The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump

by Bandy X. Lee

  Gloria Steinem posted the Huffington Post article on her Facebook page, and contacted JH to brainstorm about who in the government could implement our recommendation. Robin Morgan suggested that we convey our letter to Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and reminded us of the series of events that transpired during the final days of the Nixon administration. Because President Nixon was drinking heavily and threatening war (Davidson, Connor, and Swartz 2006), the secretary of defense, James Schlesinger, instructed the military not to act on orders from the White House to deploy nuclear weapons unless authorized by Schlesinger or the secretary of state, Henry Kissinger (McFadden 2014). Robin Morgan thought that it would be useful for Chairman Dunford and the Joint Chiefs to be apprised of this history, because of Mr. Trump’s imminent access to the nuclear arsenal. Drs. Gartrell and Mosbacher contacted colleagues to obtain Chairman Dunford’s official e-mail address. On January 3, we sent our letter to Chairman Dunford, with the subject line: “An urgent matter of national security.”

  A week later, Dr. Gartrell met a woman who worked in government intelligence. Dr. Gartrell inquired if she would be willing to convey our recommendation to other professionals at the agency. The woman agreed to distribute our letter among key individuals who shared our views about Mr. Trump’s mental instability.

  As Inauguration Day grew closer, Dr. Gartrell, Dr. Mosbacher, Dr. Herman, Gloria Steinem, and Robin Morgan decided to send our letter to members of Congress whom we know personally or to whom we had access. We also agreed to publicize our recommendation whenever there was an opportunity. Dr. Mosbacher called House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and sent our letter to her. Gloria Steinem conveyed our letter to Senator Chuck Schumer, and Dr. Mosbacher discussed our recommendation with Senator Elizabeth Warren. At the Women’s March on Washington, Gloria Steinem quoted our recommendation during her speech (“Voices of the Women’s March” 2017). Robin Morgan read our letter during her Women’s Media Center Live radio show (Morgan 2017a), and quoted it in her blog (Morgan 2017b).

  Since being sworn in, Mr. Trump’s impulsive, belligerent, careless, and irresponsible behavior has become even more apparent:

  • He has angry outbursts when facts conflict with his fantasies (Wagner 2017). The day after the inauguration, he lashed out at the media for contradicting his claim that there were “a million, a million and a half people” on the Mall listening to his speech (Zaru 2017).

  • His opposition to the press borders on paranoia (Page 2017). He screams at the television when his ties to Russia are mentioned (Pasha-Robinson 2017). He calls the media “the enemy of the people” (Siddiqui 2017).

  • He deflects the blame for failed operations, such as the air strike he authorized in Yemen that killed thirty civilians and a U.S. Navy SEAL (Schmitt and Sanger 2017; Ware 2017).

  • He makes false and unsubstantiated claims that are easily disputed, asserting, for instance, that the Yemen action yielded significant intelligence (McFadden et al. 2017), and accusing President Obama of spying on Trump Tower (Stefansky 2017).

  • He discredits other branches of the government. After issuing an executive order banning immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries, Mr. Trump sought to delegitimize the decisions of federal courts that imposed a halt to the ban, and used demeaning language to dishonor the judiciary (e.g., referring to James Robart as a “so-called judge”) (Forster and Dearden 2017).

  • He praises authoritarian leaders of other countries. Mr. Trump admires despots Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, and Rodrigo Duterte (New York Times Editorial Board 2017; Pengelly 2017), and invited Abdel Fatah al-Sissi and Recep Tayyip Erdogan to the White House (Nakamura 2017; DeYoung 2017).

  • He deflects attention from Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. After firing the director of the FBI during its criminal investigation into collaboration between Russian intelligence and the Trump campaign, Mr. Trump met with Putin’s senior diplomat and revealed highly classified intelligence (Miller and Jaffe 2017).

  • He is indifferent to the limits of presidential powers and fails to understand the duties of the office. He could not answer the simple question “What are the top three functions of the United States government?” (Brown 2016).

  • He provokes North Korea with casual references to impending military actions. Mr. Trump claimed that an “armada” was steaming toward North Korea as a “show of force,” resulting in a defensive response from Kim Jong-un, whose state news agency called Mr. Trump’s bluff “a reckless act of aggression to aggravate tension in the region” (Sampathkumar 2017).

  All in all, Mr. Trump’s hostile, impulsive, provocative, suspicious, and erratic conduct poses a grave threat to our national security.

  The Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution addresses presidential disability and succession (Cornell University Law School, 2017). Section 4 of this amendment has never been invoked to evaluate whether a standing president is fit to serve. We (Drs. Gartrell and Mosbacher) call on Congress to act now within these provisions to create an independent, impartial panel of investigators to evaluate Mr. Trump’s fitness to fulfill the duties of the presidency. We urge Congress to pass legislation to ensure that future presidential and vice-presidential candidates are evaluated by this professional panel before the general election, and that the sitting president and vice president be assessed on an annual basis. We also recommend that panel members receive all medical and mental health reports on the president and vice president, with the authorization to request any additional evaluations that the panel deems necessary.

  Our specific recommendations are as follows:

  • Under Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Congress should immediately constitute an independent, nonpartisan panel of mental health and medical experts to evaluate Mr. Trump’s capability to fulfill the responsibilities of the presidency.

  • The panel should consist of three neuropsychiatrists (one clinical, one academic, and one military), one clinical psychologist, one neurologist, and two internists.

  • Panel members should be nominated by the nonpartisan, nongovernmental National Academy of Medicine (Abrams 1999).

  • The experts should serve six-year terms, with a provision that one member per year be rotated off and replaced (Abrams 1999).

  • Congress should enact legislation to authorize this panel to perform comprehensive mental health and medical evaluations of the president and vice president on an annual basis. This legislation should require the panel to evaluate all future presidential and vice-presidential candidates. The panel should also be empowered to conduct emergency evaluations should there be an acute change in the mental or physical health of the president or vice president.

  • The evaluations should be strictly confidential unless the panel determines that the mental health or medical condition of the president or vice president renders her/him incapable of fulfilling the duties of office.

  Congress must act immediately. The nuclear arsenal rests in the hands of a president who shows symptoms of serious mental instability. This is an urgent matter of national security. We call on our elected officials to heed the warnings of thousands of mental health professionals who have requested an independent, impartial neuropsychiatric evaluation of Mr. Trump. The world as we know it could cease to exist with a 3:00 a.m. nuclear tweet.

  Nanette Gartrell, M.D., is a psychiatrist, researcher, and writer who was formerly on the faculties of Harvard Medical School and the University of California, San Francisco. Her forty-seven years of scientific investigations have focused primarily on sexual minority parent families. In the 1980s and ’90s, Dr. Gartrell was the principal investigator of groundbreaking investigations into sexual misconduct by physicians that led to a clean-up of professional ethics codes and the criminalization of boundary violations. The Nanette K. Gartrell Papers are archived at the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College.

  Dee Mosbacher, M.D., Ph.D., is a psychiatrist and Academy
Award–nominated documentary filmmaker who was formerly on the faculty of the University of California, San Francisco. As a public-sector psychiatrist, Dr. Mosbacher specialized in the treatment of patients with severe mental illness. She served as San Mateo County’s medical director for mental health and was senior psychiatrist at San Francisco’s Progress Foundation. The Diane (Dee) Mosbacher and Woman Vision Papers are archived at the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College. Dr. Mosbacher’s films are also contained within the Smithsonian National Museum of American History collection.

  Acknowledgments

  We thank Esther D. Rothblum, Ph.D.; Madelyn Kahn, M.D.; Judith Herman, M.D.; Robin Morgan; Gloria Steinem; Mary Eichbauer, Ph.D.; Nate Gartrell; Marny Hall, Ph.D.; Kathryn Lee, M.D; and Patricia Speier, M.D., for their assistance in the preparation of this chapter.

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