General Discussion

The United States and Iran reached a tentative agreement Sunday to bring about an end to the war, which one Iranian official involved in the negotiations credited, in part, to Tehran’s unorthodox approach to addressing what they considered to be President Donald Trump’s “mental illness.”

Investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill shared a startling revelation last week that Iranian negotiators had recruited psychologists to help navigate what they believed was Trump’s “impaired mental state.” And on Monday, Scahill provided an update on Iran’s unique approach to the negotiations, which he said Tehran partially credited for Sunday’s success.

“Senior Iranian psychologists began working with the negotiating team to try to cater the messages that the Iranians were sending via mediators back to Donald Trump to try to take into account what they say as his specific mental illness and mental deficiencies,” Scahill said in an interview with Democracy Now published on Monday.

“Almost quite clinically, they said [they] began to see this process yielding results as [they] worked with psychologists to send these communications to Donald Trump, and they credit that, in part, with getting to this point where Trump finally accepted some version of his manufactured and almost entirely false victory narrative.”

Trump’s cognitive function has come under renewed scrutiny during his second term in office, with The Washington Post reporting last week that the president was assessed by 22 medical specialists during his most recent medical checkup, a figure “nearly double the number of specialists who assessed Trump for his past medical checkups as president.” The president has also been spotted appearing to doze off during important meetings.