Trump says law doesn't apply to him - “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
Dr. Bandy X. Lee
This is what happened to us at the height of our influence, when we were consulted by over fifty U.S. Congress members, who told us they were depending on us to “educate the public medically,” so that they could “intervene politically.”
Even White
House Chief of Staff General John Kelly turned out to have used our book as an
“owner’s manual”—applying its principles, when nothing else worked, to stop
an erratic president from waging nuclear war on North Korea!
The tremendous momentum was artificially halted when American Psychiatric Association (APA) aggressively intervened, citing its own guild rule that exclusively protects public figures—which no other mental health association or licensing board duplicates—as being more important than the public’s health, the nation’s security, or the species’ survival.
It was
nonsensical, but the public swallowed it, since it was coming from an
authoritative organization. But it was later revealed that the APA distorted its
own “rule” and embarked on a disinformation campaign, so as to protect its
federal funding—and, for
Jeffrey Lieberman who spearheaded it, his personal federal funds (and fame).
We warned in real time that such cowardice would be
calamitous, permitting mental impairments in an influential figure to magnify
and transmogrify, until they would become unstoppable.
Columnist
David Brooks wrote recently:
Last week Minneapolis’s police chief, Brian O’Hara, said the thing he fears most is the “moment where it all explodes.” I share his worry…. it’s pretty clear that we’re headed toward some kind of crackup…. the unraveling of Trump’s mind is the primary one.
The problem is, the unraveling of one man’s mind is now echoed and reverberated across the country and throughout the globe, in what I have termed, “Trump Contagion.” All this was predictable and preventable from a mental health perspective, which is why we came forth in unprecedented numbers in the history of the nation, in the first year of the first Trump presidency.
Thousands of professionals joined our World Mental Health Coalition,
immediately after we published an unprecedented New York Times bestseller
of its kind, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and
Mental Health Experts Assess a President.
Within three months of publication, we were the number one
topic of national conversation—and rose to unprecedented prominence because of
dire societal need. Since our silencing, without a public voice, the nation
could not properly inform and protect itself from one of the greatest
existential threats of our time: the “unraveling” that, without intervention,
would inevitably lead to “crackup”.
Prepare for Martyrdom!
The level of threat has gone from existential to spiritual.
No other time in living memory have clerics come forth, such as has New
Hampshire Episcopal Bishop Rob Hischfeld, who urged his congregants and clergy to
finalize their wills and to get their affairs in order to prepare for a “new
era of martyrdom.” He added:
I’ve asked them to get their affairs in order, to make sure
they have their wills written, because it may be that now is no longer the time
for statements, but for us with our bodies, to stand between the powers of this
world and the most vulnerable.
This was said even before the second Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) murder in Minnesota, which made his words remarkably
prescient.
Three Catholic Cardinals Issue a Rare Joint Statement on
U.S. Foreign Policy!
Simultaneously, the Catholic Church’s most senior U.S.
leaders issued a damning, unprecedented statement warning that “the moral
foundation” of the nation’s foreign policy is in jeopardy. Three Catholic
cardinals urged the Trump administration to use a moral compass in pursuing its
policies, stating that U.S. military action in Venezuela, threats of acquiring
Greenland, and cuts in foreign aid risk bringing vast suffering instead of
promoting peace.
In a joint statement, Archbishop Cardinals Blase Cupich of Chicago, Robert McElroy of Washington, and Joseph Tobin of Newark, warned that, without a moral vision, the very underlying values of the country were in severe jeopardy. The statement was extraordinary and marked the second time in months that members of the conservative Catholic hierarchy have asserted their voice against the Trump administration, in order to uphold “the moral imperative” of solidarity among nations and the dignity of the human person.
Last November,
the entire U.S. conference of Catholic bishops condemned the administration’s
mass deportation of migrants and their “vilification” in public discourse. The
damning recent statement was issued after the three cardinals met privately
with Pope Leo and published it on the Vatican’s home page.
From my perspective, had the cardinals consulted with mental health experts, they may not have made two significant mistakes with their statement. First, they could have specifically urged Catholics to act far more decisively, urging actual intervention—just when the Doomsday Clock is at 89 seconds to Armageddon and about to be advanced.
Second, amid a horrendous,
ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing, formally recognized by the world’s two
highest courts—the International Court of Justice and International Criminal
Court—they should have explicitly named Palestine, the birthplace of Jesus and
of Christianity itself, for immediate moral reversal, clarifying that none of
us are safe until we are all safe.
Dictator of the World Proclaims Only ‘My Own Morality’
Constrains Him
Meanwhile, Donald
Trump has declared, “I don’t need international law,” in the context
of aggressive military posturing in the Middle East, direct interventionist
attacks against Venezuela and Iran, public pressure against allies over
territory, and hostility toward international legal institutions.
When asked if there were any limits on his global powers,
Donald Trump said: “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can
stop me.”
This is exactly what we warned against. One does not have to be a psychiatrist to know that only the most dangerous, criminally-minded person would answer this way; the criminally insane is in charge of the asylum, and we are indeed in a “new age of martyrdom.”
If the APA were ethically courageous, even at this late stage it would apologize for its errors—and elevate conscientious mental health voices, instead of denouncing them as “unethical”—so that proper intervention might finally occur. But it remains unrepentant.
The Hippocratic oath bound physicians to place patients’ welfare above their own interests—sometimes taking on mortal risk—but, here, a morally-bankrupt medical institution sacrificed the public’s permanent welfare for its own, temporary profit, “leading” the way for other institutions to follow.
Dr. Lee is a forensic and social psychiatrist who studies
human violence and also holds a master’s in divinity. She mainly worked with
maximum-security prisoners and public-sector patients, before she became known
to the public through her 2017
Yale conference and book that
alerted against dangerous 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
dangerous leadership that has recently been expanded,
in addition to a volume on how
dangerous signs in a leader spreads and two critical statements on dangerous leadership.
As many of the dangers she warned against unfolded—including millions of
unnecessary pandemic deaths, the propagation of political violence, the
exacerbation of economic inequality, the destruction of democracy, the
devastation of the climate, the replacement of international collaboration with
hostile confrontation, a renewed and accelerated nuclear arms race, a global
emboldening of dictators leading to brutal warfare and genocide, and growing
state-sanctioned cruelty and human rights violations—she has advocated for
another way. Now, the author of the internationally-acclaimed textbook, Violence;
over 100 peer-reviewed articles and chapters; 17 scholarly books and journal
special issues; and over 300 opinion editorials, introduces her curriculum on
rising above the current destructive course to embrace an awareness of, “One
World or None.”
