Letter to the Senate and the House Majority and Minority Leaders

Donald Trump Must be Removed from Access to Nuclear Weapons and from Military Powers

I wish to thank all those who have worked tremendously hard to try to get out my message to the four living former commanders-in-chief that Donald Trump must be removed from his access to nuclear weapons and his command of the planet’s most powerful military for mental health reasons—please continue to do so! In the meantime, economist and influential advisor of governments Jeffrey Sachs has helped me to send the same message to Congress (this is in addition to our statement of medical concerns that the U.S. Senate requested):

Dear Senate Majority Leader Thune, Senate Minority Leader Schumer, Speaker Johnson, and House Minority Leader Jeffries:

We write to you today with a sense of urgency that we do not use lightly. The behavior and rhetoric of President Donald Trump have crossed a threshold that demands the immediate and bipartisan attention of Congress. This is not a partisan assessment. It is a judgment grounded in observable fact, consistent professional assessment, and the constitutional responsibilities that your offices carry.

President Trump exhibits what forensic mental health experts have, across dozens of independent assessments, identified as the “Dark Triad” of personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Rather than constituting a clinical diagnosis, this trait-based assessment is grounded in behavioral observation and is particularly useful for assessing the level of danger an individual poses in a political leadership position. We do not offer this as a clinical verdict. We offer it as the considered judgment of a substantial body of professional opinion, based on well-researched evidence that is consistent, accumulating, and impossible to dismiss.

What makes this more than an academic matter is what predictably happens when this personality structure collides with immovable obstacles. The clinical literature is clear: individuals with Dark Triad profiles, when confronted with situations they cannot control or escape, do not recalibrate. They escalate. The psychological imperative to relieve narcissistic collapse overrides strategic calculation, concern for consequences, and ordinary self-restraint. Rage surges to domination. Impulsivity overrides caution. The urgent need to extinguish psychological pain eclipses every other consideration.

We are watching this dynamic unfold in real time.

The President’s recent public communications have been, by any normal standard of political discourse, alarming. His posts demanding that Iran “open the fuckin’ strait, you crazy bastards” and his threat to bomb Iran “back to the stone ages,” adding that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” are not the rhetoric of calculated geopolitical pressure. They are the expressions of a man in profound psychological distress who is reaching for the most extreme retaliatory threats available to him. That these statements were addressed to an adversary in the context of an active military confrontation makes them not merely shocking but profoundly dangerous.

President Trump has now ordered a U.S. naval blockade of Iran—an action that has sent world oil prices soaring and placed the United States in direct opposition to the international community. His ongoing actions carry the potential to trigger a global economic catastrophe, draw in regional and great powers, and ignite a wider conflict with consequences that no one can bound. These orders are being issued without adequate deliberation, without congressional authorization, and in a context in which the President’s judgment is, by every visible measure, severely compromised.

We urge three specific actions.

First, Congress must immediately retake its constitutional authority over war…. Article I of the Constitution vests in Congress the sole power to declare war and to regulate commerce with foreign nations. The Framers intended Congress to deliberate upon and be accountable for precisely such consequential actions. Congress must assume its constitutional authority now, before further escalation renders the question moot.

Second, congressional leadership … must convene urgent consultations with senior administration officials, including the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Secretary of State, and the Director of National Intelligence…. It is to create a circuit breaker capable of preventing escalation toward catastrophe, including the potential use of nuclear weapons. Those officials have their own constitutional and statutory obligations….

Third, Congress should formally initiate consultation with the Vice President and Cabinet regarding the President’s fitness for office under Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment:… the process that the Constitution itself provides for … when a President’s capacity to discharge the duties of office is in question and poses a potential imminent danger to the nation. The Amendment exists because those who drafted it recognized that the question of presidential incapacity … required a constitutional answer….

We recognize the gravity of what we are asking. We ask it because the gravity of the situation demands it.

A President who publicly threatens to destroy a foreign civilization … shows every behavioral sign of a personality in acute crisis is not merely a political problem….

The war with Iran will not wait. The escalation dynamics of this active military confrontation will not wait. The psychological conditions driving the President’s decisions will not improve under pressure—they will worsen.

We urge you to act without delay. The Constitution gives you the tools. Your oath of office assigns you the responsibility.

Respectfully,

James Gilligan, M.D.
Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, New York University

Prudence L. Gourguechon, M.D.
Former Vice President, World Mental Health Coalition

Bandy X. Lee, M.D., M.Div.
President, World Mental Health Coalition

James R. Merikangas, M.D.
Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, George Washington University

Jeffrey D. Sachs, Ph.D.
University Professor, Columbia University

I also wish to thank all those who have forwarded me Lawrence O’Donnell’s show, in which he features my book, as he has done repeatedly over the years. He quotes the following from the New York Times:

John F. Kelly, his longest serving White House chief of staff in the first term, even bought a book by 27 of those specialists called The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump in an effort to understand his boss and came to the conclusion that he was mentally ill.

We know that he recently posted a depiction of himself as Jesus Christ (a common defense of those with mental illness is to see themselves as an all-powerful God, to fight the unbearable reality of losing one’s mind). His precipitous psychotic spiral is what the corporate media (which is still completely blacking out mental health experts), the federally-funded American Psychiatric Association, and the Trump administration have worked in coordination to conceal—to stop mental health professionals from protecting the public from dangers arising from mental health problems, which is one of our primary professional responsibilities, superseding all else.

Here is a link to O’Donnell’s program:

Announcement:

Dr. Bandy X. Lee is in the process of establishing SURVIVAL UNIVERSITY. Please use the contact form to join and to help make this unprecedented effort successful. She is also leading a public course series with Preventing Violence Now, about which you can find out more and register here.