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Mr. Trump, and others with ADHD, are prone to talking to themselves out loud.
Talking Out Loud
Mr. Trump returned to the golf course this week, for the first time since early March when he declared a state of emergency for the COVID-19 pandemic. Although he has visited golf courses more than a hundred times during his presidency, the intent of this column is not to bash him for how much this habit has cost taxpayers (estimated at over $134,000,000 to date). Nor will I analyze Mr. Trump’s attacks on President Obama for golfing too much, and then proceeding to go to the links more than twice as often. And I’ll avoid using golf as an extended metaphor for Mr. Trump’s life, territory that the American sportswriter Rick Reilly explored in his book Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump.
I have previously discussed how Mr. Trump meets seventeen of the official DSM-5 criteria for ADHD, and now I will explore the likelihood that he also fulfills the eighteenth, and final, criterion. (Only five of which are required for diagnosing adults.) I can’t be certain that Mr. Trump is “often unable to play or engage in leisure activities quietly” because I haven’t seen extensive footage of him playing golf or watching Fox network, the two leisure activities he seems to engage in most often. Certainly, anecdotes abound, from both foes and political allies, quoting his…
