Donald J.Trump, Cognitively our First Child President
Trump fails to color the US flag despite his peers correctly doing so
The complete lack of common sense demonstrated by our President has been on full display his entire Presidency, yet little to no reporting has been dedicated to defining the cause. That changes today. Donald Trump has clear evident issues with communication and social behavior consistent with Pervasive Developmental Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, a form of Autism Spectrum Disorder known for extreme rigidity, idiosyncratic language, repetitive behavior, and other spectrum traits. I have spent eight years of my career as a Special Education teacher tasked with documenting and recording behaviors associated with disorders, conducted over 500 clinical behavioral observations, and written over 300 legally defensible IEPs. I know it when I see it, and in Donald Trump’s case, the evidence he has this disorder is overwhelming. Trump will never sit down getting formally tested, something I was permitted and trained to do, which is required along with a psychologist evaluation to be properly diagnosed. But just like COVID, his not having testing done doesn’t eliminate his having it.
Before I take a deep dive into Trump’s language and behavior, keep in mind that no single issue can fully describe Trump. Narcissism, which is also undiagnosed, seems to be the popular consensus of who Trump is due to his retaliatory and morally bankrupt nature. I see those issues as being outside of my realm of expertise but know of the tendency of people to say that because he is mean he cannot also be Autistic. To that, I say Trump can be both. Meanness is a choice, and while the majority of children with spectrum disorders I have worked with have been honest and kind, I have had a fair share of kids that due to extreme rigidity were much less than pleasant. Much of their behavior was driven to avoid tasks and/or acquire preferred outcomes, not much different than Trump’s actions suggest he is doing. While I believe narcissism is adequate for the meanness element of Trump’s personality, it does not address why his staff frequently utters off-the-record that Trump is a child or a toddler in the way PDD-NOS does.
Trump has persistently expressed a flat affect facial expression
Trump gives obvious tells in both his language and his behavior that indicate something isn’t developmentally right. The first is a flat affect. A flat affect facial expression has little emotion to it, similar in appearance to a newborn. Typically developed children learn a social smile sometime in their first year, while many on the spectrum never do. Trump has always had this manifestation of the disorder, including all his childhood photographs, save one he was playing leapfrog. Trump also presents with a nonstandard gait, seated posture, and stance which explains why he appears so awkward and his frequently reported meltdowns are not normal after the age of five. Even his middle-school-age bullying lacks the sophistication one associates with adulthood.
Trump fails to flip a coin, a novel task, opting to chuck it instead
Trump’s language, which was measured by researchers using the Flesch-Kincaid scale in 2017 using his first 10,000 words not read from a teleprompter, indicated his oral language skills were equivalent to that of your average ten-year-old at 4.7th grade-level. That oral language level isn’t sufficient to read or comprehend government documents even if he was briefed orally. Having reviewed many of his interviews dating back to the mid-eighties, that linguistic simplicity was always evident, meaning Trump’s oral language has been consistently depressed compared to what one would expect of a man his age. In general, children can comprehend about eighteen months better than their oral language skills. If that held true for Trump, he might understand things at a sixth-grade level provided he had adequate background knowledge on the subject being discussed.
Let’s shatter any illusion that Trump understands fully what is going on during a conversation by using his own words.
“And, you know, when you say “per capita,” there’s many per capitas. It’s, like, per capita relative to what? But you can look at just about any category, and we’re really at the top, meaning positive on a per capita basis, too. They’ve done a great job.”
May 20, 2020
The most basic form of comprehension is just being able to identify who, when, where, or what is going on. Trump from this exchange asking Dr. Birx for clarity shows he clearly doesn’t know what per capita means, and without that knowledge, he is prone to all sorts of errors like thinking the US is doing a superior job with COVID despite having 4.25% of the world population leading in all the wrong stats with over 25% of the infections and 20% of the deaths. Per capita is a mathematical way to compare different-sized populations, and the US, guided by mostly Trump taking center stage, is among the worst-performing countries in handling and containing this deadly disease that has consumed well over two-hundred thousand lives within our borders.
Here is a more recent example of Trump’s present communication skills, uttered just before he made a dangerous trip outside Walter Reed Medical Center putting secret service agents and others at risk of infection so he could have his photo op.
“So, it’s been a very interesting journey. I learned a lot about COVID. I learned it by really going to school. This is the real school. This isn’t the “let’s read the book” school, and I get it and I understand it, and it’s a very interesting things, and I’m going to be letting you know about it.”
October 4, 2020
Donald’s speech above represents the beginning of second-grade level proficiency due to its repetitiveness, simplicity, short sentences, rambling structure, and lack of details. Pay attention to that fifth sentence and its presidential abuse of conjunctions. If one fixes that sentence by removing the commas and conjunctions, it becomes five simple sentences. Trump speaks this way all the time, without details, marking his language as idiosyncratic, one of the truest hallmarks of his having an Autism Spectrum Disorder. While many of Trump’s defenders will use the excuse Trump was pumped up with all the best drugs that socialized medicine can provide when he said this almost nonsensical blurb, it is on-par for the course of his entire Presidency and lifetime full of unfiltered and idiosyncratic musings. Remember this?
“And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that. So, that, you’re going to have to use medical doctors with. But it sounds — it sounds interesting to me.”
April 23, 2020
The bane of the elementary school language arts teacher is the kid that always starts each sentence with a conjunction. For us Sped teachers, it’s the rarified kid like Trump that lacks common sense and might injure himself by trying out guzzling a bottle of bleach on someone else’s suggestion. And it WAS someone else who led him to say this. Trump had been targeted days before with a letter-writing scheme from a now-indicted Floridian church hawking a miracle bleach cure. Without fully developed social awareness, logic, and basic general knowledge about the dangers of ingesting chemicals he was easily fooled into thinking this was the next big thing since getting that hot tip on hydroxychloroquine a month earlier! I assume the letters the group had written were flattering, extremely powerful, and convincing to him just as has his BFFs Putin, MbS, and Kim declarations of friendship and denials of wrongdoing had been previously because that is how one manipulates Trump. Flatter and praise and never criticize or bring up things he can’t emotionally handle.
One reason Trump can be this easily fooled into hawking bleach martinis as a miracle cure and believes in easily debunked conspiracies is that he still appears to be functioning cognitively as a child for many of the higher-ordered cognitive abilities. A typically developed child acquires the skills of the logic stage of classic education generally between the third to eighth grades. These include the higher level of inferential comprehension using context, logic, and social cues to understand hidden meanings of language or to answer how and why types of questions. This is generally much harder for kids on the spectrum to learn, but considering Trump’s sister is on record in niece Mary’s recordings for her book as having done most of his college work for him, this profound disability is probably self-inflicted, and something Donald had he had more drive and work ethic instead of work avoidance behaviors probably could have learned given time assuming an average IQ. Without being able to access any of these abilities, Trump is usually going to understand things only in a very literal concrete way, having difficultly grasping more abstract concepts such as the difference between weather and climate which he instead conflates as being the same thing. He also is prone to making silly reading mistakes without these skills.
“We want every American child to have access to pristine outdoor spaces. When young Americans experience the breathtaking beauty of the Grand Canyon; when their eyes widen in amazement as Old Faithful bursts to the sky; when they gaze upon Yo Semite’s — Yoseminite’s [sic] towering sequoias, their love of country grows stronger and they know that every American has truly a duty to preserve this wondrous inheritance. And that’s what they’re doing and that’s what we’re doing: We’re preserving an incredible inheritance.”
August 4, 2020
Giving a shout out to Jewish people in the crowd with a quick Yo Semite, is not how one would expect a prepared speech on US National Parks to go unless the reader of said speech lacks the ability to pick up on contextual clues that would have helped him understand the novel word is Yosemite. While not as bad as Thigh-land he misread on August 6th, his trouble with coming up with the correct word on a fifth to sixth-grade level text when looking at it on paper or a teleprompter indicate he still is moderately struggling with basic reading skills without factoring in how much of it he processes or comprehends. These cognitive skills deficits explain why Trump is profoundly handicapped whereas most individuals with PDD-NOS aren’t. He is presently unable to make logical adult-level informed decisions, nor read (decode not comprehend) all that well.
Yo Semite!
Without fully developed logic and sufficient self-awareness, and his constant emotional need for attention by being on the cameras, Trump will always do public things that at the time he thinks are good ideas that any adult will see the obvious holes in his deceptions. Some of his recent blunders have been his staged signing of blank pages that he tweeted out from Walter Reed to look like he was being busy and his clearly edited hospital video where his coughs had been clipped out. Nothing though beats his early return from the hospital, his filmed set up shot twice on the balcony of the White House with the dramatic ripping off the face mask essentially saying to all those trapped in the building with him that he was ready to infect and harm, thinking such imagery would endear him to others as a great leader instead of an incompetent fool.
“We’re going back — we’re going back to work. We’re going to be out front. As your leader, I had to do that. I knew there’s danger to it, but I had to do it. I stood out front. I led. Nobody that’s a leader would not do what I did, and I know there’s a risk, there’s a danger. But that’s OK, and now I’m better — and maybe I’m immune — I don’t know. But don’t let it dominate your lives. Get out there. Be careful. We have the best medicines in the world, and it all happened very shortly, and they’re all getting approved, and the vaccines are coming momentarily. Thank you very much, and Walter Reed — what a group of people. Thank you very much.”
October 5, 2020
This is who Trump is, a child playing make-believe pretending to be a leader for the cameras while engaging in the same risky behavior that allowed COVID to rage like wildfire through the White House after he became the exploding tree and didn’t take the time to rake his forest clean. Again, note the short simple sentences mostly starting with conjunctions. He speaks like a child, acts like a child, and probably thinks like a child given his propensity to always put himself and his needs to the forefront generally forgetting that he has a wife and friends also inflicted presently with this disease. His entire list of observable behaviors is rather restricted and self-centered, which brings us to my least favorite aspect of Autism disorders, the restricted patterns of behavior, or RPBs.
A grown child pretends to be a band conductor, a lack of cognitive filter moment
Because restricted patterns of behavior are often the first things parents, teachers and healthcare providers notice and want to address, diagnosticians tend to ignore the other signs of the child’s language or social deficits especially when they are minor that indicate a spectrum disorder is instead to blame. This means that higher functioning kids like Trump on the spectrum are often misidentified as having ADHD, OCD, or emotional disturbances because their behaviors have a tendency to mask their deficits. Roughly half the kids I have serviced that were on the spectrum had clear indicators like flat affect, lack of cognitive filter, and social issues were instead diagnosed narrowly with ADHD, OCD, or emotional disturbances. Think of how many times on social media or on the opinion side of the news, an unnamed White House staffer or a member of the press has applied these same terms labeling Trump.
Trump has a load of documented RPBs that are driving people around him bonkers. During the first year of his presidency, he was constantly tearing up paper in a ritualistic way of his being done with it after he has read the document. His team of archivers resorted to saving the trash so they could tape back together all these documents required to be preserved by the Presidential records act. He might still be doing this, yet because he fires people around him constantly, including all the archivers that had worked tirelessly to preserve these records, we don’t know. This ripping behavior probably serves multiple Trump sensory needs as the sound of the crackling fibers, the tension of his muscles as he pulls and tears at the paper can be very stimulating. I have witnessed firsthand both low and high functioning students on the Spectrum engage repeatedly in this same repetitive behavior where literally nothing attached on the walls is likely to remain in pristine condition for long.
Trump tearing up his notes following the third HRC debate. Note the tension on his lips.
Another oft-repeated behavior is his compulsion to touch or move objects. Lately, he has been fondling the microphone squeezing the soft and squishy sound filter getting his tactile fix at every presser. Before that, it was cups, name cards, and papers placed on a table in front of him that he was compelled to knock over, flick, or push. And before that, it was his being like an octopus putting his hands and other body parts where they do not legally belong then bragging about it on a hot mic with Billy Bush. I would strongly suspect he had other, now extinguished, more pronounced stereotypical or sensory oriented behaviors in his childhood. Given his family exiling him to NYMA in embarrassment for five years Trump likely found adequate replacement behaviors to limit his getting picked on such as a self-hug preventing him from more embarrassing self-stimulatory behaviors like body rocking or hand flapping. On occasion, Trump still briefly rocks side to side and does some odd things with his hands before correcting himself.
Compulsive repetitive behaviors are a hallmark of Spectrum Disorders and drive others a bit crazy. Note Pence.
Other RPBs he has demonstrated include his inability to accept criticism, his overinflated sense of accomplishment, his fixations on fame, wealth, and winning at all costs, meltdowns, lack of reciprocal communication talking excessively hardly ever listening, his fast-food ‘hamberder’ diet, narrow perseverated interests and his insistence that he is always right. That burning need to be correct about things is highly damnable when it comes to protecting his friends. Here is what he said when pal Vlad had got caught paying bounties to the Taliban for killing Americans.
“Well, you don’t know about the bounties. I mean, you’re telling me — if you know something, you can let us know, but you obviously don’t know very much about it. But if we found out, that would be true; if we found, that would be a very — it would be a fact, what you just said. We would hit them so hard your head would spin.”
August 20, 2020
Trump would rather be “correct” than admit Putin is a bloody murderer that has been playing him his entire Presidency. He is just that rigid. No journalist is going to get him to speak out against his friend for bounties, poisonings, or tampering with the election because doing so would require him to admit that he was wrong. Taking COVID seriously would require him to admit he was wrong. Denouncing white nationalist groups that rally around him would require him to admit he was wrong. Addressing the leaks that he called US soldiers in 2018 suckers and losers while he had stayed in his hotel avoiding getting his hair messy would require him to admit he was wrong. Trump will do anything to avoid admitting he was wrong even lying about when he knew he got COVID so he could use someone else as a fall guy for his own failures. As I said before, Trump is just that rigid and emotionally stuck. In a sense, he is in a perpetual meltdown mode as everything he has fought against admitting to, have piled up on his emotional doorstep sky high.
It isn’t normal for an adult to be this emotionally hurt all the time, bemoaning in a never-ending cryfest about how everything is always someone else’s fault and that he is always a victim. This is however another developmental maker that appears with some adolescents, stuck in the gloom and doom of emotional pressures of constant change. Yet his emotional reaction to things, the actual meltdowns, and immature manipulative behaviors is more akin to that of a preschooler.
Trump is agitated and about to have a meltdown, which then led to the longest US shutdown in history, and only where one party controlled the House, Senate, and White House. A self-hug can restrict stimulatory behaviors such as hand-flapping, likely extinguished in Trump’s childhood.
Even Trump’s lying and scheming are patterned and predictable as he gives tells of what he intends to do before doing so. This isn’t the mad genius villain giving a monologue revealing his master plan most of his detractors think it is. It is actually the clearest sign of a Spectrum Disorder, the lack of a cognitive filter that is at play. A cognitive filter is a logical construct that prevents people from saying or doing things on impulse that might lead to social embarrassment. It begins to develop around age seven or eight when social skills are being learned, yet Trump in his seventies has extremely limited ability to hide what he is thinking or doing. As soon as a reporter or an adversary gets him comfy, his mouth starts running, and things he shouldn’t say tend to slip out.
“It goes through air, Bob. That’s always tougher than the touch. The touch, you don’t have to touch things, right? But the air, you just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed. And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus. People don’t realize, we lose 25,000, 30,000 people a year here. Who would ever think that, right?”
February 20, 2020
Trump’s legacy will mostly be tied to his robust failure to take the threat of COVID seriously. Despite his clearly knowing how it was transmitted, that is was deadly he made a politically expedient choice to keep this information hidden, not playing it down to avoid panic, but to sell the lie everything was okay so that the stock market and his election prospects didn’t tank. Every choice is always about what is best for Trump. I am quite sure he has regrets for playing so loosely with Bob Woodward telling him this later in that same interview.
“I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down because I don’t want to create a panic.”
Trump can’t help but say the quiet part out loud, even if that means admitting to the most heinous things like suppressing testing, not approving stimulus because it would fix the very same mail problems he had created to impede votes from being counted or his seemingly diabolical plans for how he can ignore the election using either the Supreme Court or State Legislatures and still pull a win from another probable loss.
“So, I said to my people slow the testing down, please. They test and they test. We had tests that people don’t know what’s going on. We got tests”.
June 20, 2020
“They want $25 billion for the Post Office because the Post Office is going to have to go to town to get these great ridiculous ballots in. You know, there’s nothing wrong with getting out and voting, you get out and vote. They voted during World War I and World War II, and they should have voter ID, because the Democrats scammed the system. But, two of the items are the Post Office and the $3.5 billion for mail-in voting. Now, if we don’t make a deal, that means they don’t get the money. That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting, they just can’t have it. So, you know, sort of a crazy thing. Very interesting.”
August 13, 2020
“And all I’m asking is people go out to vote, go out to vote and stop with this nonsense because we’re going to be counting ballots for the next two years. And I don’t want to end up in the Supreme Court and I don’t want to go back to Congress either, but even though we have an advantage if we go back to Congress as everyone understand that? I think it’s 26 to 22 or something because it’s counted one vote per state, so we actually have an advantage, oh they’re going to be thrilled to hear that”.
September 26, 2020
Lack of filter moments can actually be fun if they were coming from a child not fixated on everything he needs to do to keep his finances in order, steal an election, and avoid impending accountability. Yet he clearly has this issue. Nuking hurricanes, alligator-filled moats with electrified border walls painted black, sharpie altered weather maps, wheels older than walls, soup can wielding antifascists, paper towel throwing, wheels older than walls, and a grown man pretending to be a band conductor during the National Anthem isn’t normal behavior. Yet it is what it is. A man that cognitively, emotionally, behaviorally, and academically that is no better off than a twelve-year-old has proven himself woefully unequipped for handling the constant pressures and demands required of adulthood, such as leadership, accountability, and logic-based decision making.
Steven Jarvis graduated from Brigham Young University in Elementary Education then completed a two-year program for Special Education at Weber State University. He is the author of Donald Trump Explained, a Special Education Perspective of the Forty-Fifth President of the United States.
Stephan - you are “not a psychologist “, according to the opinion of an Amazon reviewer, who I am pretty certain, didn’t read your book. 😂
Stephan never claimed he is a psychologist. WTF is wrong with people. Why so judgey?
GAWD.
This article is obviously only an excerpt of your book. Will read it at my leisure, and get back to the comments section . However, I am also “not a psychologist”, so maybe nothing I think is going to pass the test with your Amazon reviewer should he/she ever read MY comments left here.
Stephan - you are “not a psychologist “, according to the opinion of an Amazon reviewer, who I am pretty certain, didn’t read your book. 😂
Stephan never claimed he is a psychologist. WTF is wrong with people. Why so judgey?
GAWD.
This article is obviously only an excerpt of your book. Will read it at my leisure, and get back to the comments section . However, I am also “not a psychologist”, so maybe nothing I think is going to pass the test with your Amazon reviewer should he/she ever read MY comments left here.
I think Graduate School,is overrated. 🤣