Why Ailing Trump’s Erratic Ego Has World on Edge

The Daily Beast Podcast

The Daily Beast

News

4.6 • 8.4K Ratings

🗓️ 23 February 2026

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dr. John Gartner joins Joanna Coles for a bracing deep dive into what he argues are the accelerating signs of cognitive and behavioral decline in Donald Trump—from garbled words and meandering stories to grandiosity, paranoia, and the spectacle of falling asleep at his newly formed Board of Peace. As they dissect Trump’s escalator conspiracy tale, obsession with looks, fixation on naming landmarks after himself, and late-night social media tirades, the conversation widens to the real stakes: nuclear codes, Middle East brinkmanship, the midterms, and what Dr. Gartner calls the dangerous mix of narcissistic injury and unchecked power. With references to Greenland, Gaza, Iran, the Justice Department, and even the shadow of the Epstein files, Coles presses on whether any institutional guardrails still hold—or whether impulse now drives policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	We have a constitutional crisis of sorts, right, where our president has really disregarded all of the checks and balances.
0:06.0	But we have someone with a brain disorder, okay, a deteriorating brain disorder, so they have no internal controls or judgment.
0:14.0	Donald Trump's id is now sort of in control of the world.
0:18.0	Because he has no frontal lobes, He has no advisors. We have no
0:23.2	constitution. We have no checks and balances. It's like everything just radiates from his
0:28.2	id and there's not a single thing to sort of stop an impulse in his disturbed brain from
0:34.4	becoming a war.
0:44.0	I'm Joanna Coles. This is the Daily Beast podcast, and nobody has chronicled the president's health, I think, with more meticulously than the Daily Beast. We've chronicled
0:51.2	his cancels, his chronic venous insufficiency, his strange gait,
0:55.8	his inability to pronounce certain words. And certainly nobody has paid more attention to the
1:03.4	president's mental state and his psychological state than Dr. John Garner. He's a fan favorite
1:10.5	here at the Daily Beast. and I love talking to him
1:13.2	because he always makes the point that Donald Trump is a man who is hiding in plain sight.
1:18.8	He's been with us in public life for 50 years. We've got so many recordings of his to judge his
1:25.9	current form against.
1:28.2	And that's why I think Dr. John is unparalleled in his ability to analyze what is going on with the president.
1:36.3	He's a former assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University.
1:41.0	He's a clinical psychotherapist and he brings such attention to detail. I always
1:47.0	love talking to him. So we get into the Board of Peace and his speech there. We get into his
1:53.2	inauguration anniversary speech where he suddenly goes off on some random train of thought about
1:59.9	how he was a kid and he was playing baseball and there was this big building with bars on the window.
2:05.7	And Dr. John knows how to analyze this with such perception.
	...

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