist Hilary Shae. Shae specializes in concussion recovery and creates political content in which she offers professional insights into signs of Trump’s cognitive and physical decline.
“Donald Trump went on Usha Vance’s show, and that turned out to be a big mistake for him,” Shae said in one of her latest videos. ” Because he demonstrated signs and symptoms of dementia in both the speech and language aspect, as well as the motor-functioning aspect.”
On the physical side, Shae used slowed-down footage from the appearance to demonstrate Trump having a difficult time grabbing the book he paged through, as well as the awkward “external rotation” of his shoulder when he turned to grab it from a stack of other books. She noted how his strange method of grabbing the book, using all four fingers and leaving out his thumb, was “actually quite informative from a neurological perspective,” as this sort of behavior in dementia patients signals “a problem with motor planning, hand shaping or sensory motor integration.”
Shae explained that dementia patients can struggle with “pre-shaping,” which refers to the brain’s process of preparing movements before we make them, such as when you reach for something to grab it. These struggles might result in a patient defaulting to the simplest grip possible, as Trump appeared to do.
Shae also suggested that this was a similar dynamic to what can be seen in some of Trump’s public addresses, in which he struggles with properly pronouncing multi-syllabic words. In these instances, he instead tends to verbalize a “much simpler approximation of those words,” while also leaning on simpler words as much as he can.
“Donald Trump is showing significant observable signs and symptoms of dementia, and he’s got to go,” Shae concluded.