Debate Tips To Expose Trump’s Unfitness For Office
by Vince Greenwood, Ph.D., founder of DutyToInform
To: Kamala Harris
From: The Never-Trump Mental Health Lobby
Re: Debate Tips
We can only imagine how much you have on your mind in preparing for your debate with the ex-president. You are still trying to introduce yourself to the country, and you have many important policy positions to convey. You want to highlight the unpopularity of many of Trump’s positions and his flip-flopping. We hope you have the opportunity to display your sense of humor, whether it highlights the contrast between you and your opponent or not.
But even with all that under your purview, we would suggest an additional item to your goals for the debate: underscoring that Donald Trump is cognitively and morally unfit to be president due to specific and delineated mental health conditions.
We make this assertion based on extensive clinical observations and mounting scientific evidence. We implore you to consider devoting some time to the issue because he is a distinct danger to the country because of his conditions. We justify our request because we have a duty to inform and, when warranted, warn the public about threats to the general welfare.
We propose four strategies to help expose his mental health conditions: hold a mirror up to both his cognitive decline and moral unfitness, challenge him to collaborate in a bona fide examination, and trigger his disturbing behavior.
- Hold A Mirror Up To His Cognitive Unfitness For Office
Donald Trump, to many professional and lay observers, has displayed a noticeable cognitive decline over the past couple of years. There is accumulating evidence that this decline is the result of a neurodegenerative process and not just normal aging.
You can highlight the seriousness of this cognitive decline by focusing on four domains of his functioning.
- Train of thought.
Trump displays clinically meaningful tangential thinking and disordered syntax. Those are medical terms to describe severe disruptions in thinking and mind-wandering. More down-to-earth characterizations in this domain would be phrases like:
“Your thinking seems all over the place.”
“Recently, even some of your allies and the TV networks that support your candidacy notice that you struggle to complete your thoughts and you say things people can’t understand.”
“President Biden had a rough debate night, but I never had trouble understanding his words. I scratch my head when I see you on TV responding to questions or speaking at a rally.”
“You seem aware that your thoughts are more scattered now. The other day, you acknowledged your mind “weaves,” but then you said that only reflected how brilliant you are…but for me, and I think many of us, it feels like there is yarn all over the floor.”
“It’s as if your thoughts just can’t stay on the highway. They get lost on side roads.”
(2) Memory
Trump has recently displayed memory difficulties. Mixing up people is a sign of possible neurodegenerative illness. Trump appears to be doing this with increasing frequency, such as confusing Nancy Pelosi with Nikki Haley, whether he shared a memorable helicopter ride with the mayor of San Francisco or a much different-looking councilman from Los Angeles.
Concerns about Trump’s functioning in the memory domain might be highlighted by phrases such as:
“When you seem to mix up people, not just names, and don’t seem aware of it, I worry about your well-being.”
“When you don’t answer questions asked of you, I wonder if it is because you don’t want to or you just can’t remember the question.”
“I saw there was a recent study of your speeches and interviews and, that compared to the past, you are really struggling to find the right words to express yourself,’
(3) Complexity of thought
When you compare Trump’s speech now to when he was middle-aged, you see a shift to shorter sentences, greater reliance on superlatives, and diminished breadth in his vocabulary. The author of a recent study that applied a metric of analytic thinking to Trump’s contemporary speeches concluded, “I can’t tell you how staggering this is. He does not think in a complex way at all.”
Phrases that capture Trump’s struggles in this domain might include:
“The presidency demands that one grapple with complex issues. Can you do that?”
“So, so many of your past advisers and cabinet officers are on the record in warning the public that you are just no longer capable of addressing thorny problems. Doesn’t that concern you?”
“You’re still good with your nicknames, insults, and complaints about how you are treated, but can you handle the country’s difficult problems? Or will you just hand them off to your Project 2025 cronies?”
(4) Use of language
Many have noted Trump’s recent verbal expressive struggles. These include but are not limited to, phonemic paraphasias (an unintended substitution of an inappropriate sound for part of the word), semantic paraphasias (substituting an entirely inappropriate word for the intended word), speaking in fragmented sentences, and over-reliance on superlatives (“the greatest,” “the worst,” “like nothing we’ve ever seen”).
Phrases that capture Trump’s struggles in this domain might include:
“ In the past, you didn’t usually have trouble pronouncing words, repeating yourself, or using the right word.”
“I know many people just chuckle at your word salads, but the presidency requires good communication skills. You can still knock it out of the park with your divisive rhetoric, but almost everything else is gibberish.”
2. Hold A Mirror Up To His Moral Unfitness For Office
Donald Trump has a personality disorder labeled as malignant narcissism or clinical psychopathy (essentially the same condition). The essence of this disorder has been described as “moral insanity.”
You can highlight his moral unfitness for office by focusing on three of his malignant narcissist/clinical psychopathy traits.
- Lying
It can be a rabbit hole to fact-check or call out Trump when he spews one lie after another. But it is desirable to elucidate the breadth and depth of his lying. Trump is at the mercy of blurting out whatever meets his egocentric needs of the moment. He has no buffer of aims or values to deflect the drive for immediate, tangible gain or restrain his frequent lying.
Possible ways to convey the hard-wired and dangerous quality of his lying:
“You just can’t help the lying, can you?”
“You can lie at every moment, to try to win every skirmish, every news cycle, but don’t you see you are losing the battle to be a credible, serious person?”
“Don’t you think it is disrespectful to the country to lie to them all the time?”
“I honestly don’t think you realize how trapped you are in a world of deceit.”
“Many of your lies are consequential, like when you downplayed the COVID-19 virus when you knew early on about how lethal and easily transmissible it was because you thought it would hurt your political standing. The most conservative estimates of the cost of that lying were tens of thousands of lives. Yet you showed no remorse at all.”
“Lying seems so effortless for you.”
“You almost seem to get a kick out of saying whatever false and outlandish thing comes into your head.”
(2) The ‘win at all costs’ and selfish “what’s in it for me?’ trait.
The psychopath is turbocharged to achieve dominance in a relationship. That is his sole goal. Life is reduced to the game of winning. His instincts in that realm are savage and unfettered. He will do anything to win, whatever the risk or collateral damage. He has no conscience to stop him.
Possible ways to convey this dangerous trait to the public:
“You have only one gear: win at all costs, whatever damage that brings to others. If you hadn’t undermined the bipartisan border security bill, who knows how many lives we may have saved from fentanyl and how much protection we would have gained from better securing our border. And all because you calculated it might hurt you politically.”
“In one of your memoirs, when talking about your philosophy of life, you said, ‘Man is the most vicious of all animals, and life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat.’ When I hear that, I feel sad. There’s no room for joy, or laughing, or love. No wonder the mood of our country has been so polarized and sour.”
(3) The arrogant/ conceited/self-justifying trait
The malignant narcissist is self-aggrandizing and has a strong feeling of deserved privilege. Trump believes he is a “stable genius” and shrugs off responsibility for any harm he may have inflicted on others or for any moral transgressions.
Possible ways to convey the extreme nature of his sense of being extraordinary and his failure to accept responsibility.
“I don’t know that I have ever met anyone who bragged about never apologizing to anyone. That actually is extraordinary.”
“You claim to know more than all the generals, more than all the scientists, more than all the public health officials…I mean, really, do you want to be taken seriously?”
3. Challenge Him
“I know you challenged President Biden to take ‘cognitive exams’ so the public would have relevant information regarding his and your brain health. I am happy to take you up on that challenge.
Citizens have a right to relevant and meaningful information for those seeking office for positions that affect the general welfare. This duty to inform would include, but not be limited to, considerations of cognitive functioning.
We have a moral duty to inform the public about the possibility that one of us might be in the beginning stage of a deteriorating neurological disorder.
Sir, please do the right thing and collaborate on a comprehensive neuropsychological exam. Of course, I will do so as well.
I am not talking about the 5-minute, one-page exam you took that only screens for a severe form of dementia. A comprehensive neuropsychological exam involves detailed tests of memory, attention, language, executive functioning, and emotional intelligence. It would require each of us to take a day off the campaign trail or golf course, but the electorate would no doubt appreciate our effort and transparency.”
4. Trigger Him
The more people can see Trump’s destructive traits, the more information they will have to make a choice in the election. How can this be brought out on the debate stage? The kryptonite for Trump, his main trigger, is perceived loss of status. “Winning” is the only game in town for the malignant narcissist/clinical psychopath. He will engage in frantic efforts — typically bullying, lying, and grandiose assertions — to avoid a loss of status. Pricking that sensitivity will trigger him.
On the other hand, recognize that he has no capacity for guilt, shame or fear of punishment. Confronting him over his outrageous or shameful behavior will not trigger him. However, that doesn’t mean you have to ignore such behavior, particularly if it occurs in real-time. It does mean that you should respond to such behavior with a status move that puts him on a lower rung. It was precisely the right touch when Dana Bash of CNN asked you to respond to Trump’s claim that you only identify as Black later in life and only for political gain, and you responded, “Same old, tired playbook, next question, please.”
Possible opportunities Tuesday night for triggering his status anxiety:
- When his responses are all over the place- “I think I speak for most people watching when I say I can’t follow what you are saying.”
- When he is in attack mode — “When I see all you can do is attack me, I feel worried about your stewardship of the country.”
- If Trump tries to interrupt her when his mike is off — “Americans can’t hear you right now, but they should know you’re doing your yelling and name-calling routine. If some child did that in elementary school, they would send him to the principal’s office.”
- When Trump is in ‘firehose of lies’ mode — “I’m not going to fact-check all your misrepresentations because it would take all night, and I want to tell America what I would like to do for her the next four years. But I urge people to stay with the broadcast after the debate when I am sure the fact-checkers will have a field day with all these lies.”
Or, “I probably didn’t catch them all, but I counted four mistruths in that last response.”
- “Have you no decency, sir,” probably still works.
Best of luck, Madam Vice-President
