Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics and the Trump presidency in 2017.

I'm Freddie Gray and I'm Deputy Editor of the Spectator.

Today's Americano is going to be a little bit different.

We're listening to an extended version of the interview

you heard on the main spectator podcast between Lara Prendergast and Lionel Schreiber. And they're

talking about Trump and how American expacts feel about him. So at this festival, you asked a simple

question, and the question was, how do you explain Trump? And what was your answer to that?

I dodged it, okay?

But having had some interesting conversations at the weekend,

I think I have my answer now.

You know, I'm not a doctor.

I'm just observing from the distance.

But, you know, Donald Trump does display many of the signs of someone who is

suffering from dementia. And what really sealed it for me was looking up an old interview of his

that he did with Oprah Winfrey in 1998. And, okay, he was still full of bombast. There was some of his signature arrogance was

certainly there. But the way he spoke was completely different. He used complete sentences. He used a

larger vocabulary. You could tell that he was speaking with intention so that he was driving toward

a point. It was completely formed thought. Whether I agreed with it

was another matter, but there were none of the stumbles, that there was none of the repetition,

you know, the way that he uses the same word over and over again. And you didn't either have any of this

obsessive placeholding usage, by which I mean umed, a lot of ums or this very, very,

very, very thing and the really, really, really great. That's what you do when you're spinning

...