# John Gartner **John D. Gartner** is the clinical psychologist — Princeton, a Massachusetts PhD, twenty-eight years as a part-time assistant professor at Johns Hopkins Medical School until 2015, private practices in Baltimore and Manhattan — who in 2017 founded **Duty to Warn**, the organization of mental-health professionals arguing that they had an ethical obligation to say publicly that [[Donald Trump]] was unfit. His petition, "Mental Health Professionals Declare Trump is Mentally Ill And Must Be Removed," gathered more than 41,000 signatures; he contributed to *[[The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump]]* (2017), wrote *Rocket Man: Nuclear Madness and the Mind of Donald Trump*, and from late 2023 co-hosted the *Shrinking Trump* podcast with Harry Segal for seventy episodes, ending October 2025, arguing that the President showed signs of dementia as well as [[Malignant Narcissism]]. A second petition on cognitive fitness followed in 2024. Gartner's earlier work is the tell for his method: *The Hypomanic Edge* (2005) argued that America's founders and entrepreneurs were clinically hypomanic, and *In Search of Bill Clinton* (2008) diagnosed a President he admired. He diagnoses at a distance as a matter of principle, which is exactly what the [[Goldwater Rule]] — the American Psychiatric Association's bar on such opinions, adopted after the 1964 *Fact* magazine survey — forbids its members to do; Gartner is a psychologist, not a psychiatrist, and the rule does not bind him. ## Why he matters here The vault's [[Narcissism]] and [[Malignant Narcissism]] pages carry the Goldwater caveat the movement he founded rejected: traits inferred from public conduct are fair analysis, a diagnosis is not, and the distinction is what separates a description of behavior from a claim to clinical authority the speaker cannot have. Gartner is the strongest version of the opposing argument — that silence is the greater breach — and the page records both. Compare [[Mary L. Trump]], who is credentialed, related and equally interested. ## See Also - [[The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump]] · [[Goldwater Rule]] · [[Narcissism]] · [[Malignant Narcissism]] · [[Mary L. Trump]] · [[Donald Trump]]