The January 6th Committee Let Us Down

Let Me Explain

Literally, as soon as Donald Trump won the U.S. presidency in 2016, my phone rang incessantly, and my email kept exploding.  In many cases, it was professional medical colleagues not only bewildered but afraid.  Those of us who are educated and trained in psychiatry were immediately concerned that there were signs of dangerous mental impairments with the new U.S. president-elect.  Realizing that he would be commander-in-chief in charge of nuclear weapons made me sense particularly that we professionals had a critical responsibility we had never before contemplated.

According to our medical training and ethics, a person about to take a major societal responsibility exhibiting blatant signs of dangerous mental defects, as Donald Trump did, was a critical public health issue for which we would be uniquely equipped in our obligation to protect society.  Indeed, all military personnel who have any connection with nuclear weapons are required to undergo the kind of mental health and psychological testing that we routinely perform, yearly.  All boards of directors of major corporations are aware that it is their fiduciary responsibility to have their chief executive officer (CEO) properly evaluated if there were any question about their sound judgement and mental capacity.  Indeed, we medical professionals are legally authorized, and it is our professional responsibility, to require if necessary an involuntary mental examination if the safety of others or the public at large might be endangered.

Then many matters erupted, month after month, that validated our concerns, and the public was catching on, too.  “You were right all along!” and “You are vindicated!” are not just statements we received in our emails and through our web site after January 6th but which began since about the second month of the Trump presidency.  Soon, we came to have more relevant information about this person’s unfiltered stream of consciousness, his behavior and interaction with others, and influence on the public than about just any person we had ever personally examined or treated.  Even so, dangerousness is not a diagnosis but an assessment we typically make as soon as any person walks in the door (or, occasionally, have the obligation to evaluate in public).

In our statements and in our discussions, our intent was never to diagnose Donald Trump specifically, as if he were a patient (he is not, and if he were, we would not have the independence to comment on his fitness for duty).  Rather, our responsibility was to evaluate the overall situation from a public safety point of view.

Then came the Covid pandemic, and we recognized right away that Donald Trump’s behavior and rhetoric were leading to far more misery and death than necessary, and so we immediately we began our “Prescriptions for Survival.”  Then, at the end of his reign came his insurrection and attempted coup on that date of infamy, January 6, 2021—the very kind of escalating violence we had warned would likely result with Trump setting foot in the White House.

And now, today, for the first time in American history, we have a congressional committee publicly calling on the Justice Department to indict a former U.S. president on multiple criminal charges, including insurrection against the United States.  This is great progress. The House Select Committee on the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol has done its job remarkably well.  Even so, however, it is insufficient.  What it has not done is what we psychiatrists and mental health experts have been repeatedly advocating from the very start, as far back as in 2017. We began with our Yale Conference in April and then through our bestselling book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, and in 2019 in Washington with our major, C-Span broadcast conference at the National Press Club, and then with our “Prescriptions for Survival” series starting in the first month of the Covid pandemic in March 2020. 

As we have persistently and repeatedly explained, from our professional point of view, our country needs to take steps to prevent any kind of recurrence of January 6th, a day that itself was the result of ignoring many signs that came before, which we tried to warn against.  We need to honor the death of now over a million Americans and the near-success of a violent coup by learning our lesson and putting in place a dignified process for mental health assessment and treatment when called for of our president and other senior elected leaders.  And we need to revise the 25th Amendment so that, when it is needed, it is actually implementable and not just theoretical.

Considerable kudos are due to the January 6th Select Committee.  Yet, in the end, it should have taken to heart the need to safeguard the nation and the world going forward with regard to the concerns we psychiatrists and mental health experts have collectively raised for years, as a result of the public health crisis that Donald Trump presented.  It is those concerns that in fact circuitously but predictably led to January 6th—and our Congress and our media need to recognize them, rather than overlook and brush aside this difficult topic.

Literally, the survival of this nation and the world is at stake when it comes to the mental fitness of U.S. presidents, as January 6 has shown. There should be no other national priority than to assure it. All else can follow.