‘The Only Thing that Matters is Winning’

We Came Very Close. Next Time, We May Not Have a Second Chance.

In the days before January 6, 2021, even Hope Hicks, one of Donald Trump’s closest “advisers” kept urging Trump to speak up against violence and to stop inciting violence by claiming that the election was “fraudulent” and he had won.  We learned only on Monday, December 19, 2022, that Trump refused all such urgings and pleas, no matter whom they were coming from, insisting: “The only thing that matters is winning.”

That is exactly the kind of psychological defect we had warned would predispose him to say, think, and act in a way that would endanger the nation—even as his awareness of right and wrong renders him fully criminally indictable.  That is why we medical professionals, recognizing the dangerous psychological disposition in a man who was president and commander-in-chief, immediately began speaking up in 2017 and speedily published our book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.  Our goal was to prevent a violence insurgency—as would become inevitable with so unfit a person in the Oval Office—before it happened.

Additionally, only recently have we ourselves learned that our book was being “secretly” consulted by one of the highest officials in charge of the president at the time: none other than White House Chief of Staff General John Kelly—who used our book “as an owner’s manual” on how to protect the nation and the world from a man he himself recognized to be a great danger.

We must do more than merely respond to existential, deadly, and destructive national and international crises, only after the fact.  We have the scientific knowledge to foresee and to prevent calamities from happening in the first place and should make maximal use of that knowledge.  Next time, there may not be a second chance.