A US psychologist has claimed that President Donald Trump is displaying what he sees as akey sign of psychosis, arguing that the president's recent online behaviour suggests he'wants the world to worship him as a god'and is gripped by'magical thinking'.
The comments come fromDr John Gartner, a former psychology professor at Johns Hopkins University who has publicly tracked Trump's mental state for years. Speaking this month, he pointed to a series of Truth Social posts, including one in which Trump reportedly shared, then deleted, an AI generated image of himself as Jesus, and another in which he referred to himself as the 'acting president of Venezuela'. The White House has not endorsed Gartner's assessment and continues to insist the president is in 'excellent' health.
Gartner's central argument is direct. He says Trump's online self presentation is not simply political theatre or exaggerated bravado, but evidence of a disordered style of thinking more commonly associated with psychiatric illness.
'It's something that, again, we associate with psychosis,' he toldThe Daily Beast, describing what he sees as the president's 'magical thinking'. In clinical terms, he said, it resembles what Sigmund Freud called 'primary process' thought.
Gartner explained this as 'the most primitive type of thinking, where if you imagine it, it must be true'. In Trump's case, he argued, 'anything that occurs to him, any stray, crazy thought, is true'.
He pointed to the AI Jesus image and the 'acting president of Venezuela' post as part of a wider pattern rather than isolated incidents. In his reading, Trump is no longer just using grandiose slogans or exaggerated rhetoric, but increasingly blurring the line between fantasy and reality in public.
Gartner has gone further than many of his peers are willing to go. Professional bodies in the United States have long debated the ethics of diagnosing public figures from a distance, particularly under the so called Goldwater rule, which discourages speculative diagnosis. Gartner has made clear that he has never examined Trump personally, but argues that the volume of public video and written material is enough to justify his concerns.
Gartner has also argued that Trump's behaviour reflects a broader pattern of mental decline. Earlier this month, he said the president was displayingfour major symptoms associated with dementia, pointing to what he described as 'the deterioration of his thinking, of his verbal language, of his physical body, and of his behaviour'.
On the question of psychosis, Gartner focused on what he sees as Trump's need for endless praise and public adoration. He argued that the president's grandiosity 'is so extreme that not only does he want to be the pope and Jesus and the president of Venezuela and the Mullah of Iran, he wants to be all of these things at once'.
'He wants the world to worship him,' Gartner said, 'and he wants to erect massive monuments to praise himself.'
Source: International Business Times UK
