January 6th

—The Urgency to Prevent the Next One

In one month and one day, it will be the second anniversary of the American insurrection-coup event conceived of, fomented by, and at the time clandestinely led by none other than the then-president of the United States.  Before then, likely in the next week or two, will come the unprecedented, detailed Report from the House Select Committee on the January 6th Attack, revealing a great deal of the clandestine planning and what went on behind the scenes of this extremely significant Constitution-be-damned event.  It is far too tempting to deny the reality that, like the 2020 presidential election itself, we came very close to a horrifyingly dangerous, different outcome. And with the same individual running for presidency again, calling for the “termination” of the Constitution, we may yet be in that situation again.

For this reason, I and the World Mental Health Coalition (WMHC) have been in touch with the January 6th Committee.  Well, we have tried to be—and we will not know with what result until the Report is issued.  Though we hope otherwise, we fear that the Committee will fail the country when it comes to the most crucial issues about the dangers of a U.S. president as a result of his severe mental impairments and what to do to prevent such dangers in the future.

Long before January 6, 2021, we were warning in unprecedented ways about the serious dangers and the never-before kind of violence that were likely to result from Donald Trump being in the White House.  We did so from the start, going back to our ethics conference at Yale School of Medicine in April 2017, soon after he became president, which led a few months later to our book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.  We continued to do so throughout the years of his presidency, first in March 2019 with our major interdisciplinary conference at the National Press Club in Washington, “The Dangerous State of the World and the Need for Fit Leadership,” which C-Span broadcast in full for some three hours. Then in March 2020, we did so with our “Prescriptions for Survival,” beginning the very first month of the pandemic, when we warned that the vast majority of Covid deaths would be the result of the president’s mental impairments. We turned out to be right.

A recent feature article entitled, “The Psychiatrist who Warned Us that Donald Trump would Unleash Violence was Absolutely Right,” is a good summary of what happened.  But when it mattered the most, the pharmaceutical industry- and federal government-connected American Psychiatric Association worked overtime to try to discredit and to silence us, among other things leading to my dismissal from Yale University, after teaching there in the Schools of Medicine and Law for seventeen years. (My principal opponent, Jeffrey Lieberman, reaped major increases in federal funding and even vied for a government position following his crusade, until he, too, was dismissed from Columbia University for a “tweet” that exposed his lifelong racism, sexism, and bullying behavior.)

The subtitle of the feature article in Mother Jones further proclaims, “The Vindication of Bandy Lee”—and “vindication” is a what we heard over and over, even from Congress members, after January 6th—but this comes after many years of totally unnecessary harm, unwarranted vilifications, and failure to deal with the key issues we persistently raised.  Indeed, even more recently we have learned that none other than White House Chief of Staff John Kelly had secretly purchased our book soon after its publication in 2017 and was using it as a kind of “owner’s manual” about how to protect the country from a uniquely dangerous president.  But here, too, this is only becoming known in late 2022.

Now let us be clear: the conspirator-in-chief should have been criminally indicted long ago.  While he was in the presidency, the House leadership kept delaying or limiting impeachment, twice, so that it would be ineffective.  The U.S. Congress allowed the president and his cronies to set a minimizing narrative on the Mueller Report. Since he has been out of office, the Justice Department continued to be too slow and too afraid to do what the situation clearly requires.  Now, the January 6th Committee should have already acknowledged that what happened on January 6, 2021, we had predicted and warned against, long in advance, in as many ways as we could possibly think of.

I and the WMHC considered this our public health duty, since as far back as in 2017, for the threat to society he posed and what he was likely to do were clear to us—and in 2020, I even outlined in Profile of a Nation: Trump’s Mind, America’s Soul that his presidency would not end with the election—which is why we continually urged mental fitness testing, or if not an involuntary mental health evaluation, which is the medical standard of care to which even the First Citizen is entitled by the Law.  There is no distinction of a person’s status when it comes to our legal authority as physicians and mental health professionals to protect the public; the Geneva Declaration, instituted after the experience of Nazism, obligates that we not fall under the dictates of a dangerous regime.  Finally, invocation of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment relies heavily on “medical data,” as the drafter of the Amendment clarified, which we tried to communicate in meetings with members of Congress.

Now we await the January 6th Committee’s concluding Report, as well as the Justice Department’s Special Counsel, who should have been appointed and acted long ago.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the measure by which our society is capable of consulting the appropriate experts, in this case us, is a measure by which we will be able to save ourselves: our democracy, our viability as a nation, and even our survival as a species. Will we?