President Donald Trump’s power grabs could become increasingly more dangerous because of the dark motivations behind them, a forensic and social psychiatrist warned Wednesday.
Dr. Bandy Lee, an Ivy League-trained mental health professional who has been sounding the alarm on Trump’s mental fitness since his first term, said the president’s mobilization of thousands of immigration agents and National Guard troops comes from a place of paranoia.
“Do you think that Donald Trump has a sense of his own limitations?” The Daily Beast Podcast host Joanna Coles asked.
“Deep down, absolutely—and that is why he is constantly on guard. He’s paranoid,” Lee responded.
“These kinds of acts come out of his own almost limitless insecurity,” she went on. “Because when he demands this kind of powerful positioning of himself, he’s doing so from a place of pathology. It’s not a healthy demand. So he’s doing so in a way that actually fuels his sense of insecurity, his own unfitness, his unbelonging, and so he will increasingly become more defensive and more dangerous.”
Lee added that “it simply doesn’t benefit anyone” to enable Trump’s quest for more power and influence.
The former Yale psychiatrist first made waves in Trump 1.0, when she gathered two dozen mental health experts to assess the president’s cognitive faculties in the bestselling book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. Lawmakers later invited her to a Capitol Hill briefing about Trump’s mental fitness.
Lee drew the ire of Trump’s inner circle in 2020 when she claimed in a social media post that his supporters were in a “shared psychosis” and that Alan Dershowitz, then a member of his legal team, had “wholly taken on Trump’s symptoms by contagion.”
Yale fired her in the aftermath, citing a violation of the American Psychiatric Association’s Goldwater Rule, which states that it is unethical for psychiatrists to offer a professional opinion unless they have conducted an examination and received proper authorization to make such statements.
But speculations about the state of the 79-year-old president’s health continue to intensify after several sightings of his bruised hands and swollen ankles, as well as multiple mental flubs that some psychologists see as signs of cognitive collapse.
Questions about Trump’s health once again rose to the fore after Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt revealed that the president underwent an MRI last month. The White House has consistently maintained, however, that Trump “remains in exceptional health.”
Lee, who has worked in maximum-security prisons treating violent offenders, said it was necessary to impose limits on Trump’s power grabs.
“One thing about dangerous individuals such as Donald Trump is that once we contain him, we will see immediately how he would be reduced, he would fold in on himself and no longer be as threatening and intimidating as he seems right now,” she said. “My solution really is for all manner of institutions, agencies, stakeholders to please consider consulting us mental health experts who deal with these situations day in and day out.”
The White House dismissed Lee’s remarks in a statement to the Daily Beast.
“Hopefully this ‘doctor’ knows how to treat TDS — she can start with herself,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said.
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