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Nov. 17, 2022 - Rudy Giuliani
01:01:19
Board Certified Physicians assess then Presidential Candidate JB's Mental State | 11/17/22 | Ep 290
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Welcome to Rudy Giuliani's Common Sense.
And today we have a very, very sensitive issue to discuss and a very important one, and that is about all the rumors and talk of Joe Biden's mental state.
What does it all amount to?
What bearing does it have on his being President of the United States?
How serious is it?
And how much can we tell from the information that's available?
We're very honored to be joined by Dr. Alan Masaryk, Who is a clinical instructor, neurology at the Icahn School of Medicine.
He's certified in neurology, the American Board of Psychiatry.
He was a graduate of Mount Sinai School of Medicine, which is a hospital I'm very close to.
His internship was at Brookdale Hospital Medical Center, his residency in neurology at Mount Sinai Hospital, and he is a very, very distinguished doctor, and we're really honored that he's giving us this time to discuss this.
Doctor, thank you very much for joining us.
Thank you, Mayor.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
So maybe—the best way to ask you about this is, you've had a chance to, first of all, look at the material that we sent you from the different articles that exist, but you've also had a chance to look at it on your own.
So just generally, how do you approach this subject of the comments, the question—let's call them the questionable comments that Presidential candidate Biden has made over the last several years.
So as you said, this is a sensitive subject and I've been a neurologist, a clinical neurologist for over 30 years and I have a particular area of expertise in dementia, Alzheimer's disease, cognitive impairment.
And this is something that we don't enjoy doing when we see someone who is afflicted, but we are concerned.
And I would say that if anyone accused us of having an agenda, our agenda is one, an agenda of concern, not an agenda of hate, but an agenda of concern.
We're concerned for Mr. Biden's, for Vice President Biden's personal health, and also concerned because he is looking to become the President of the United States, the leader of the free world.
And that's a role that requires an inordinate amount of cognitive ability.
It requires someone to be on the top of their game, as well as to be able to express themselves in a proper manner.
And it's been clear to many that's he's had some difficulty in the in that regard
uh... and we reviewed some of the evidence that uh...
clearly shows that he's having some cognitive impairment
and may in fact even have and early
sign of dementia and i'm willing to to really lay out
shortly evidence for you on that and and by the way uh...
again this is something that we're doing regretfully
We wish we didn't have to do this, but also I think it's important to realize that whenever someone has a difficulty it's often said that you cannot really tell what's wrong
with them without examining them.
And as a physician, you examine them. But in this particular instance, we have
30 to 40 years worth of video evidence that we can watch a progression from the time when
Senator Biden and then Vice President Biden was at the top of his game. And we see how there's
been a significant decline in the last few years and really accelerating in the last few months.
So what I did was I looked at five different areas.
that characterize either a mild cognitive impairment or what we call MCI, mild cognitive impairment,
or an early stage of dementia. And those five areas are memory issues, which I think we're
all familiar with, something we call word finding difficulty, difficulty finding the right words,
which again all of us experience at one time or another.
We have that tip of the tongue syndrome.
We're looking for a word.
But when it happens repeatedly, that becomes a problem and is a sign of either cognitive impairment or dementia.
Language issues, either expressing or understanding language and using numbers calculation as well.
Disorientation to person, place or time.
And finally, behavioral issues, often either having aggressive or inappropriate behavior.
So those five areas are the areas that characterize a dementia, a cognitive impairment,
and those can be used to assess if somebody's having some difficulty with that.
And this is a question of each one of these is a question of degree.
Correct.
Correct.
And also in comparison to ways to the way someone might have been in an earlier time in their life.
Absolutely correct.
And again, we are fortunate in that we have A prior evaluation, if you will, because we have video of, as I said, first Senator and then Vice President Biden at one particular time in his life, in his career.
And now we can see how he is behaving and speaking now, and we can see a dramatic change.
And that's basically, you know, when we do telemedicine, you know, because of COVID, many of us have had to do telemedicine.
When we're examining someone over a video, we're doing the same thing.
We're watching them over a video.
So this is, I think, is a legitimate way of evaluating somebody.
As you pointed out, we are comparing it with prior evaluations.
Well, let's just go over for one second, so we're all clear on it, the five areas that you that you focused on.
One is loss of memory.
Correct.
That's number one.
Number two is word finding difficulties, having difficulties finding the right word for a particular sentence or thought.
Correct.
Then third would be other language issues.
Expressing yourself, dealing with numbers, sometimes speaking language that doesn't make any sense.
Gibberish, I think you mentioned to me.
Correct.
At one point.
And four would be disorientation of person, place, or time.
And the fifth would be behavioral issues.
Aggressive behavior or inappropriate behavior.
These are five possible areas that would indicate cognitive impairment.
That's correct.
Let's look for a second at, there was one that you focused on originally when we spoke, which was the statement that he made when he was running for the Senate.
I think it was described as paragraph four in the consortium article.
Do you know the one that I'm talking about?
Yes, that's correct.
That was earlier this year.
You're the ones that sent Barack Obama the presidency, and I have a simple proposition here.
I'm here to ask you for your help.
Where I come from, you don't get far unless you ask.
My name's Joe Biden.
I'm a Democratic candidate for the United States Senate.
Look me over.
If you like what you see, help out.
If not, vote for the other guy.
Give me a look though, okay?
He was actually, he's running for president, but he said he was running for the Senate. He said he was running
for Senate. Correct.
He made the error saying that I'm running for the United States Senate
even though he was running for president and he reverted to a very
stock phrase, a stump phrase where he says I'm running for U. S.
Senate.
And he said, basically, if you don't want to vote for me, vote for the other guy.
But he was making that mistake.
This was something just several months ago, in February 2020, because he'd run for Senate for so many years.
He'd been in the Senate for almost 40 years.
But of course, in between, he ran for vice president twice.
Correct, correct.
It was quite some time ago that he ran for the Senate.
Right, that's correct.
And yet, here he was running for President and he confused it with running for Senate.
And that was exactly it.
He had not been in the Senate for some time.
He'd been Vice President for eight years.
He was already out of office for three years, the most recent three years.
And then in this year, actually the end of last year, he started running for President and yet confused it with running for Senate.
And it was unfortunately seen all over the the internet and was seen on TV. And it was unfortunate
that he made that mistake. But again, this idea that one reverts to a stock phrase, we see that
characteristically, and people have dementia, in order to help them get through
the conversation, they may utilize familiar phrases. And he ran for Senate so many times for
so many years that for him, it was natural to say I'm running for US Senate. You know,
with the recent ruling from the Supreme Court on vindicating life, which was supposed to have a big,
big impact on this election.
And right now it doesn't seem to be.
It seems like economy, crime, open border, Biden's mental state, Fetterman's mental state, the sort of idea that the Democrats are running at least, or have at least, two people they want in public office that seem to be non-compass menace, it seems like a tremendous, tremendous condescending attitude by By them.
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Now, if that had been the only thing or maybe one or two things over the last year, it wouldn't mean anything, right?
Correct.
We all make mistakes.
We all say things that we were used to saying.
Absolutely correct.
But if that's part of a pattern, then that becomes a difficulty.
Then there was another one that you focused on when we spoke earlier, and that was the one regarding the record player.
Right.
Unfortunately, that was the one during the debate.
We bring social workers into homes of parents to help them deal with how to raise their children.
It's not that they don't want to help, they don't know quite what to do.
Play the radio, make sure the television, excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the phone, make sure the kids hear words.
A kid coming from a very poor school, a very poor background, will hear four million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.
So when you consider that, how do you analyze that given the five criteria that you gave us and just your basic sense as a doctor?
So you could see that he was searching for a word.
He was having difficulty.
If you look at the clip, first he said television, then he corrected himself and said record player.
He was trying to find something that would Inject the idea that parents should spend time with their children learning something, and he came up with record player, which is an anachronism.
I mean, for the most part, nobody has record players anymore, and we certainly don't utilize those to help our children learn.
And again, he was reverting back to a term that was from his past, and it was unfortunate.
It was almost cringeworthy.
You know, you feel sorry when somebody's having difficulty.
You don't take any delight in someone's difficulty, and you felt sorry for him.
And this was on a national stage.
While he was at a national debate during the primaries.
So we'll contrast that with two clips of him.
One in about 2007 or so and the other in 2016.
One where he's talking about Israel and another where he's talking about Bernie Sanders to show how he was before any of this seems to have happened to him.
Right.
He was very, he was, when he talked about Israel or Bernie Sanders, and Bernie Sanders was just in 2016, he was vigorous, he was forceful, he was descriptive.
In fact, that interview about Bernie Sanders, it was also about Hillary Clinton, and he was, it was a tough interview.
The interviewer was giving him a rough time and you saw he handled himself beautifully.
He really was able to parry and answer the questions.
He was able to come up with responses that also dealt with policy.
So it was classic.
Super politician.
That was only four years ago.
And you see that the decline has been so striking and so rapid since then.
If we look at the Middle East, I think it's about time we stop those of us who support, as most of us do, Israel and this body, for apologizing for our support for Israel.
There's no apology to be made.
None.
It is the best $3 billion investment we make.
Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region.
The United States would have to go out and invent an Israel.
The strangest one of all was the one where he had difficulty completing even the first sentence of the first words of the Declaration of Independence.
We hold these truths to be self-evident.
All men and women created by God, you know the thing.
So what does that indicate?
I mean, that seems to me to be almost definitive.
Yeah, that was a very striking one.
You know, that's the classic, we hold these truths to be self-evident.
And of course, it continues that all men are created equal, but he could not remember the words.
The thing, he said, the thing, the thing.
So he said, you know, the thing, you know, the thing.
And that was a classic example of a difficulty with both memory and language.
He was unable to complete the sentence, the thought.
And again, if it had been a rare event, I'd say, okay, whatever the circumstances or the pressure, but this was of a piece of repeated difficulties in finding words, finding language, faulting speech, stopping himself in the middle of a sentence, and just giving up, basically, you know, the thing.
You know, that's not actually rhetoric, unfortunately.
It's taken on a life of its own on the internet, the Twitter world.
Doctor, in preparation for this interview, I read the DSM-5.
And in the DSM-5, that's one of the examples they give.
That when people seem to run out of words, they'll say the thing or that.
They'll say, oh, the thing, the thing, the thing.
It was very strange.
I don't know if that's just a coincidence or... No, that's...
That's, you know, it's like when somebody's talking and he uses the term the whatchamacallit.
We all do that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We're all native New Yorkers.
We use the whatchamacallit.
But that's something that we all do routinely.
That's not a sign of cognitive impairment.
Here, when you try to speak to a group and recall something as important as the Declaration of Independence and you cannot do it and you call it the thing, that's clearly a sign of a problem.
Well, these would indicate, would implicate several of your criteria.
Loss of memory, word finding difficulties, difficulty expressing yourself, maybe even disorientation.
Well, in this particular case, there wasn't that much disorientation, although later when he had difficulty remembering if he was in Vermont or New Hampshire, as we saw a clip at that point, that he had difficulty knowing which state he was in. He
did that on more than one occasion.
Difficulty knowing which facility he was in in a particular state.
That was an indication that there was disorientation to place and of time because in another clip he
used the word he talked about the year 1976 when in fact he meant to say 2014. And he later
corrected himself but clearly it was a we're talking about a 40-year difference.
We're not talking about one or two or three years.
So clearly there was a difficulty with orientation as to time as well.
The other one that struck me, maybe because I'm approximately Joe's age and grew up during the same things that he did, that he seemed to be totally confused about the year in which Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated.
He had it off by about 10 years.
Let me just play that one.
Just like in my generation when I got out of school that when Bobby Kennedy and Dr. King had been assassinated in the 70s, late 70s, when I got engaged.
So that seems to be about as clear an indication of disorientation.
of person and place and time as you can possibly get. Yes, yes, that you know that was one of the
pivotal years. Even the democrat convention was held in 1968. It was quite a violent convention,
but the fact that there was those two assassinations in 1968, something that's
seared on my memory and I'm a little younger than you Mr.
Mayor, but I remember it well.
And unfortunately, anybody who lived during that time will not make that mistake.
And he first said it was in the 70s, then the late 70s, and clearly he was confused.
Well, you know, the day or the night that Robert Kennedy was killed, I was taking my bar review course.
So I'll never forget it.
And although I am now a Republican, I was a big supporter of Robert Kennedy at that time.
As we all were, I think.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, I mean, I don't think I could possibly... It would be like forgetting the assassination of John Kennedy.
Right, right.
There also are issues where he seems to get He seems to get numbers completely out of whack.
You get a tax break for a racehorse, why in God's name couldn't we provide an $8,000 tax credit for everybody who has childcare costs?
It would put 720 million women back in the workforce.
It would increase the GDP, to sound like a wonk here, by about eight-tenths of one percent.
It would grow the economy.
Right, right.
On one occasion, he actually criticized Bernie Sanders about something with gun registry
and he said that a hundred and fifty million people were killed since
2007 so which means that half of the United States was killed which of course
is is ridiculous and then as you mentioned and another time he was talking
about a child support for children who go to daycare to make it easy for
women to go to work And he commented that 720 million women could be put back in the workforce.
720 million.
That's that's more than twice the number of people in the United States.
And he's saying 720 million women.
And again, these are again examples of repetitive errors into either comprehension of numbers or the ability to use numbers, which, of course, We're now at a stage, just in the numbers that we've gone through, we've gone through just a handful of the examples.
It almost seems to happen regularly.
There's also the situation where he got confused about the first African-American senator.
Carol Braun was the first African-American senator.
She was elected, I believe, in 92, 93, in that area from Illinois.
Correct.
Well, I'm looking forward to appointing the first African-American woman to the United States Senate.
Tell us about that.
Yeah, well, speaking to a group, he said he appointed the first African-American woman to the Senate when, of course, senators are elected, not appointed.
And he did not do any such thing.
He then forgot, later on when he was speaking at a debate, that he was talking about the only African American woman In the Senate, and he neglected the fact that Kamala Harris, who of course is now his running mate, was there by his side, who was another African-American woman in the Senate.
He forgot that she was also in the Senate, because he kept saying the only African-American woman, meaning Carol Braun.
And then he tried to correct himself, saying that he was talking about the first.
But clearly he made an error.
Even at that debate, Cory Booker corrected him.
Of course, Kamala Harris corrected him.
And clearly was a situation where it was embarrassing, where he was talking about either appointing a senator, which of course does not happen, or he was talking about the only African-American woman, and clearly Kamala Harris is another African-American woman who was in the Senate, who now, strangely enough, is his running mate.
How would you logically locate that in the analysis of dementia and Right, so again, it has to do with language, because his use of the word appoint, instead of being perhaps saying, sharing the Senate with an African American woman, he could have said that, you know, we were senators together, but instead he had the idea that he was appointing her, so there was some aspect of him having some power that he doesn't have.
The other point being, is neglecting the simple facts that there was an African-American woman, Carol Braun, who was elected in 1993, as you mentioned, and then later Kamala Harris was an African-American woman, and here she was by his side in the debate, and yet he neglected that simple fact.
Again, cringeworthy moments.
Nobody takes any delight in his failures, but it's certainly a sign of a cognitive problem, and anyone who tries to ignore it is just unfortunately fooling himself or herself and the American
people.
Then there's the last issue that you mentioned, which is behavioral issues,
sort of aggressive or inappropriate behavior. And I think the two that jumped out at you or
jump out at me certainly is the one about It's a good question.
Number one, I was a Democratic caucus.
The woman he got very angry at, the young teenage woman that he got very, very angry
at for, seemed to be no reason.
And why should the voters believe that you can win the national election?
It's a good question.
Number one, I was a Democratic caucus.
You ever been to a caucus?
You're a lying dog face pony soldier.
You said you were, but now you got to be honest.
I'm going to be honest with you.
And how would you how would you how would you describe that?
Well, this young woman asked him a question.
And instead of answering the question in a relatively calm manner, he started to as a teenager, he started becoming very aggressive towards her and called her a lying dog Pony soldier, which I'm not even quite sure what that term means.
No, I don't know what that means either.
It's like corn pop.
Yeah, it must be some sort of reference that he has.
But again, by the way, that's something that often people do when they're in the beginnings or even in the throes of dementia.
They go to phrases that they've used in the past and they use them in inappropriate ways.
But it's something for them to keep language going.
And unfortunately, Joe Biden has done that repeatedly.
He will just talk gibberish and just keep his Language going.
So in this case, though, he got very angry at her and was calling her this and was aggressive.
And in fact, he's repeated some of that aggressive behavior more recently when he was answering an African-American journalist who asked him about whether or not he was going to be cognitively tested.
He got very angry and started shouting at him that, what, what are you, a junkie?
You think I use cocaine or something of that nature, where he started to channel his frustration and his anger towards the person questioning him.
Which again, is not uncommon in individuals who have a dementia.
And those behavioral issues sometimes are more serious and significant than the cognitive issues.
Have you taken a cognitive test?
No, I haven't taken a test.
Why the hell would I take a test?
Come on, man.
That's like saying you, before you got in this program, you take a test where you're taking cocaine or not.
What do you think, huh?
Are you a junkie?
What do you say?
The last one that I wanted to play for you is this Uh, comment about this adversary of his named Corn Pop who he had some battle with but then he connects it to children in a pool touching the hair of his legs.
So let's play that.
And Corn Pop was a bad dude.
And he ran a bunch of bad boys.
And I did.
And back in those days, you see how things have changed?
One of the things you had to use, if you used pomade in your hair, you had to wear a bathing cap.
And so he was up on the board, wouldn't listen to me.
I said, hey, Esther, you, off the board, or I'll come up and drag you off.
Well, he came off, and he said, I'll meet you outside.
My car, this was mostly, these were all public housing behind it.
And by the way, you know, I sit on the stand and it get hot.
I got a lot of, I got hairy legs that turn that, that, that, that, that, that turn blonde in the sun.
And the kids used to come up and reach in the pool and rub my leg down.
So it was straight and then watch the hair come back up again.
They'd look at it.
So I learned about roaches.
I learned about kids jumping on my lap and I've loved kids jumping on my lap.
Doctor, I have to say about that something not very scientific, but it seems very creepy.
That whole conversation about the legs and when you consider all that footage we've seen of him touching little girls and sniffing their hair and putting his arm on women who appear to be very nervous when he does it.
What's that all about?
Yeah, so you're right.
It is creepy and it's very strange.
And I'm not sure what the reference to corn pop was.
Somebody obviously in his past, but clearly when somebody has a dementia or cognitive impairment, there is a loss of some socially appropriate behavior because there's a loss of inhibitions.
All of us have inhibitions of our behavior.
from the frontal lobes.
And as we get dementia, and it happens even as we age normally, but certainly as we get dementia, there's a loss of that frontal lobe inhibition.
And we can do things that are socially inappropriate.
And unfortunately, Vice President Biden has shown sniffing women's hair, touching them inappropriately, things that are not socially appropriate, certainly not for someone in the public eye.
And then that conversation about children rubbing their hair on his legs, it was, as you said, creepy and wacky, and does seem to indicate there is some loss of frontal lobe function, which would normally give you that inhibition of this kind of socially inappropriate behavior.
So, when you put this all together, Doctor, how serious is this for someone that wants to take on I guess the most difficult job in the world.
Well, what struck me that's so serious, and it really is quite serious, is the rapidity of his decline.
If you look at how he behaved during the debates, which were only a few months ago, and he was clearly having problems, as we just pointed out with all these videos, these clips, he was clearly having trouble then.
If you look at how he's responding now, even in scripted moments, you watch him scripted by his staff, Having difficulty reading, difficulty expressing himself is almost an apathetic quality to some of his speech.
You see how rapidly this is going downhill in only a very short months.
And that's what's really disturbing to me, that by the time the election rolls around, I don't know if he's going to even be capable of assuming any of the offices of the presidency in any way.
And that's why I'm so concerned that We have to show this to the American people.
And it doesn't matter if you're a Democrat or a Republican.
This is about the leader of the United States of America.
And when you see this kind of behavior and kind of difficulty, you have to not be in denial.
You have to take it seriously.
So what you're saying, Dr. Ister, if we go back even four years, we go back to 2016, he seemed to be normal.
And in fact, quite able to handle the questions that were being asked about Bernie Sanders and about Hillary Clinton under somewhat stressful circumstances.
And then when we come to the debates, a little less than four years later, you can see a lot of these stumbles that take place.
Forgetting times and dates and forgetting who the first African-American senator was and forgetting you don't appoint a senator.
But what you're saying is since then, since he's been isolated in the basement, I guess, for so long, it seems as if he's gotten even worse.
that he's deteriorated even more. But isn't this a disease that is viciously progressive?
Unfortunately, it is. You know, I'm not going to call it Alzheimer's dementia or Alzheimer's
disease because that's a diagnosis that can only be made specifically. But it is, as I said, a
cognitive impairment. It's gone, in my opinion, gone past the mild stage, already in the moderate
stage, where clearly he's having difficulty with simple activities.
And, you know, there was actually a video where he even forgot the name of his former boss, of President Obama.
He could not come up with President Obama's name.
And it was... And Bernie Sanders.
And Bernie Sanders' name.
And there were countless other incidents where he actually referred to Bernie Sanders as president.
He referred to Cory Booker as president.
Again, in the heat of the debates.
But clearly, there were signs that stress brought out some of these activities.
And now, because he is really isolated, a lot of the compensatory mechanisms that he might have had are being lost.
And he's just declining further and further.
Is there any question that he should be tested?
Absolutely.
This is very comprehensively tested.
Absolutely.
This is something that we would check if a candidate for president had heart issues, we would test his heart.
We would check his heart.
We have to now check Mr. Biden's cognitive function because it's such an important prerequisite to being president of the United States.
Well, Doctor, thank you very much for your honesty, and thank you very much for your expertise and analysis, and we really appreciate it.
Thank you, Mr. Mayor, and if I may say personally and publicly, thank you.
For saving the city of New York almost 30 years ago.
I'm a native New Yorker.
And it was because of you rescuing New York from the brink.
And unfortunately, you're too kind.
We're watching now.
We're watching.
Well, we're going to fight.
We're going to fight.
Try to stop it.
We miss you terribly.
I must tell you.
And thank you.
God bless you.
And thank you.
God bless you.
Thank you.
That was really a very sobering interview with Dr. Alan Mazur just in the mere span of time from four years ago.
When he was quite articulate to the beginning of the debates, where he fumbled and made terrible mistakes, to now, where it seems much worse, the doctor feels that it's progressing very, very quickly.
Something really has to be done about this.
This is not something that should be covered up.
And if it does get covered up, I don't know what kind of country we've become.
Thank you very much.
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Dr. Jay Flightman.
Dr. Flightman is a board-certified pulmonologist and sleep medicine physician.
He's in private practice.
He is the past president of the medical staff of Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton, Massachusetts.
He was the director of intensive care there and he was also chairman of the board of health for the city of Northampton in Massachusetts. He went to Stony Brook
University Medical School here in New York.
He has a residency at Long Island Jewish Medical Center.
His fellowship was at Montefiore Albert Einstein Medical Center and he's board certified in a
number of specialties, internal medicine, pulmonary disease, sleep medicine by the American Board of
Internal Medicine.
So this is a very, very diverse doctor who covers many, many areas.
and he wrote an article about a week ago about a situation involving Joe Biden's cognitive,
apparent cognitive impairment. So I want to first ask him, doctor, what brought you to write the
article? Well, when I was trying to decide what I was going to write on my monthly column, three
videos came out with Joe Biden that really strongly suggested he was suffering from dementia. And
And it's clear that nobody in public is actually saying anything about it, so I felt that somebody had to stand up and say something out loud about it.
There was the video when he's talking about a nurse who was doing some peculiar things outside of training.
There was a video in which... That's the nurse who he says was breathing into his nostrils?
Yes, to recover his health.
Have you ever heard of anything like that?
A nurse breathing into nostrils?
No, it's actually pretty bizarre.
And what was the other?
There was another video in which he was speaking to a group and clearly did not know where he was.
And then there was a third video when he was talking about the 2020 census having been two or three censuses taken before.
And these were very recent.
So I'm going to play, we're going to play those.
We'll take a little break and we'll play all three of those just to, just to show that it's a reference to something very real.
And, and I guess something that was even more shocking in light of the numerous other comments that have been made over the last year.
Nurses at Walter Reed hospital who had Bend down and whisper in my ear.
Go home and get me pillows.
They would make sure they'd actually, probably nothing ever taught in, you can't do it in the COVID time, but they'd actually breathe in my nostrils to make me move, to get me moving.
Good afternoon, everyone.
Welcome to Kingswood Community Center.
Actually, that's the one down I used to work.
It's a joke.
I didn't know where we were.
Anyway, it's great to be here.
Back to the place where, you know, I want to thank Wayne Jefferson for having us here at the Hicks Anderson Center.
Everything from Delaware, everybody knew who Hicks was.
He was deeply involved in social justice issues and politics in this state for a long time.
I was really very much engaged back in the days when after Dr. King was assassinated and this city was in flames.
He was a good friend, a good friend.
Interject one thing here.
When you and I first met, we had a relatively small population and we called us at the time a Hispanic population, mostly Puerto Ricans, American citizens already.
But, you know, in the 2020 census, which is now two censuses ago... Well, those are the three.
And the nostril comment, I must say, Doctor, reminds me of the one that probably troubles me the most.
And that's the one where he talks about he's in a pool and the little children come up and play with the hair on his legs.
And so I'll play that one also as part of this little sequence so people can see that one.
And Corn Pop was a bad dude.
And he ran a bunch of bad boys.
And I did.
And back in those days, you see how things have changed?
One of the things you had to use, if you used pomade in your hair, you had to wear a bathing cap.
And so he was up on the board, wouldn't listen to me.
I said, hey, Esther, you, off the board, or I'll come up and drag you off.
Well, he came off, and he said, I'll meet you outside.
My car, this was mostly, these were all public housing behind it.
And by the way, you know, I sit on the stand and it get hot.
I got a lot of, I got hairy legs that turn that, that, that, that, that, that turn blonde in the sun.
And the kids used to come up and reach in the pool and rub my leg down.
So it was straight and then watch the hair come back up again.
They'd look at it.
So I learned about roaches.
I learned about kids jumping on my lap and I've loved kids jumping on my lap.
Well, the one where he's talking about the hair on his legs, I mean, that was also pretty bizarre and pretty crazy.
The video with the nurses, with the nurse, is really particularly interesting because there are a couple of issues in this one.
Please tell me.
First off, he tells three parts of the story.
The first story was that the nurse was whispering in his ear, and then the nurse goes home to get him a pillow, And then the nurse does something which is outside her training, which is what he says, which is to breathe up his nose and give him his health back.
And there are a couple of interesting things here.
Number one, the three parts of the story have nothing to do with each other.
The whole thought process is completely disorganized.
Again, you know, another part of the story is that that whole idea that she's going to breathe up his nose and restore his health is pretty crazy, actually.
Pretty what?
Crazy.
Yeah.
And the other part that makes you worry about this is that he said it in public, in an interview, which really shows some poor judgment.
Now, how does that bear on a diagnosis in terms of cognitive impairment or dementia or Alzheimer's?
Is that an indication of it, poor judgment?
Yeah, poor judgment is definitely a part of it.
Another part of it, again, is that the thought processes that went into that story were so disorganized.
The parts of the story had nothing to do with each other.
Of course, the third part of it is that this whole... First off, the whole thing about the nurse leaning over and whispering in his ear is a little crazy, and a little bizarre, also, or creepy.
But her breathing up his nose to recover his health... The whole thing is really...
Pretty bizarre.
And of course we don't know what this health interaction or encounter was that he had or even if it really existed.
So when we go back four or five years we have a tape of him answering questions about Bernie Sanders and I think about Hillary Clinton in which he sounds perfectly Normal.
He was intelligent.
He was articulate.
His sentences and sentence construction was good.
The ideas followed each other logically.
Now, if you listen to him, his speech is halting.
The word selection is very thin.
That's another sign of developing dementia.
The ideas are dissociated from each other and incomplete.
I mean, he clearly has some significant cognitive difficulties that have developed in the last few years.
So I'm going to play probably the one that At least from my point of view, it's the most indicative of all.
So we have that very clear statement of his four years ago, and then we have his, we hold these truths to be self-evident.
All men are created by the, and then he can't remember, by the go, you know, the thing.
Let me just play that.
We hold these truths to be self-evident.
All men and women are created by the go, you know, the thing.
So this seems like a totally different man.
Yeah, he really has, well, I hate using this word, but his cognitive function has really degenerated in the last short period of time, the last year or two.
And you see, he's a changed man.
And is that the nature of this disease?
I know, I've always been told that dementia, Alzheimer's, they're progressive and they're relentless, meaning ultimately they're going to win.
Yeah, it's an irreversible process at this point.
You know, there are many diseases which cause dementia.
I mean, Alzheimer's is one of them.
There are other degenerative neurologic diseases.
Parkinson's can be related to dementia.
Another common cause of dementia is vascular disease.
People have multiple tiny strokes.
It's hard to know from a distance which one of these disorders he has, but he clearly has a dementia process.
Can you briefly describe When you're looking at dementia, like other illnesses, what the symptoms are or what the criteria are that you look to.
Well, you're looking at consistency of thought process.
You're looking at memory.
You're looking at orientation.
Does he know where he is and does he know when he is?
And we have a couple of tapes, actually, in which he doesn't know where he is.
And, you know, again, in that tape with the census, he really doesn't know when he is.
You know, he talks about a 2020 census having been done 10 or 20 years ago.
At times, comments about events that happened Oh, four or five years ago, happening 20 or 30 years ago.
I mean, he does that more and more recently.
Well, there are a number of those, Doctor.
There's the one where he doesn't seem to remember the year that Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
were killed.
He has it in the 70s.
That'd be something you'd think that he would remember.
That was 1968, being a person in politics at the time and being someone who supported Robert Kennedy.
And so there are a number of those that he—I think he had Franklin Roosevelt talking on the television when, in fact, there was no television when Franklin Roosevelt was president of the United States.
I mean, I can't remember all of them, but there— were significant numbers of 20, 30-year lapses.
He thought he had been involved as vice president with the Parkland murder.
It was a year after he was vice president.
So there's a whole host of these.
He believed that he gave a medal to a soldier on the battlefield that never occurred.
What does this mean to a layman like me?
You know, you say, he sounds crazy.
He sounds crazy.
But what does it mean to a doctor?
What does it point to and what has to be done about it?
Well, I mean, what it means is that he's losing his thought processes.
And as you said earlier, it is inexorable.
It's progressive.
We don't have any way of stopping it at this particular point.
He will get worse.
His judgment is impaired.
One of the other signs here that's subtle, but it's in that video when he's in front of the group talking about some place that he thought he was, and then he stopped and realized that he wasn't there when he said, oh, it's a little joke, haha, but clearly he was confused.
One of the other hallmarks here, particularly in people who are used to being very social and having social skills, is they cover up the deficits by their usual jokes and their usual way out of it.
So in that particular clip, when he didn't know where it was, he tried that trick by saying to the audience, oh no, that's a joke.
But if you look at it, he was really confused.
Yeah, very confused.
Or the one where he confused his wife and his sister, which is very strange because he actually looks right in his wife's face.
It's not, he tries to explain it as they switched sides, but the fact is when he walks out, he goes right up to his wife and introduces her as his sister, then turns to his sister and realizes, or somebody says something, I mean that is really, what, that, can you actually confuse your wife for your sister?
Well, I think what was most telling in that clip, you know, you can give them a bye and say they were behind him, but I think what's most telling in the clip is how long it took him to recover when he realized, when he turned around and looked at his sister or his wife, I can't remember which one he looked at first, and it took him a couple of moments to realize what his mistake was.
Now, somebody who has their faculties intact you know, they recognize their wife and their sister
immediately. But there was that one or two second pause which demonstrates that he does have
memory problems. Well we're going to play that so people can get a look at it and basically see that
he had a pretty good look at his wife when he said it was his sister. By the way, this is my
little sister Valerie and I'm Jill's husband.
Oh, no, this is Val.
You switched on me.
This is my wife.
This is my sister.
They switched on me.
Then there's another one that jumped out at me, and that's when he talked about negotiating the Paris Climate Accords with Deng Xiaoping, who had been dead 23 years before there were any negotiations.
I mean, clearly, his memory was stuck.
On one relationship that he had in the past, and it's hard to know, but he has so many memory lapses.
You know, they're not cute gaffes anymore.
They're real markers of his deteriorating function.
I guess any, you know, you could take almost any one of these.
Like getting a Chinese leader confused or even—I don't know how you could actually think that Franklin Roosevelt was on television, but you could take any one of these and you could say, oh, well, that could happen to anybody.
But it seems that it—there's just an overwhelming number of dates wrong, people wrong, inability to identify things.
Isn't it absolutely critical that he gets some kind of a really major test and we find out what's wrong with him before he takes on the most important job in the world?
Yeah, well, I mean, testing is nice.
I mean, the truth of the matter is, I really think it's pretty obvious.
I don't know what the Democrats are going to do about debates.
They're going to have to find some excuse for him not to debate.
They can't put him out in public like this.
I don't know what's going to happen.
Obviously, they're keeping him in the basement now.
He's not taking any answers, any questions, I mean, from his press conferences.
He's not taking any interviews.
They're already hiding him.
So, you know, you can't hide in a debate.
Is there any medicine that could, for a short period of time, help him so that he could get through an hour, an hour and a half debate?
A little bit better than A little bit better than, I guess, what he's been doing.
I'm just looking at these things where he says we choose truth over facts.
Then we have 150 million people have been killed since 2007, which would, when Bernie voted to exempt the gun manufacturers from liability, which means we would have lost half our population in that period of time.
I mean, is there anything that you can take That it would get you by for a few hours that restores your memory, I guess.
No, actually there isn't.
You know, there are some medications for Alzheimer's specifically.
You know, they change the trajectory of the deterioration, but in terms of really recovering somebody, particularly in the short term, there's nothing which really exists like that.
Well, we wanted to talk about two or three others that you had noted.
One is a One is a very rambling conversation in which he seems to be totally confused about when Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
died.
Two people he refers to as, you know, major heroes of his.
And I remember Robert Kennedy's assassination because I was taking the Bar Review course when that happened.
And I was a supporter of Robert Kennedy.
And I just think, like the John Kennedy assassination, you're just not going to forget that it happened in 1968 and think it happened 10 years later.
But let's just listen to him for a second.
Just like in my generation, when I got out of school, that when Bobby Kennedy and Dr. King had been assassinated in the 70s, late 70s, I got engaged.
So, is that just another indication of bad memory or not being able to deal with time sequences that happens in the brain?
Yeah, it's all part of the same puzzle.
You know, he's losing his connection in time.
He's confusing memories, confusing people from his past.
That's, you know, more examples of the same.
There was this other video we had during the debates when he was asked a question about systemic racism.
And he went on this long, rambling speech.
And one idea did not follow the other idea.
It was completely confused.
And, you know, it sort of ended up in his recommendation that poor families have their children play the record player.
Yes, I recall that.
in some fashion that somehow was addressing issues of racial disparity.
But the whole answer, if you read through it, was a demonstration of a completely disorganized
thought process.
Well, we'll play that one also.
And of course, most young people wouldn't even know what a record player is at this
point.
Someone just gave.
Someone just gave me one as a birthday present because I have so many long-playing opera records.
Very good.
We bring social workers into homes of parents to help them deal with how to raise their children.
It's not that they don't want to help, they don't know quite what to do.
Play the radio, make sure the television, excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the phone, make sure the kids hear words.
A kid coming from a very poor school, a very poor background, will hear four million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.
And I guess the other one that we wanted to talk about for a moment was the one where he says that we should fix the problem of violence against women by punching at it and punching at it and punching at it.
Yes.
Yes.
No man has a right to raise a hand to a woman in anger, other than in self-defense, and that rarely ever occurs.
And so we have to just change the culture.
Period.
And keep punching at it, and punching at it, and punching at it.
It will be a big... No, I really mean it.
It's a gigantic issue.
And we have to make it clear, from the top, from the president on down, that we will not tolerate it.
We will not tolerate this culture.
That just seems to be a completely inappropriate comment.
Well, I mean, yeah, that was really a poor choice of language, to say the least.
But what's also interesting in that answer is if you listen to the whole thing, it's again, the language is halting.
The language demonstrates a lot of poverty in word choice.
The ideas do not follow each other.
So these are all, and the loss of articulateness, you know, these are all more examples
of his loss of mental acuity.
Yeah, at the end, the punchline was ridiculous, but the whole answer tells you the whole story
in terms of his loss of cognitive function.
Doctor, why is there, why is there such a reluctance
for people to speak out on something like this And forget Republican and Democrat.
I mean, this job requires extraordinary—the job of president of the United States, I worked for Ronald Reagan, who's my hero.
And of course, I'm a very close friend of President Trump, and I've been—I'm his personal lawyer.
So on both occasions, I've spent a lot of time in the White House.
The judgments that have to be made are extraordinary.
And even if he had a milder form of cognitive impairment, it would be very, very dangerous.
But at this level, there's also, since it's so progressive, what are the chances he makes it through four years?
Oh, he's not making it through four years.
That's not going to happen.
And, you know, I used an analogy, as an analogy, a historical analogy, in that article that I wrote.
What happened in 1944 with Franklin Roosevelt.
And I think that's what's happening here.
You know, they knew that Roosevelt was dying.
But they ran him for a fourth term anyway, because it was so important to them that a Democrat get into the presidency, even though, as I mentioned, he was on death's door.
And he died three months after his inauguration.
You know, they chose Truman largely because they thought he would not hurt the ticket.
They didn't choose Truman because they thought he would be a good president.
We were lucky in that regard.
But this is the same thing.
I don't think they're expecting him to last.
And they're not going to surround him with a good cabinet and hope they get away with it.
This is short term, you know, to give them the presidency.
And that's what this is about.
It's not really doing justice to the country.
I think the Democrats got stuck.
You know, once it became really obvious and he started making all kinds of mistakes, they couldn't take him out before the convention because then the Bernie Sanders folks were going to demand that he actually had the keys to the kingdom, that he had the rights to the throne.
What do they say to the rest of the world that we're nominating a man that is obviously suffering from serious Mental impairment, whether it's dementia or Alzheimer's, for President of the United States.
Yeah, it's pretty scary, isn't it?
Yeah.
Especially when you put him up against people like Xi and people like Putin, you know, who clearly are sharp as tacks.
You can't have somebody like this in the presidency.
And I have to tell you, I have to tell you, but of course this is testifying as my own witness, for all of the comments to the contrary, President Trump is sharp as hell.
You don't want to go up against him.
You don't want to go up against him.
His mind operates on about four or five levels.
He's an unbelievable negotiator, and his memory is fabulous.
I don't doubt that the test that he took, which he'd be happy to release, I think, if Biden released his, came out rather strong in terms of his ability to think and to—particularly to strategize.
So a debate between the two of them, I'm negotiating the terms of the debate, and I also get a feeling that there's a real question as to whether he'll be able to do it.
So, Doctor, what's your conclusion here from what you've seen?
The stuff we've talked about, and then there's so much more, you know, that we don't have time to go through.
Maybe we can talk later about more of it.
What's your basic conclusion?
Well, I find it really scary.
He is the President of the United States.
You know, there's a nation to run, and of course, obviously, the nation's having some problems, serious problems right now.
The world's a bad place.
You know, you need somebody who has faculties that are basically supernormal, not subnormal.
It's really a terrifying prospect.
And it says bad things about our political system that the party that's putting them up there, won't face up to the issues and do
whatever they have to do to correct it.
It's a very scary prospect having this guy running for president.
Yeah, I mean, it shows that the desire for power is so overwhelming that it overcomes any sense of
the good of the nation or the world, which is a very disturbing thing to think that's where we
are. But let's hope that our contribution will help and we'll see what happens.
But I have to thank you very, very much, Doctor, for your willingness to do this and the courage that it takes to do it, and the time that you gave us.
I appreciate it very much.
Well, Mr. Giuliani, it is an absolute pleasure sitting down and talking to you.
Well, thank you, Doctor.
It has been for me, too, and I'll be in touch with you.
Thank you.
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