Some unexpected fall-out from the kerfuffle over Trump’s letter to Norway — you know, the give-me- the- Nobel-or-Greenland letter: Vice President Dick Cheney’s cardiologist, Dr. Jonathan Reiner, who is a CNN medical analyst, has tweeted out a call for congress to investigate whether the president is fit to serve. (See Reiner’s tweet on RawStory.) Sounds reasonable. Maybe Republicans in congress can be persuaded to take this escape hatch and end their (and our) misery?
Speaking of misery, I was compelled before this story broke to check in with Dr. Bandy Lee. She’s the forensic psychiatrist, formerly on the faculty at Yale School of Medicine, who edited the 2017 book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a collection of essays by 25 experts in psychology who shared the conviction that they had a duty to warn. As Lee mentions in an interview with the Daily Beast podcast, the book gained some traction. Trump 45 chief of staff Gen. Kelly was reported to have read it and treated it as a “user’s guide” for his interactions with Trump during his first term.
Bandy Lee refused to be silent about the dangers of having a man with Trump’s pathology serving in high office. Yale fired her. She is still talking nonetheless.
Bandy Lee specializes in, and is renowned for, her work on violence. She wrote a textbook on the subject. She approaches violence from a public health perspective. Key to that is the concept of contagion. (She published a 2024 book titled The Psychology of Trump Contagion.) In the interview, she illustrates this concept by talking about a family, all of whom exhibited 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.
The Daily Beast interview, done two months ago, is worth a listen. On Trump’s psychopathology, she talks about his feelings of inadequacy, his “limitless insecurity.” Unable to adjust himself to find fulfillment in the world that exists, he “changes reality to conform to his delusional sense” of how he wants the world to be, which saves him from having to confront his own inadequacies. His “fantastical thinking is never fulfilled.”
Think of all that has transpired in the two months since this interview! Gold and more gold at the White House; a huge ballroom that can’t 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.
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 the delusional reality he inhabits and projects on the world. ICE is his Praetorian guard, and, again, there will never be enough of them.
More important than the Trump psychosis is what Bandy Lee has to say about those he infects, whether it’s his MAGA supporters or the people lured into his inner circle. She labels Trump as a “spell binder” 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.
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’s mental profile, most of them in maximum security prisons. Her prescription, as violence spreads, begins first with “containment,” removing the disordered personality from the group.
We will have to get there, one way or another, whether congress takes Dr. Reiner’s advice or not. Waiting for the midterms seems inadvisable: “the Trump presidency is a public health emergency for the human species.”
Visit Bandy Lee’s webpage for the Daily Beast interview, other videos, and links to articles.