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| Trump grasps railing with his left hand (Reuters) |
Donald Trump has had a stroke, a medical expert says, and it likely came in the past 12 months. That's from a report at Raw Story (RS) under the headline " Medical expert claims Trump had a stroke -- and Air Force One stairs video tells the story Unfortunately, the expert proceeds to hurt his credibility by suggesting Trump might handle such a health crisis in a forthright manner.
RS Investigations Editor Martin Pengelly writes:
Donald Trump has had a stroke, a prominent clinical professor of medicine said, listing evidence he saw in the president's behavior.
"My impression is that President Trump has had a stroke, and I think there's several lines of evidence supporting that," said Professor Bruce Davidson, of Washington State University Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine, in Spokane, Washington. "I think his stroke was on the left side of the brain, which controls the right side of the body."
Davidson was speaking to the Clinton aide turned Lincoln biographer Sidney Blumenthal and Princeton historian Sean Wilentz on their podcast, The Court of History.
As we reported at Legal Schnauzer in July 2023, numerous physicians have analyzed or commented on Trump's mental health, including a book titled "Trump on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President," by Justin Frank, M.D., former clinical professor of psychiatry at George Washington University. Our post contains this quote from Dr. Frank:
The title of Republican strategist Rick Wilson's book Everything Trump Touches Dies is true. And it turns out that everything Trump says, kills. He commands his unstable followers to violently attack his "enemies;" he instructed his White House minions to downplay the pandemic resulting in the completely preventable deaths of thousands of Americans, because the truth might make him look bad. Trump's appetite for cruelty and destruction in the service of his personal agenda knows no bounds. It never has.
In chapter seven of my book "Trump on the Couch," I wrote that Trump has had a profound internal conflict between building and destroying since childhood. As his power grew, the destroyer instinct has overwhelmed any constructive instincts he had. Even his single-minded drive for self-preservation is met with an inner drive for self-destruction, as we've all seen in his damning confessional rants.
Trump's violent directives excite the fantasies of his mindless supporters, converting his words into weapons designed to destroy anyone he hates. Ninety years ago, the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich wrote about mass psychology and the origins of fascism. He described Hitler's ability to stir up deep feelings of hatred. Trump is not (yet) Hitler, but he knows how to provoke those same feelings in others.
While Frank focused on Trump's jumbled mental state, Davidson writes on a relatively new aspect of his physical health. For those longing for stable leadership from the White House, Davidson's thoughts are not encouraging. Raw Story's Pengelly reports:
"People who … have a stroke, it's a very serious, concerning, life-threatening, upsetting, scary thing, and people react in different ways," Davidson said. "Some people respond with humility, grateful to be alive and viewing life as precious. Others become, as they improve, positively euphoric, that, 'I was at the cliff of death, and now I'm back,' and and some view it as, 'That was my chance to die, and I didn't, and now I'm going to do everything I wanted to do, because the next one may be fatal."
Pengelly notes that Trump recently has governed like a man in a hurry:
The accelerating pace of Trump's policy announcements, military orders, demands for the prosecution of enemies, and attacks on political opponents has been noted around the world.
Referring to Trump's regular claims about his own health, Davidson said: "Another piece of evidence in favor of him having had a stroke is his telling us that he's taking a whole aspirin tablet, 325 milligrams daily."
Trump said that this month, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, about his health. Saying the aspirin had caused widely noted bruising on his hand, Trump told the Journal: "They say aspirin is good for thinning out the blood, and I don't want thick blood pouring through my heart. I want nice, thin blood pouring through my heart. Does that make sense?"
To Davidson, it did not.
"The instruction to take one full aspirin, 325 milligrams daily, is solely, only for prevention of recurrent repeat stroke after partial 50 percent or more blockage, occlusion of a large vessel in the brain," the doctor said. "It's not recommended for anything for the heart, and we were told that President Trump's chest CT scan was unremarkable, was fine."
Trump recently said he had an MRI, then said it was in fact a CT scan.
Davidson told Blumenthal and Wilentz: "A CT scan of the chest takes three or four minutes, and when you add the abdomen, that's another three or four minutes. An MRI is what we use to most carefully image the brain. You can image the brain pretty well with a CT scan, and that's emergency imaging of the brain, because it's more available, but an MRI gives you far more detail, and an MRI takes a minimum of 20 minutes, and they put this over your head, and it's extremely noisy, it's a banging sound, and they put headphones to block the sounds. So there is no mistaking an MRI for CT. And when President Trump said he had an MRI, he undoubtedly did. Now we do MRIs of the spine, of bone and joints. But that's not what he was talking about when he talked about cognitive testing. So I think it's certainly clear that did not sound like a misspeaking, that he had an MRI of his brain and he had CT, surveillance, CAT scans of his chest and abdomen."
Interestingly, Davidson does not think Trump shows signs of dementia. Davidson also does not consider Trump to be a candidate for removal from office under the 25th Amendment. From the Raw Story report:
Trump has regularly boasted about passing basic cognitive tests, adding to widespread speculation that the president could be suffering from dementia. Davidson did not think so.
"He doesn't, to me, behave demented," he said, adding: "It seems to me that with those New York Times questions recently and press conferences, he grasps the question and appropriately responds — or inappropriately, depending on your views — but he certainly handles the gist of the question. So I do not see dementia, for which I'm glad, but it is common after strokes for people to behave, as some people say, more like they were beforehand. So if President Trump had a brash personality, I think everyone would say long ago, he appears to have become even more so."
Davidson said there would be no current reason to invoke the 25th Amendment because Trump appears functionally capable, at least from a superficial perspective. He emphasized that many people recover from strokes while retaining their judgment and ability to perform complex work, though such recovery typically requires support from trusted advisors, whether family or colleagues.
"I think there could be a way for President Trump to thread the needle," he said.
Davidson suggested Trump could navigate this situation by acknowledging a stroke without losing cognitive function, thus avoiding the need for temporary replacement. In this scenario, with proper support from advisors whom he heeds, along with attention to diet, medication, exercise, and intellectual engagement, Trump could continue serving as president despite the health event.
"There is no need to get all exorcised about that issue. But I think it'd be good for the public to be informed. That's just the nature of my view of the way I was trained in elementary and junior high school about democracy," he said.
Davidson paints a picture of a president who is capable of speaking openly and forthrightly with the American people about a delicate health issue, one that could point at weakness, now or in the future. Jimmy Carter might have been that kind of person, but it doesn't sound like Trump. Many Americans probably cannot imagine Trump handling a health crisis in the way Davidson describes.
Trump has proven that his tendency is to cover up problems, and you can count me among those who would be shocked if Trump even were to acknowledge having a stroke. He might claim to have had the most complete and profound recovery from a stroke in the history of medicine, but that would be going down his usual slippery slope of dishonesty.
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