Paranoia. Alzheimer’s. Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Dementia.

Professional psychiatrists have diagnosed President Trump with these and other conditions without seeing him professionally.

I think President Trump is, to use the language of my stepkids, a creeper. A serial sexual assaulter of women. A rich brat screwing contractors and customers. A cowardly bully using “swamp rules” and other people to do his dirty work. A con artist obsessed with popularity and power.

And I wonder if he might have an undisclosed or undiagnosed disability.

President Trump “refuses to sit still for briefings and demands that all reports be reduced to single-page bullet points,” reported Heather Digby Parton in a recent column posted on AlterNet (1). She continued:

“He has shown absolutely no willingness to bone up on necessary knowledge, he lies and exaggerates constantly and all you have to do is look at his Twitter feed to see that he is as impulsive and combative as a tween bully.”

Refusing to sit still, impulsivity, and an aversion to reading suggest either Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder or some sort of learning disability.

But even if this diagnosis is wrong, might it be possible that President Trump learns best by listening? After all, he seems to pay attention to TV news, and has changed his mind on Taiwan and NATO after talking with leaders from China and Germany.

So why isn’t President Trump’s inner circle playing to his strength of being able to learn through sound? Why aren’t they conveying the information they think he needs to have audibly? If they can’t do so in person, why don’t they use available technology to convert the written word into speech? Surely not because “that’s the way things have always been done around here.” Didn’t many of us vote against that sentiment?

While disability doesn’t excuse despicable behavior, shouldn’t progressives, with our concern for diversity and tolerance, be advocating that President Trump have the supports (or accommodations in Americans with Disabilities Act speak) that might make him more effective? And shouldn’t Trump’s inner circle implement these changes before whining off the record about their boss’s stupidity?

Later in her column, Ms. Parton wrote:

“NATO is scrambling to tailor its upcoming meeting to avoid taxing President Donald Trump’s notoriously short attention span. The alliance is telling heads of state to limit talks to two to four minutes at a time during the discussion, several sources inside NATO and former senior U.S. officials tell Foreign Policy.”

NATO summits are organized to allow participants to exchange information, develop relationships, and set goals. Like most of you, I have attended conferences with similar aims that have fallen flat because certain participants have droned on for too long about something forgettable while others yawn, drink coffee, check their e-mail, read a book, or leave the room. Encouraging presenters to keep their remarks under four minutes sounds sensible, not only because most of us can only concentrate fully on one person’s comments for no more than 30 seconds, but also because these get-togethers hinge on participants becoming actively engaged. And pretending to listen to speeches doesn’t encourage active engagement.

Didn’t many of us vote against NATO’s snobby rigidity? Couldn’t NATO meeting planners signal that they were incorporating best practices into their design instead of whining about accommodating President Trump’s quirks, diagnosed disability or not? And shouldn’t we all entertain the possibility that accommodating the needs of others might make things better for all of us?

That’s what universal design is all about. (2)

(1) http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/were-trumps-revelations-russians-criminal-or-just-stupid-we-cant-rule-out-either

(2) For more on universal design, please visit

Universal Design