President Donald Trump is struggling to maintain his grip on his "authority" after the historic beating his party took in the midterms, according to an analysis by one psychologist, who says the president's efforts in a recent Oval Office address came across as "incoherent" as his decline continues.

Dr. John Paul Garrison is a clinical and forensic psychologist who specializes in body language. He also produces a series of YouTube videos in which he applies his professional insights to the behavior of public figures. Many of his recent videos have focused on Trump, with Garrison suggesting that the president is suffering a severe decline, possibly accelerated by a stroke. Because that commentary is based on analyzing video of public appearances rather than in-person evaluation, Garrison frames his conclusions as observations of speech and behavior rather than a formal diagnosis. That distinction carries weight in his field: the American Psychiatric Association's Goldwater Rule bars psychiatrists from offering professional opinions about public figures they have not personally examined, though psychologists are not bound by that specific provision.

In his latest video, Garrison examined Trump's recent Oval Office address following the midterms, during which the president signed an executive order designating the office as a landmark. That designation means future administrations cannot undo his redecoration efforts without congressional approval or another executive order reversing his own.

Garrison noted that Trump continued to display "apparent neurological dysfunction" while struggling to communicate clearly, pointing to an "incoherent" attempt to share a "meaningless anecdote" about Chinese and British leaders supposedly complimenting the Oval Office during recent visits.

"As you could probably tell from his very brief and meaningless anecdote right there, President Trump struggles to get his points across and to communicate clearly if it's not written down for him," Garrison said.

Garrison further highlighted one sentence in particular in which Trump was "entirely unable to articulate himself," with the remark emerging as a mumbled jumble — another potential sign, in his assessment, that the president is grappling with dementia.

"So, if you really listen to what he just said, those were fragments of ideas that truly do not belong together," Garrison explained. "What he's saying is basically incoherent. And this is something that we sometimes observe when people have dementia — as I've talked about before — someone has a stroke, and there's different types of lesions or scarring in the brain or something like that. There are a wide variety of reasons that people can struggle with something like this. But what we're observing is problems producing language, and we're also finding problems with him forming coherent thoughts and ideas. So we're seeing multiple layers of issues right here... We typically associate that with stress or anxiety. So it's very interesting to see right now, as he's talking about this, the blink rate is unusually high."

He added further: "Now he's been doing that at times when he was not actually reading off the page, and this goes back to the idea that he's struggling with eye contact, something else that we see as dementia progresses for a wide variety of reasons related to attention, poor social communication. There's a wide variety of reasons that eye contact becomes worse, but we're seeing his eye contact get dramatically worse."