Donald Trump: the Greatest Danger to Our World in 2024

Will Containment be Possible without Mental Health Expertise?

When the Economist came out with its article, “Donald Trump Poses the Biggest Danger to the World in 2024,” a couple weeks ago, my email was again flooded with messages: “Now even the Economist agrees with you that Trump is dangerous!”  “The whole world is now saying what you said years ago!” “You were the first and the best!”

The article stated: “A shadow looms over the world.  In this week’s edition we publish The World Ahead 2024, our 38th annual predictive guide to the coming year, and in all that time no single person has ever eclipsed our analysis as much as Donald Trump eclipses 2024.  That a Trump victory next November is a coin-toss probability is beginning to sink in.”

“The Fate of the World” is at stake if Donald Trump were again to become president of the United States next year.  This is the key takeaway from the well-respected British magazine, which will feature a 90-page guide to the critical year 2024 ahead.

Obviously, I and my colleagues were correct seven years ago not because we are fortune tellers, but because expertise matters.  Civilized societies thrive because they make use of the relevant expertise that is at their disposal.  We suffered the greatest number of deaths in the world during the Covid-19 pandemic, despite having the greatest concentration of top medical experts in the world, because of our unwillingness to avail ourselves of the expertise we had.  Now, the same is happening with the mental health pandemic; we may well end up one of the most backward “Banana Republics” in the world, because of our unwillingness to avail ourselves of the relevant expertise that we already have.  At least for the Covid-19 pandemic, there was not a complete blackout of the relevant experts.

The greatest responsibility for this travesty in mental health also lies in a single person, little known to the general public: Jeffrey Lieberman, past president of the American Psychiatric Association (APA).  Driven by jealousy, ambition, and the entitlement that comes with largely unearned authority (he rose the ranks by conducting Nazi-like experiments on vulnerable populations, which the European Union might have counted as “torture”), he embarked on a singular crusade to shut down all mental health experts from public discourse, at the height of our demand.

Lieberman accused us of breaking “the Goldwater rule,” when we did not, even as he himself broke it more egregiously than anyone, absurdly fawning over the former president.  And when popular support for Trump waned after a violent insurrection, he tried to revise history by asserting that he, too, had opposed Donald Trump.  Now, he is suspended in disgrace from his positions at Columbia University and with New York State, but his ironic attempts to revise his image through his own “Groundhog Day” seem unceasing, no matter the damage he has done.  And as long as Lieberman and the APA remain unrepentant, it is up to the American public to demand better.

The fact is that mental health experts were among the first to warn in a major way the dangers of a Trump presidency, shortly after inauguration, when we were credited with introducing the word “danger” into public discourse in relation to Donald Trump.  I was invited to meet with over fifty U.S. Congress members as a result, when the Twenty-Fifth Amendment was actively discussed behind the scenes, with legislators depending on our ability to educate the public.  Our instant New York Times bestselling public-service book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, had catapulted us to the number one topic of national conversation.  It was so unexpectedly successful, it took Macmillan five weeks of repeat printings to replenish stocks enough not to sell out again instantly—which speaks to the public’s hunger for what we had to say.

Yet, since Lieberman’s and the APA’s disinformation campaign, mental health experts have been the only experts blacklisted from speaking about the area of our own expertise, and the reason for this is because our voices were the most relevant and important.  Imagine all legal experts being barred from speaking about any aspect of Donald Trump’s legal problems, because they “have not personally represented him as a client, and have not gotten consent to speak about him.”  We would not have a democracy!  Yet, this is essentially how Lieberman and the APA “gaslighted” the public into being deprived of mental health knowledge critical to public interest, by framing it terms of a personal examination of a patient—as if the former had anything to do with the latter.

This is how we lost the ability to defend our democracy against mental pathology.

Furthermore, and the reason for this essay today, even now the Economist is missing a critical part of the big story: that Trump and Trumpism have evolved.  The extreme dangers now extend far beyond this particular person whose aggressive rhetoric, defiance of norms, detachment from reality, and unfettered criminality, like a psychological “viral infection,” have spread far and wide.  Yes, Donald Trump will be in the headlines for the foreseeable future: the legal proceedings, the debates, the primaries, the unending media coverage, the election campaign, and afterwards.  But what I have termed “Trump Contagion” will continue with or without Trump being the Republican candidate and whether he wins or loses the 2024 election.

I and my colleagues immediately recognized the unprecedented dangers of Donald Trump from the very beginning, exactly seven years ago, because we knew we were dealing with what was essentially a problem of mental pathology.  Pretending that a mental health crisis is something other than what it is, is akin to asking an astrologer to curb a flu pandemic or a plumber to perform a brain surgery.  This is why the exclusion of mental health experts has been so decisively devastating.  And it is imperative to point out that the Economist, and far too many others, is quite late in sounding the red alarm about the unprecedented dangers of Donald Trump—and even since, it has not mentioned our work or invited us to contribute.  As a result, the media have in various ways helped bring him to and sustain him in power, while “Trump Contagion” has gone far beyond infecting American society, to affecting many other cultures in Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East.