There is Still Time to Call in the Mental Health Doctors!

Trump's impairment is irrefutable

Bandy X. Lee

“Emotional overstrain” is the phrase the official spokesperson of the Russian president used to describe Donald Trump’s state. How diplomatic!

Russian and Chinese leaders are very careful with the language they use in public, quite the opposite of the mentally- and emotionally-disturbed American president.

Yet, there is no doubt they, and so many other world leaders, are well aware of the dangerous psychological disturbance in the Oval Office—and consulting their own experts! There is no doubt that these leaders have their own psychiatric consultants who have very seriously profiled, thoroughly assessed, and even diagnosed Donald Trump. We would do so if we were dealing with any other such leader in the world.

There is no doubt that these leaders have been professionally counseled on how to manipulate and maneuver a man so emotionally vulnerable—who they should also rightly fear is, in addition to everything else, the commander of the most powerful military on the planet who has instant control of the second largest stockpile of nuclear weapons.

As I have been writing and speaking about for years, persons with mental issues such as Donald Trump are extremely manipulable—and malleable if managed in the right way. We may have taken advantage of this and convinced him to step down voluntarily early in the first Trump presidency (many do not believe this, rightfully so, but it is true!). Or we may have imposed severe limits on him and forced him to step down early in this presidency (harder to do, but more possible than many believe!).

Instead, we yielded to corruption and cowardice, not minding the inevitable catastrophe that lay ahead, and enabled and emboldened his weaknesses instead of managing and remedying them. To this day, we are controlled and conned, rather than making use of medical expertise to control and take charge of an all-too-common condition, well-known in forensic psychiatric settings.

When the mentally-impaired are at the helm, they are by definition capable of actions that are tremendously irrational, inconsistent, incompetent, and endangering, and no matter how they wish to believe otherwise.

I have therefore emphasized for many years that, unless such a person is properly understood, the danger assessed, and the violence risk contained, they will proceed to do things that are more and more dangerous, outrageous, and unstoppable.

As I wrote in one of my newsletters a few months ago, quoting a senior British political scientist:

During seven weeks in the U.S. this summer, I was shaken every day by the speed and executive brutality of President Trump’s assault on what had seemed settled norms of U.S. democracy and by the desperate weakness of resistance to that assault. There’s a growing body of international evidence to suggest that once a liberal democracy has been eroded, it’s very difficult to restore it.

And as I wrote in one of my recent newsletters about the very real dangers of nuclear war, quoting an astute reviewer of the new film, “A House of Dynamite”:

Atop our nuclear monarchy today, for example, stands an impulsive, incurious man who has demonstrated no interest in long-term consequences or for the well-being of people he considers to be not on his team. To have him contemplate how to operate in a nuclear emergency is simply unthinkable.

Hence, we are all here at this exceedingly dangerous moment in history, which for many has become—and as I have quoted eminent individuals using this term—“unbearable”. We have this psychiatrically serious moment of having a mentally-impaired man, deteriorating before our eyes, not only take our country apart—for which his dismantling the White House is an apt metaphor—but holding the fate of humanity in his hands. Indeed, it should be “unthinkable” that such a person be the one to contemplate how to operate the nuclear football in a nuclear emergency.

This is why I also emphasize in my newsletter about the film, “A House of Dynamite,” the author who wrote the vivid fictional book, Nuclear War: A Scenario. These creators have used their own capabilities and gifts, as we psychiatrists have tried to use ours, to warn the world that we must urgently contemplate our predicament and act.

This is one of the reasons why I did not hold back in my recent, Daily Beast interview, even though it may have sounded sudden:

I have written most recently about how dangerous it is that we have such an impaired person in charge of the nuclear arsenals of our country, in such a devastatingly dangerous state of a risk of nuclear war, by so many countries now holding nuclear weapons and threatening to use them—one of the principal reasons why from the very beginning I have stated that the Trump presidency was a public health emergency, in fact an emergency for the human species’ … survival.

It has been a long time since mental health experts have been blacked out of the mainstream media—since 2018, when “the Goldwater rule” became an authoritarian suppression tool—and why I said then that the silencing of mental health experts was the most dangerous situation we could allow at the onset of a public mental health crisis.

I repeated this concern in my recent interview with Ralph Nader, “The (Un)stable Genius”:

Even without a mentally impaired president, would we be in a critical situation of nuclear danger…. As a violent scholar, that is one of the main issues I have focused on even in my textbook, Violence—that it is an urgent issue humanity needs to address to curb our own collective suicidality. And having a commander-in-chief such as Donald Trump, of course, is contributing vastly to that … suicidal tendency.

And in my earlier interview with Andrew Borowitz:

What we had warned against eight years ago, when we first came out publicly, has not changed. In fact, this is exactly what we predicted, according to the exact same severity and time course that we predicted, [in all my interviews and] articles.

Sometimes, we allow illnesses to fester before calling in a doctor. This tendency is the worst for mental illnesses. It is never too late to obtain consultation and to try to contain the harm—in fact, the time may be more urgent than ever to call in the mental health doctors!

Dr. Bandy X. Lee is a forensic and social psychiatrist who became known to the public through her 2017 Yale conference and book that emphasized the importance of fit leadership. In 2019, she organized a major National Press Club Conference on the theme of, “The Dangerous State of the World and the Need for Fit Leadership.” In 2024, she followed up with another major Conference, “The More Dangerous State of the World and the Need for Fit Leadership.” She published another book on fit leadership that has been recently expanded, in addition to a volume on how unfitness in a leader spreads and two critical statements on fit leadership. Dr. Lee warned that journalists and intellectuals are the first to be suppressed in times of unfit leadership, and it is happening here; she continues, however, to be interviewed or covered abroad, such as in France, Germany, Norway, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Italy, Poland, Russia, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, and Canada (with notable articles in Dutch, Finnish, Estonian, Lithuanian, Slovakian, Ukrainian, Turkish, Persian, Hindi, and Korean). She authored the internationally-acclaimed textbook, Violence; over 100 peer-reviewed articles and chapters; and 17 scholarly books and journal special issues, in addition to over 300 opinion editorials. Dr. Lee is also a master of divinity, currently developing a new curriculum for public education on “One World or None.”