Is Trump becoming “the demented dictator?”
Shrinking Trump
Really American Media
4.5 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 15 August 2025
⏱️ 125 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Is Trump becoming “the demented dictator”? That’s the question driving the latest episode of Shrinking Trump, as clinical psychologists John Gartner and Harry Segal sit down with Dan Rodricks, the legendary former Baltimore Sun columnist, to unpack Trump’s disastrous press conference where he unveiled a plan to seize control of the D.C. police.
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They paint a vivid picture of Trump’s recent media blitz, from declaring eight separate states of emergency to deploying troops in Washington, D.C. Rather than stemming crime—which has actually declined—these moves feel like a staged spectacle, a bid to manufacture chaos and justify an authoritarian grip.
Heather Cox Richardson and photographer-writer Rex Huke chime in to call out the mainstream press for glossing over Trump’s erratic behavior. Too often, anchors chase sensational sound bites instead of pressing for real answers, reducing cognitive warning signs to fleeting headlines rather than treating them as red flags.
When Trump turns his fire on Baltimore, he distorts a city on the rise into a caricature of dysfunction. Gartner and Segal contrast his fear-mongering with ground-level reality—neighborhood revitalization, falling violent-crime rates, and community-led renewal—showing how he weaponizes urban struggles to stoke division.
Pointing out possible signs of cognitive strain in our leaders isn’t a cheap political attack—it’s a civic responsibility. By naming these stunts for what they may be—symptoms of mental strain—we open the door to honest dialogue, inoculate ourselves against manipulation, and reclaim our democratic norms.
Tune in to Shrinking Trump on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your shows. Arm yourself with the language to see past the façade and call out authoritarian playbooks whenever they emerge. In a world drowning in noise, psychological clarity just might be our most powerful defense.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Dr. John Gartner. |
| 0:02.0 | And I'm Dr. Harry Siegel. |
| 0:04.0 | And welcome to another session of shrinking Trump. |
| 0:08.0 | It's been another long week. |
| 0:11.0 | You walk into the building of your therapist and you walk up the stairs and you don't even have to sit in the waiting room because the door is open and you come in and you sit down. |
| 0:21.5 | But in this case, you don't have one therapist. You have two clinical psychologist, John and I. |
| 0:28.5 | And we hear every week to help you think about the week in Trump. And although you may be following |
| 0:35.1 | politics and alarmed at the various ways in which Trump has been amassing power, and he's been very successful at it, to be honest, we're here to talk about that, but we're here to talk about it from a clinical perspective. We're both clinical psychologists. |
| 0:58.0 | We're experts in personality disorders. |
| 1:04.4 | We also have expertise in early onset dementia, which we see Trump suffering from. |
| 1:08.6 | And we've been seeing it for 62 episodes. |
| 1:10.4 | This is our 63rd, John. And there's always something to review. There's always |
| 1:14.0 | something to see because Trump, besides grabbing for power and being very effective with the media, |
| 1:22.4 | is showing his pathology all the time. Isn't that right? |
| 1:26.8 | Yes, yes. You know, this week, the big story, |
| 1:29.8 | obviously, is his sending troops to Washington, D.C., and we're going to talk about that. But as you |
| 1:35.3 | mentioned, since our metier, or our raison d'etre, is to talk about his psychological dysfunction |
| 1:40.9 | and his cognitive dysfunction, we've kind of made a commitment to cover every week |
| 1:45.6 | new examples, new developments, or new developments in it being covered in the press. |
| 1:52.3 | So actually, last week, we had some enthusiasm about the number of articles that were starting |
| 1:58.9 | to talk about his cognitive decline. |
| 2:07.4 | We're going to continue in that vein to talk about different ways in which his cognitive decline was covered this week. |
... |
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