‘The Much More Dangerous Case of Donald Trump’

‘Vaccination’—or Education—in the Time of a Mental Health Pandemic

The greatest fear I had when the American Psychiatric Association (APA) silenced mental health experts in the media—which was the reason for our going from “the number one topic of national conversation,” invited onto every major news program, to total blackout overnight—was that the public would not recognize the dangers of Donald Trump.

His fantasy of himself as “dealmaker”—when in truth he coerces through threats and intimidation—portended his fiction of himself as “peacemaker”—when in truth he would be an instigator of “endless wars.” Few recognized how he activated a virtual civil war during his first presidency and, through his Covid-19 mismanagement, effectuated more deaths than all previous war casualties in U.S. history combined. Few connected how he set in motion Joe Biden’s failures in Afghanistan, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Israel’s disproportionate response in Palestine.

Without a vaccine against the spreading mental health pandemic—for mental health matters, inoculation consists of public education, which the APA blocked—the public was maximally vulnerable to being beguiled into electing him again, which it did. We now see how much closer we are to total annihilation from a larger regional war in the Middle East, or the possibility of nuclear war in Eastern Europe, but by the time the public learns on its own what mental health experts could have told them nine years ago, there may be no turning back.

This is why we have published our new book, The Much More Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 50 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Warn Anew (of which the paperback edition is now out!), during this extraordinary National Safety Month, when the safety of all humankind is at stake.

Among the essays, I wish to highlight that of Dr. Henry Friedman, contributor to all volumes since the 2017 edition of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump and faculty at both Tufts and Harvard Medical Schools. Trained in medicine at Johns Hopkins and in psychiatry at Harvard, his 45-year practice of psychoanalysis and analytic psychotherapy brings especially keen and rigorous insight into the dangers of the current commander-in-chief. Here is an excerpt from his latest contribution:

The observations that I had made of [Donald Trump] during his successful 2016 campaign convinced me that his was a most dangerous personality type. Commenting on his character didn’t feel to me like making a diagnosis as much as offering a description informed by my psychiatric experience about a man in a unique position. Indeed, Trump did somehow convince a significant part of the population that he would solve their problems, make their lives better, and in fact, transform America into something which could be called, in his terms, “great again”…. The paranoid core of his personality was revealed in his unswerving belief in nonexistent dangers that threatened this country, and his belief that the United States was in a state of carnage and decay. [These constitute] evidence of his essential totalitarian orientation towards the country and its citizens….

When I first suggested that Trump was an American Hitler, many people objected that this went too far. More than ever, I am convinced that my assertion about the parallels between Trump and Hitler are eerily accurate. Like Hitler, Trump, in his grandiose effort to make America great again, will be capable of allowing Putin to re-annex the Ukraine, and making alliances with Putin to take the United States out of NATO. This would allow Russia to regain its satellite states, all of whom would be prey to Putin’s expansionism without the United States military to back them up….

We need to think about Trump’s paranoid preoccupation with immigrants as very much the equivalent of Hitler’s preoccupation with Jews. The need to cleanse the country of illegal immigrants is parallel to Hitler’s need to eliminate the Jews of Europe to purify and protect the continent. Does this sound extreme? Not if you really think about the plan to round up millions of illegal and legal immigrants and deport them. It should be remembered that Hitler’s initial plan was based upon the idea of expelling the Jews, putting them into concentration camps and then deporting them; when no one would take them he developed the Final Solution.

Are we going to see a Final Solution coming from Trump and his followers? In the end, he will deport millions of people. Perhaps we do differ from the Weimar republic in the 1920’s in that our economy is not a disaster, nor is the nation filled with carnage. But have no illusion that Trump will restrain himself from insisting this is the case, and that many will believe they need protection from immigrants, among other vaguely defined enemies. It is easy to imagine what another four years of Trump would allow him to do to this nation. I have little doubt that we would end up as Germany did, a broken nation, due to his destructive impulses….

There are conmen and sociopaths that we encounter on a personal level in life; they cause injuries and distress for those in contact with them, but this cannot be confused with what someone with a dictatorial character can produce in any nation where they achieve power. That power rarely is applied for the good of the people; primarily it is wielded for the gratification of the dictator, for his delight in having the ability to inflict pain and suffering on those who oppose him….

He has already been able to win people over to a form of violence in speech, and advocated in action impulsive destructivity, something which his predecessors had uniformly managed to move away from. How is it possible that one man, equipped only with speech and hate speech at that, could have captured the minds of so many?.... Richard Hofstetter wrote about paranoia in American politics; he essentially describes this vulnerability as: The wish to believe that somebody who is black or Jewish or gay has the power to contaminate society and dislodge it from its perfection merely by existing.

It is important to remember that the media, with its ability to reach into the homes of all citizens, can become a conduit for the spread of a new way of condoning violent “patrons” of those who are different. On the other hand, [it] can also provide the most potent antidote to allowing the degradation of standards in American politics.

Of note, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell again mentioned our original book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, in the context of highlighting a “persuasion system” that “preys on the weak minds of elderly Fox viewers”:

*Please tell your family, friends, and colleagues about Dr. Lee’s new book! Send them this post, and they can purchase it here: The Much More Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 50 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Warn Anew. There is no more important book, in our view, at this time.

Announcement:

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

“Special Topics in One World or None”

The next session will be this Friday, June 20, 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, Poland, Russia, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, and Canada (with notable articles in Estonian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, 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.”