Donald Trump Turns 80, but It’s Not Age that Has Us Worried

Join Me and Dr. Henry Abraham Tomorrow Evening

Jun 14, 2026

The Independent publishes another excellent article, while American media stay silent:

Medical experts warn, though, that it’s not so much … obvious symptoms and his age that Americans should be most concerned about, but the conduct and behavior on display during his second presidency.
“It’s not that he’s 80, but let’s not ignore the red flags on the field,” Dr. Henry Abraham, a Nobel Prize-winning professor of Psychiatry Emeritus at Tufts University School of Medicine, told The Independent. “There are people in their 80’s and 90’s who have all their marbles.”
But Abraham, who stressed he has never examined the president in person and was not offering a diagnosis, is seriously alarmed that Trump has access to the nuclear codes.
“If you just look at everything that he’s said and done, and has been observed doing over, really, decades, certain signs and symptoms emerge which are warning flags regarding the conduct of his presidency going forward…. Poor impulse control, poor control over his rage, sleeplessness at night, unrelenting aggression toward his perceived enemies,” Abraham said. “Well, put all that together and give him the nuclear football, and you can see why we’re worried.”

Dr. Abraham is a fellow alumnus of mine from Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School. He served as a consultant to the National Academy of Sciences, and as advisor for several revisions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association. He was an author of the constitution of Physicians for Social Responsibility and the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which won the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize. In 2007 he was elected Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. He was one of the signatories and stepped up to our request to be spokesperson for the Statement of Medical Concerns we submitted for the Congressional Record. He did an excellent interview with Dean Obeidallah, which Ben Meiselas, who featured me prominently with the launching of Meidas Touch, highlighted as well.

The article continues:

The White House did not acknowledge questions about the president’s health when reached for comment by The Independent, but dismissed the concerns of medical experts in a statement.
“If it quacks like a duck, it may actually just be a Democrat hack doctor,” said White House spokesman Davis Ingle. “President Trump is the sharpest, most accessible, and energetic president in American history and any so-called medical professionals engaging in armchair diagnosis or false speculation for political purposes are clearly breaking the Hippocratic Oath they’ve sworn to”….

Except we are not all Democrats, which negates any link to political purposes. It should also be clear that our warnings over almost a decade concern mental pathology that has already brought very real damage to our nation—so much so, that some believe that its 250th anniversary will be its obituary. There is certainly no U.S. president who has caused so many unnecessary deaths through Covid mismanagement alone—more than all war casualties in its history combined—and yet has laid the groundwork for losing multifold more in the next pandemic. This has nothing to do with “armchair diagnosis”—or any diagnosis—and detecting danger signs is an obligation under the Hippocratic oath, not a violation.

Dr. Rosanne Leipzig, professor emerita, vice chair in the Department of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and one of the signatories to our Statement, also spoke to The Independent:

“The stuff that I most worry about here is the mental status exam.” [She said] staying up late into the early morning hours on Truth Social is not the norm for an 80-year-old. “There are changes in sleep patterns as you get older. This is not one of them,” Leipzig said of the president’s social media habits. “People are not usually up all night and falling asleep during the day in important meetings where people are looking at them.”

This is while Donald Trump has:

set another new bar last month as part of his medical exam when he was reportedly screened by 22 specialists, nearly doubling the number from his past check-ups….
[Abraham] questioned Trump’s “perfect scores” on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a common test used to diagnose dementia. According to [White House physician Capt. Sean] Barbabella’s memo, Trump scored 30 out of 30 on the short test.
“Who gets three or four [assessments] in 18 months?” Abraham said. “That’s clinically not indicated. We should follow it up with much more careful, exhaustive neuropsychological evaluations”…. Looking back at footage of Trump from 30 years ago, he was using sophisticated language and words with many syllables, Abraham noted. “None of that is present now,” he said.
“If you’re really concerned about cognition, you need a more in-depth set of tests,” Leipzig added. She said that when carrying out these tests, doctors will also learn about a patient through their appearance, behavior, eye contact, posture, their speech and mood. The geriatrician said that Barbabella’s note “didn’t really talk about” what Trump’s mood was like that day or “where he’s at.”
Given the obviously politically-motivated deviation from the medical standard of care, it is about time we instituted fitness standards for elected office such as the U.S. presidency, which has nothing to do with age. Likewise:
Abraham … doesn’t agree with introducing an upper age limit on the presidency. Instead, he suggested an “honest, transparent assessment of physical and cognitive status before one even becomes president.”

Risk of illnesses such as dementia may go up with age, but absent illnesses, there is no relation between fitness and age; conversely, a young person who has a disorder such as pathological narcissism may be unfit regardless of age, if he is too preoccupied with himself to consider the nation).

Abraham said he is most concerned with how the president exhibits “a degree of self‐absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus,” quoting the playwright Tom Stoppard…. “Besides [being] self-absorbed, he has a grandiose, omnipotent view of himself,” Abraham continued. “‘I can do anything I want,’ he said. Well, that includes starting a nuclear war.”

The glaring omission is the absence of any fitness standards for the most consequential office on the planet, when every other occupation in this country that deals with life-or-death matters requires a fitness test before taking on that position. Given what difficulty we have firing a president, who is an employee of the people, we need to have firm safeguards in place to avoid the catastrophe that results from having a president who pronounces:

“Peace for the world, OK? Peace for the world,” … the same day he threatened to “bomb the s***” out of Iran.

Announcement:

Dr. Bandy X. Lee is moving up her next “Emergency Psychiatric Meeting” to Monday, June 15, 2026, at 7 p.m. EDT / 4 p.m. PDT, in order to invite Dr. Henry Abraham! Please join us! Likewise, we are moving the next planning meeting for Survival University to the evening, on Friday, June 26, 2026, at 7 p.m. EDT / 4 p.m. PDT, because of several conflicts (we will try out a midday time, as per your requests, beginning in July 2026). A paid subscription will automatically include you in both invitations, with a Zoom link to be sent to you an hour before the meetings.

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Discussion about this post

D. Hammer

Even though Trump is something to worry about, I worry more about the people who don't do anything to get him out of office, and those who who are idiotic and mindless enough to follow him along. Otherwise, he would be in jail by now!!!!

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