Is the U.S. President ‘Insane’? Are We in an ‘Abusive Relationship’?

Addressing the Elephant in the Room May be the Only Way to Save Us All

I was once astonished to find, as outlined in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, that human beings came close to being extinguished on the African continent because of elephants. That we survived is obvious today, but there was a time when the contest was quite close.

Today, we are dealing with another mammoth. As the president’s destruction of the U.S. economy turned out to have no underlying, rational agenda, people have been increasingly asking, “if the president might be insane.” Those were the words of Tom Lee, the head of research at the financial analysis firm FSInsights.

Texas Democratic Representative Jasmine Crockett also stated: “The fact that no one is questioning his mental acuity or fitness to serve is beyond wild to me.” She compared living through a second Trump administration, with its unprecedented and unpredictable emergency policymaking, to being in an “abusive relationship.”

This, of course, is what mental health experts have been saying since 2017, in The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. I stated that the threshold for our “duty to warn and to protect the public” began with “dangerousness due to mental illness or defect” (actually, this is the threshold for involuntary hospitalization; ethicists have since clarified that “benefit to public wellbeing” is sufficient for us to speak up). Harper West warned against abuse in her essay contribution to our 2017 book: “In a Relationship with an Abusive President.”

Unmitigated abuse results in trauma. There was a recent, brilliant article in the LA Progressive, titled, “It’s the Trauma Stupid: Hurt People, Hurt People.” It quotes Russell Vought, now Trump’s Office of Management and Budget director, as having stated even before 2024’s election: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected…. We want to put them in trauma.” The article goes on to state:

what stands out as the most powerful element in Trump’s November 2024 presidential victory is that many Trump voters are themselves victims of trauma…. MAGA voters’ traumas are leveraged and manipulated via Trump’s own deep-seated emotional damage. His bullying, constant lies, grandiosity and profound feelings of victimhood and grievance are major parts of the glue that binds Trump and his cult-like followers.

In my twenty-five years of treating over a thousand violent offenders in maximum-security prisons, one thing I learned is that every offender, whether overt to lay observers or not, was once a victim of violence. While not every victim of violence becomes a perpetrator (most do not), every perpetrator was once a victim. They believe they will escape trauma by inflicting it: “I mess ’em up, so they don’t mess with me.” Hence, the first thing a perpetrator does upon arrival in a cell-block or a dormitory is to pick a fight with someone against whom he expects to win—and by ravaging that person, one establishes dominance and “respect” (which he believes he can only attain through instilling fear). It is a difficult cycle to break but possible, as San Francisco’s the Resolve to Stop the Violence Project has shown, before it spread as a model program across the globe.

This is the abuse and trauma we are living through now, as we are buried in the onslaught of arbitrary edicts, slaughter through the withholding of assistance to the world’s poor, endangerment of the public through the unleashing of preventable diseases, an uprooting of our financial and social safety nets, and the shock to the American system that comes with sending a law-abiding, legal resident to an overseas concentration camp. The president and his cronies are so overconfident in their impunity, they are now flouting the very body—the U.S. Supreme Court—that gave them the impunity! Overwhelming the victim—to the maximal extent possible—so that one cannot recuperate and fight back, is how abusers plan their attack.

Once abusers establish their dominance, they pressure those surrounding them to become enablers. This may be the battered spouse facilitating the abuse of their child, the “flying monkeys” accompanying narcissistic politicians, or the “patrons and pawns” circling around psychopathic mob bosses. In the Trump administration, the Democratic Party leadership has taken on the role of facilitator. We have seen how the Senate minority leader would give any excuse not to pursue a government shutdown—widely seen as a powerful means of protest and a last resort in a desperate situation.

I witnessed in the previous Trump administration how the speaker of the House took credit for the work of opposing the president in public, even as she crushed it from within with an iron fist (she made sure to modulate every effort so that it would not succeed, so forcibly that one exasperated lawmaker remarked, “We snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory”—and yet no one could criticize her without risking a massive attack from her personality cult, which I estimated to rival that of the Trump base).

Apart from power aligning with power, the victimized may simply wish to deny the pain of one’s predicament by “identifying with the aggressor,” as a survival mechanism. This is why, in 1973, after two machine-gun carrying criminals entered a bank in Stockholm, Sweden, and took four hostages for five days, the rescued victims—after unspeakable threats and abuse, including being strapped with dynamite—were surprisingly supportive of their captors. One woman even became engaged to one of the hostage takers, and another developed a legal defense fund to assist them. An astute criminologist, Nils Bejerot, dubbed the impressive phenomenon: “Stockholm syndrome.”

Now, as abusers and enablers perpetuate the cycle of abuse and traumatic bonding, as well as the conditions that will churn out more abusers, the contest seems quite close. It may even seem insurmountable. Yet, as the sky goes darkest before dawn, the body must sometimes go through a bout of illness before recovery. And a “death” of some sort may bring forth new birth.

Though not immediately apparent, a requisite condition is a change of consciousness. The first is to realize that the power abusers wield is not real power; it is a compensation. This “power” is abusive and predatory, not capable and contributory. It destroys, but cannot create.

Our survival now depends on whether we will recognize what we are dealing with as the disease of psychopathic insanity that it is—or whether we will bow to the powerless and incompetent who says things like:

“countries are calling us up, kissing my ass…. ‘Please, please, sir, make a deal…. I’ll do anything, sir!’”

Announcement:

Dr. Bandy X. Lee is holding weekly live sessions on:

“A Curriculum on One World or None”

The next session will be this Friday, April 25, 2025, at 12 noon EDT/9 a.m. PDT on Zoom. A paid subscription is required to receive a link the morning before. Thank you!

Dr. 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 (now privately 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, Italy, Brazil, Argentina, and Canada (with articles in Turkish, Czech and Polish). 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 of public education on “One World or None.”