{"id":426127,"date":"2026-01-20T19:47:18","date_gmt":"2026-01-20T19:47:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/426127\/"},"modified":"2026-01-20T19:47:18","modified_gmt":"2026-01-20T19:47:18","slug":"check-in-on-the-presidential-mental-health","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/426127\/","title":{"rendered":"Check-in on the presidential mental health"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some unexpected fall-out from the kerfuffle over Trump\u2019s letter to Norway \u2014\u00a0you know, the\u00a0give-me- the-\u00a0Nobel-or-Greenland letter:\u00a0Vice President\u00a0Dick Cheney\u2019s cardiologist, Dr. Jonathan Reiner, who is\u00a0a\u00a0CNN medical analyst, has tweeted out a call for congress to investigate whether the president is fit to serve. (See Reiner\u2019s tweet on RawStory<\/a>.) Sounds reasonable. Maybe Republicans in congress can be persuaded to take this escape hatch and end their (and our) misery?<\/p>\n

Speaking of misery, I was compelled before this story broke to check in with Dr. Bandy Lee. She\u2019s the forensic psychiatrist, formerly on the faculty at Yale School of Medicine, who edited the 2017 book\u00a0The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a collection of essays by 25 experts in psychology who shared the conviction\u00a0that they had a duty to warn.\u00a0As Lee mentions\u00a0in an interview with the Daily Beast<\/a>\u00a0<\/a>podcast,\u00a0the book gained some traction. Trump 45\u00a0chief of staff Gen. Kelly\u00a0was reported to have read it\u00a0and\u00a0treated\u00a0it as a \u201cuser\u2019s guide\u201d for his interactions with Trump during his first term. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Bandy Lee refused to be silent about the dangers of having\u00a0a man with Trump\u2019s pathology serving in high office. Yale fired her. She is still talking nonetheless.<\/p>\n

Bandy Lee specializes in, and\u00a0is renowned for, her work on violence.\u00a0 She wrote\u00a0a textbook on the subject. She approaches\u00a0violence from a public health perspective. Key to that is the concept\u00a0of contagion. (She published\u00a0a 2024 book titled\u00a0The Psychology of Trump Contagion.)\u00a0\u00a0In the interview, she illustrates this concept by talking about a family, all of whom\u00a0exhibited symptoms of schizophrenia. In truth, only one family member was actually schizophrenic. When that person was removed from the family and treated, the other members of the family returned to normal and required no treatment at all. Contagion.<\/p>\n

The Daily Beast <\/a>interview, done two months ago, is worth a listen. On Trump\u2019s psychopathology, she talks about his feelings of inadequacy, his \u201climitless insecurity.\u201d Unable to adjust himself\u00a0\u00a0to find fulfillment in the world that exists, he \u201cchanges reality to conform to his delusional sense\u201d of how he wants the world\u00a0to be, which saves him from having to confront his own inadequacies.\u00a0His \u201cfantastical thinking is never fulfilled.\u201d <\/p>\n

Think of all that has transpired in the\u00a0two months since this interview! Gold and more gold at the White House; a huge ballroom that can\u2019t be big enough; if acquiring one country and its natural resources is good, why not two? But, as Lee says, it will never be enough. <\/p>\n

Lee talks about the ICE agents that are there, in reality, to protect Trump from the people he is afraid of, the people who protest against\u00a0the delusional reality he inhabits and projects on the world.\u00a0ICE is\u00a0his\u00a0Praetorian guard, and, again, there will never be enough of them.<\/p>\n

More important than the Trump psychosis is what Bandy Lee has to say about those he infects, whether it\u2019s his MAGA supporters or the people lured into his inner\u00a0circle.\u00a0 She labels Trump as a \u201cspell binder\u201d who attracts people like himself, often people who are themselves insecure or prone to violence who are drawn to a strong-man figure from whom they can take direction and gain protection and status. The psychosis of the leader spreads and becomes a shared psychosis.\u00a0<\/p>\n

These are dynamics with which Lee has ample experience through her consulting work with prisons. She reports that she has dealt with maybe 1000 individuals with Trump\u2019s mental profile, most of them\u00a0in maximum security prisons. Her prescription, as violence spreads, begins first with \u201ccontainment,\u201d removing the disordered personality from the group.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We will have to get there, one way or another, whether congress takes Dr. Reiner\u2019s advice\u00a0or not. Waiting for the midterms seems inadvisable:\u00a0 \u201cthe Trump presidency is a public health emergency for the human species.\u201d<\/p>\n

Visit Bandy Lee\u2019s webpage<\/a> for the Daily Beast interview, other videos,\u00a0and links to articles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Some unexpected fall-out from the kerfuffle over Trump\u2019s letter to Norway \u2014\u00a0you know, the\u00a0give-me- the-\u00a0Nobel-or-Greenland letter:\u00a0Vice President\u00a0Dick Cheney\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":426128,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[64,63,137,514,515],"class_list":{"0":"post-426127","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-mental-health","12":"tag-mentalhealth"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=426127"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426127\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/426128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=426127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=426127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=426127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}