Did Our Book Help Prevent Nuclear War?

We are Still Gambling with the Fate of Humankind

We continue to hear, the more time passes and more is revealed, that we have been “vindicated”.  One of the foremost reasons we rushed our book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, for publication in October 2017, soon after Trump became president, was our expressed fear that a man with his serious mental impairments could lead or stumble the world into nuclear war.

We are now learning for the first time from a new book just published a few days ago, Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump, that even more high-level officials early in the Trump Administration were seriously worried that Donald Trump was provoking North Korea and creating a situation that could result in some kind of nuclear attack on the U.S.  Secret meetings were held, as never before, at the Department of Homeland Security preparing for such!

As reported earlier this month in an article in Politico entitled, “Top security officials fretted about nuclear war early in the Trump administration,” we learn that: “Less than a year into Donald Trump’s presidency, top homeland security officials were so alarmed about escalating tensions with North Korea that they held multiple meetings to prepare for a nuclear attack on American soil.” 

According to the author, Miles Taylor, who was at the time a high-ranking official in the Department of Homeland Security: “In the national security world, anything having to do with nuclear weapons is handled with extreme sensitivity—well planned, carefully scripted—yet we didn’t know what Trump might say at any given moment.  One day, he threatened North Korea ‘with fire, fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before.’  He almost seemed to welcome a nuclear conflict, which terrified us.”

Last September we learned, through the investigations of Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, published in The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, that the man who was, at the time our book was published, the closest assistant to the president as White House Chief of Staff, former four-star general and former head of Homeland Security, John Kelly himself realized how dangerous Donald Trump was.  Indeed, Kelly revealed that he was extremely worried Trump was preparing to use nuclear weapons against North Korea.

Kelly, we learned last year for the first time, had secretly bought our book and was using it as a kind of “owner’s manual” on how to contain Donald Trump.  He used our book, so Kelly revealed, to understand how to convince Trump that, rather than the path of escalating confrontation he was on, he would be more acclaimed if he flattered Kim Jong-Un, met with him, made some kind of agreement with him, and even visited North Korea, rather than provoking war that would inevitably be mutually destructive, no matter how capable the U.S. is of utterly destroying North Korea.

The Politico article continues: “The Department of Homeland Security took a step it had never taken before,” according to Taylor, who is best known for writing an anonymous op-ed in the New York Times in 2018, describing a “quiet resistance” in the Trump administration “of people choosing to put country first”—which we warned at the time was well-intentioned but would not be enough.

Taylor continued:

We convened every top leader in DHS to discuss the brewing crisis….  Experts walked through various scenarios of a nuclear strike on the U.S. homeland, dusted off response plans, and outlined best-case scenarios which nevertheless sounded horrifically grim.  I cannot provide the details, but I walked out of those meetings genuinely worried about the safety of the country.  In my view, the department was unprepared for the type of nuclear conflict Trump might foment.

Hence, while Chief of Staff Kelly was secretly reading and using our book to contain, restrain, and divert “the dangerous case of Donald Trump” from nuclear war, top officials at both the Pentagon and Homeland Security were seriously concerned that the new commander-in-chief was “out of control” and the result could be nuclear war.  Taylor told Politico in an interview that the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff personally told him to prepare and that: “This is the first time to my knowledge that DHS thought there was the possibility, however remote, of Trump actually starting a war and us having to prepare for the nuclear fallout in the homeland.”

Nuclear war, by definition, will be too late to intervene with after it has happened.  The reason we dropped everything, sacrificed our careers, and endeavored to educate about the dangerous mental impairments of a newly-elected president, starting in 2017—even as our professional associations placed other interests above humanity’s survival—is because we will not have a second chance.  If we have been “vindicated” for our warnings before, the potential is even greater now.  The same psychologically dangerous individual we warned against is not only the Republican frontrunner, he may even be president again.  If that untoward circumstance were to recur, he would be angrier, brasher, and more violent—and nuclear weapons are dangerous things to place in the hands of such a person.

When we first started speaking about the psychological dangers of Donald Trump as president, we did so because the political, military, and media structures seemed unprepared for so mentally-impaired a commander-in-chief.  This is understandable, since most people are unaccustomed to dealing with psychological disorder on a daily basis as mental health professionals are, and are apt to underestimate what they are seeing by interpreting it in normal terms.  Even law enforcement can intervene only after events have occurred, not as they are imminently about to; this is often the job of mental health professionals.  However, to continue on our current course—without the input of mental health experts, with what we know today—would not be understandable but catastrophic, if not terminal.