It is Time to Start ‘Questioning … Whether or Not He is Equipped to Serve Mentally’

Mental Health Experts have Said This for Almost a Decade. Will the Nation Finally Heed Our Warnings?

“Is Trump in mental decline? He sounds far worse than Biden ever did. Trump seems to know little, and he has grown increasingly incoherent and rambling, often wholly detached from reality.” – USA Today Columnist

“He creates his own world…. Trump isn’t lying so much as he is ruling a parallel universe, like a boy’s tree house…. Accordingly, assessing such aberrational behaviour, what’s really happening inside his head, can be nearly impossible.” – John Bolton

“Trump is not like you or me or anyone else we know. He is a crazy person. You can’t predict what a crazy man will do, and that’s frightening. All bets are off.” – Michael Wolff

“Donald Trump is not a well man…. Whether he’s a pathological narcissist, a sociopath or, as some mental health experts claim, a psychopath, something is not right with his mind and behavior.” – Norman Eisen

“I mean you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that something’s wrong with Trump. It’s like if someone in football broke their leg and the bone was sticking out, you don’t have to be an orthopaedic surgeon to know that there’s a broken bone.” – Anthony Scaramucci

Even as questions about Joe Biden’s mental acuity continue to reemerge—the reasons for which I have outlined before—our new “Prescription For Survival 2025” places our global dangers directly on Donald Trump’s mental unfitness. His policies will greatly escalate the tremendous dangers we face from new pandemics, climate destruction, and escalating world wars, not because of political or ideological reasons, but for reasons of mental impairment. We termed his positions in these multitudinous areas to be “unbelievable”, but they are not unexpected.

Indeed, they are well anticipated, which is why we have made specific “Prescriptions” for what is imperative to do to deescalate our current “Death Spiral.”

We at the World Mental Health Coalition have also been unequivocal in terms of the need, the urgency, and the clarity of interventions that need to be made, since the very beginning.

In the midst of much disinformation and distortion, we also emphasized that there is a major difference between diagnosing a public figure like a patient and warning against signs of danger in his role as public servant. The former is impossible to do from a distance, whereas the latter must be done from a distance, with total independence from conflicts of interest. The former’s most important data sources are personal medical information, whereas the latter’s most critical data sources are objective observations, preferably in real-life situations. Diagnosing is what we do in private, but warning against danger is about fulfilling our professional duty to protect society. In fact, in everyday situations, we could face criminal charges if we ignored danger to the public.

Hence, it was only matter-of-fact that thousands of mental health professionals came forward in 2017, especially since our conference at Yale School of Medicine and the publication of its proceedings in The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. Our book was so in demand, it became an unprecedented New York Times bestseller of its kind and may have already prevented nuclear war with North Korea, thanks to White House Chief of Staff General John Kelly consulting it as an “owner’s manual”!

Yet, through the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA’s) acting as an arm of the first Trump regime, we have been summarily and artificially silenced (artificially, since the public continued to clamor to hear from us). I was the first in our era to be wrongly dismissed, with Yale unbelievably renouncing any obligation to academic freedom in order to avoid discovery (the Faustian pact that Yale has made in our time has had other consequences). Those who championed, if not crusaded for, the APA’s new, bending-ethics-to-favor-power position, such as Jeffrey Lieberman, were richly rewarded with federal funding. And with the most eminent voices in psychiatry and psychology being sidelined as “unethical”, imposters, non-experts, and uneducated pundits came to take their place.

To this day, I believe, the nation has not recovered from being deprived of mental health insight in the midst of a national mental health crisis that is rendering all other interventions and institutions unworkable.

We warned from the very beginning that ignoring the mental health problems would not solve anything but only allow them to grow worse, to the point of surpassing all our means of intervention and becoming uncontainable. We may be close to that point. That is why we have published a new book titled, The Much More Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 50 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Warn Anew. This time, our main purpose is to consult with the People—as members of the People, by the demand of the People, and for the primary benefit of the People.

We must recognized the dangers of having a commander-in-chief who could, at any moment, respond with escalation of hostilities, misjudgment, accident, unprovoked emotional upheaval, or any combination, which could create a situation where key decisions might have to be made within minutes. Unlike any president before him, Donald Trump rarely even receives the CIA Presidential Daily Brief about world affairs. Although it is always prepared for him, Politico reported that he has only sat and listened to twelve Presidential Daily Briefs, rather than daily, as perilous as the global situation is!

Years ago, my colleagues and I were making enormous headway when some fifty members of Congress urged us to continue “educating the public medically,” so that they could “act politically,” seemingly referring to the invocation of the 25th Amendment, for which mental impairment should be seen as a primary reason, given a president’s function. Even two years ago, fearing that he could be reelected, I summarized all that l that my colleagues and I had done to prevent that outcome in “The Abyss Ahead” and “The Abyss Ahead, Part 2.”

Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett remarked recently after a disturbing speech:

I don’t think that those who have gone through West Point expected to have their commander in chief address them and start talking about trophy wives or start talking how he has so many investigations. What a great reminder that you are not qualified to be the person that potentially will command troops to go into war.

It is time … to start … questioning his mental acuity, and whether or not he is equipped to serve mentally.

It is time indeed.

Announcement:

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

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The next session will be this Friday, June 6, 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 that has been recently 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, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Italy, Russia, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Canada (with notable articles in Estonian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Polish, Turkish, and Korean). 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 for public education on “One World or None.”