The Trump Implosion
Just about everyone on the face of the earth has witnessed President Trump’s meltdown over the past several months. All that’s left to do is analyze what happened and judge Trump for his actions. Unless you can get inside someone’s head, it’s difficult to judge someone else’s motives and motives tend to determine whether actions are good, evil, or somewhere in between. Specific overt actions are evil, including murder, unprovoked assault, sexual assault, theft, and obvious discrimination. Analyzing why a person acts in an evil way is usually quite obvious. People rob banks to get money, abuse alcohol or drugs to avoid dealing with real issues in their lives, and physically attack people because of hate or an attempt to silence them.
Trump’s Brain is in the Toilet
This post is my attempt to analyze Trump’s rapid implosion. Exactly why did it happen? My answer is simple and straightforward. I have predicted over the past several years that President Trump would end up creating a massive mess due to an untreated medical problem. I have written numerous blog posts based on my belief that Trump likely has a form of food-induced brain dysfunction called Carbohydrate Associated Reversible Brain syndrome or CARB syndrome. I wrote the first post titled “Donald Trump has CARB syndrome” on December 29, 2015—six years ago. I wrote a follow up post about his CARB syndrome in September of 2019. CARB syndrome is a form of food-induced brain dysfunction triggered by long-term exposure to highly processed food, the typical modern western diet. The 22 symptoms of CARB syndrome overlap with many traditional brain disorders, creating a great deal of diagnostic and therapeutic confusion. The lead symptom is craving sweet and starchy food, which sets up a vicious cycle where people consume more of the very food frying their brains.
People develop these disease symptoms very gradually over years and decades, so the change in their behavior is sometimes hard to detect. They also are prone to metabolic problems like obesity and type 2 diabetes. Obesity or excessive body fat can occur at any weight or BMI because it’s a body composition issue, not a weight or size issue. There is no correlation between the severity of the symptoms and fat storage. Some folks with a lot of excessive fat have mild brain dysfunction symptoms, and some thin individuals with minimal excess fat have severe brain dysfunction symptoms. Anorexia is such an example. You have to measure their body composition to see their excess body fat, so their symptoms dominate the clinical picture. They have the same disease as morbidly obese folks. They don’t eat much, but when they do eat, they eat highly processed food driven by their cravings.
The 22 Symptoms of CARB Syndrome
If you read through the 22 symptoms of CARB syndrome, you will quickly see many typical Trump personality characteristics:
- Poor impulse control. If something pops into Trump’s mind, he tends to respond to it without considering the consequences immediately.
- Mood swings. Need I say more?
- Lack of a brain filter. If a thought pops into his brain, he immediately expresses it verbally or with a Tweet, regardless of the consequences of doing so.
- Lack of empathy. Trump doesn’t seem to have the ability to sense how his behavior and words affect those around him.
- Abnormal hunger drives with cravings for highly processed food. His penchant for eating at McDonald’s is well known.
- Trump prides himself on getting by on 4-5 hours of sleep per night, but this always leads to a lack of restorative sleep, further stressing his brain.
- Poor listening skills. Trump tends to focus on his views while ignoring others’ opinions, likely because he isn’t hearing or understanding their perspective.
- Difficulty concentrating and focusing. Trump seems to be living in his own world, and he has difficulty processing information from others.
To me, it’s clear that President Trump’s bizarre behavior is due to a disease rather than an evil personality. He needs treatment rather than condemnation. Even though I can’t officially diagnosis someone with a disease unless I have personally evaluated them, I am speculating about the state of Trump’s brain based on listening to his public statements and observing his behaviors. These are just a few examples of how this disease might have negatively influenced his actions and behaviors:
- Early in his Presidency, he failed to perceive how his actions, behaviors, and statements might be perceived by others. In a sense, he was “tone deaf” because of his brain dysfunction, leading to the massive political chaos that helped to drive his first impeachment trial.
- He completely mismanaged the COVID epidemic. Initially, he obsessively focused on targeting China as the source of the virus, and he later ignored the recommendations of the health experts concerning masks and social distancing. He then got the virus himself and pushed hydroxychloroquine as a useful treatment long after the professionals abandoned it as an effective treatment. In my opinion, this entire mess was caused by Trump’s inability to process information from experts.
- His inability to accept his loss in the Presidential election reflects his brain’s difficulty processing information that doesn’t fit his pre-programmed narrative.
- The breach of the Capitol by Trump supporters set a new standard for tone-deaf leadership. Trump’s claims that he never encouraged his rabid followers to overwhelm our Capitol, but his inability to accept his loss in the election and his often inflammatory rhetoric was like adding gas to a fire when it came to whipping up his followers.
- Before one of the worst episodes in the history of our Democracy, Trump refused to immediately condemn the violence and loss of life during the breach of the Capitol. This situation sent a message to some of his followers that their actions were acceptable. Because of his CARB syndrome, I believe he was unable to project how others would interpret his views and behaviors.
I could go on and on, but I think you can see the picture of what happens when the President’s brain is in the toilet. I concluded my previous posts by offering to treat Trump at no cost if he contacted me, but unfortunately, I never got the chance to do so.
The bottom line is that I don’t blame Trump for not understanding the disease that has been frying his brain. I blame the medical and scientific communities for failing to recognize this condition that is rapidly spreading across the globe. If a simple country doctor like myself can figure this stuff out, the experts have no excuse for not doing so.
Support From the Academic World
There had been a few folks in the academic world who have seen a similar pattern. In 2003 two Psychiatrists from Harvard, Hudson and Pope proposed that 14 common brain disorders are part of the same disease process: Affective Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Their concept was too radical for its time, so it never made it out of academic medicine. A few years ago, all the top Neuroscientists in the world got together, intending to figure out how the brain works (good luck with that). They published their first article in Journal Science proposing that ten common brain disorders are part of the same disease process. I find it odd that I am the only practicing clinician who has fully connected all of these dots. Time will tell if my instincts are on the right track.
Trump Deserves Our Compassion, Empathy, and Support
In conclusion, Donald Trump’s primary sin is failing to realize that he has a reversible brain disorder that has completely screwed up his life, with the rest of us suffering downstream adverse effects. Did Trump consciously and purposely insight his followers to storm the Capitol? I seriously doubt it. Because of his CARB syndrome, Trump is incapable of perceiving how his words, actions, and behaviors will affect the people who have been supporting him. To an outside observer, it certainly looks like he was inciting this total breach of societies’ laws and norms. Putting aside all issues of motive, these events are in the past and must be considered water under the bridge. His second impeachment trial will likely determine if we can afford to let him seek the Presidency again in the future. The critical lesson to be learned is this: do not let your brain go down the rabbit hole of CARB syndrome, an eminently preventable, reversible, and treatable disease. If you are interested in doing so, my book “Brain Drain” teaches people to self-diagnose CARB syndrome and arrange for their treatment. If you have access to Donald Trump, please let me know, and I will send him and his physician free copies of my book.
The good news is that even though I don’t share many of Joe Biden’s political views, he clearly does not have CARB syndrome.
