Astonishingly, the New York Times Reports on Our Book and Our Conference!

‘John F. Kelly ... bought a book called “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” [and] mental health, national security and political experts held a conference ... on Mr. Trump’s fitness’

Remarkably, the following is published in the New York Times, as the first article on the front page!

John F. Kelly, his second White House chief of staff, was so convinced that Mr. Trump was psychologically unbalanced that he bought a book called “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” written by 27 mental health professionals, to try to understand his boss better.  As it was, Mr. Kelly came to refer to Mr. Trump’s White House as “Crazytown.”

Some of Mr. Trump’s cabinet secretaries had a running debate over whether the president was “crazy-crazy,” as one of them put it in an interview after leaving office, or merely someone who promoted “crazy ideas.”  There were multiple conversations about whether the 25th Amendment disability clause should be invoked to remove him from office.

I was a part of these conversations, at least when the U.S. Congress raised them (it was in the process of setting up an “other body” that could replace the cabinet and would include mental health experts). The Amendment was not as far off as people seem to consider it now. Only after the American Psychiatric Association closed off all major avenues for medically educating the public did it become nonviable.

“There were often discussions about whether he could comprehend or understand the policy and knowing that he didn’t really have a grasp on those kinds of things,” Ms. [Sarah Matthews, Mr. Trump’s former deputy press secretary] said of her time in the White House.  “No one wanted to outright say it in that environment—is he mentally fit?—but I definitely had my moments where I personally questioned it.”

[C]oncerns about his age have heightened now that he is trying to return to office, concerns that were not alleviated by his unfounded debate claim about immigrants “eating the pets” in a small town.

What is remarkable is not that John Kelly consulted our book, which has been known for over two years, since the Guardian reported on it, but that the New York Times did not censor this information! (I have written about how the Times deleted only my quotes from at least thirteen articles I know about, over the last six years, after I appeared once on its front page on this topic).  Now, not one but two articles mentioning us have been permitted. And:

A group of mental health, national security and political experts held a conference at the National Press Club in Washington last month on Mr. Trump’s fitness.

Our conference finally made major news!  The article concludes:

Experts said it was hard to judge whether the changes in Mr. Trump’s speaking style could indicate typical effects of age or some more significant condition.  “That can change with normal aging,” said Dr. Bradford Dickerson, a neurologist at Harvard Medical School.  “But if you see a change relative to a person’s base line in that type of speaking ability over the course of just a few years, I think it raises some real red flags”….

But like some people approaching the end of their eighth decade, he is not open to correction. “Trump is never wrong,” he said recently in Wisconsin.  “I am never, ever wrong.”

Of course, this is partly why we performed:

1.     Our “duty to warn” and “duty to protect” society as our primary societal responsibility (we have a responsibility to society, just as we do to patients, according to all our ethics codes—despite the American Psychiatric Association’s distortions of its own code);

2.     A full fitness evaluation in May 2019, when the appropriate data became available through Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report, as a service to the public, by an independent, nongovernmental panel of top mental health experts from around the country—which determined that Donald Trump is unfit;

3.     A dangerousness risk assessment in June 2024, as part of a pre-sentencing report, submitted to Manhattan District Criminal Justice Juan Merchan (as mental health experts often do to give recommendations at the time of sentencing, delayed only because of the U.S. Supreme Court’s immunity decision), by another independent, nongovernmental panel of the most eminent mental health experts alive—which determined that Trump is extremely dangerous; and

4.     An empirical study demonstrating that mental health experts from all over the nation overwhelmingly believe that it is our duty to educate the public about dangerous leadership (a summary can be found in our new publication, The More Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, and soon to be published in full in a scientific journal).

The theme of our conference was that fitness is not a subjective, partisan, or even political “opinion” but a scientific finding based on extensive research, clinical experience, and uniform medical standards as applied to military officers, officers handling nuclear weapons, surgeons, and executive officials.  The consensus at the conference was that mental fitness is critically important for the U.S. presidency and that Donald Trump is unequivocally unfit.  It should become widely known that Trump’s mental unfitness has now been objectively measured in multiple ways; that mental health expertise is critical to explaining what he is and is not capable of doing; how dangerous it is to have a mentally unfit person in a position of power; and how his psychological dangers can quickly spread into social, cultural, and geopolitical dangers, by rendering legal and political institutions domestically, and alliances and delicate balances globally, ineffectual.

It should now be obvious that we cannot leave up to a mentally unfit person to choose to do the right thing.  We also cannot rely on his supporters whose self-awareness, agency, and personhood he has usurped, in order to deny his unfitness, to recognize what will help or harm them.  Mental health experts have a duty to protect, just as military and government officials do, and this is why we felt the need to come together in unprecedented ways at an unprecedented time in our nation’s history. Therefore, please watch the conference summary video.  Read the book that was released at the conference.  Visit the conference website for updates.  Please continue to support our getting out the message about the conference, our distributing the conference statement widely, and our raising the awareness that it is inconsistent with sanity to have an unfit president in this much more dangerous world.