We Almost Brought Down the Trump Presidency—which is Why I and My Colleagues have been Sidelined and Silenced

Crisis in Leadership Leads to Existential Crisis

16 hours ago

All we did was tell the truth. I have always maintained that the failure to constrain Donald Trump began when the psychiatric establishment placed power above science and psychiatric truth. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) was the first to capitulate to a destructive regime that demanded scientific organizations to be anti-scientific and democratic institutions to be anti-democratic, setting a dangerous precedent. I have said since the very beginning that, if leadership of the most relevant field served only power (as it lamentably already did Big Pharma), then it was a matter of time until all the rest capitulated, too. Indeed, this is what has happened with Big Tech, Big Media, Big Law, and Big Ed.

What I and my psychiatric colleagues had to say was powerful, because it was the truth: an inconvenient truth for all leaders. Even before I was removed from my position at Yale School of Medicine—my main role as a forensic psychiatrist was to teach law students, which I did for 17 years to great accolades—I had raised concerns about Yale Law School’s leadership. I expressed to a former dean my disappointment at the then-current dean’s undermining of public-interest law—for which Yale came to be known and revered—in favor of raw power. He lamented with me at the time: “Leadership in this generation is not what it used to be.”

Indeed, she would go on to be the dean who canceled my teaching and consulting roles at the Law School, for exercising academic freedom—even as she kept on an alleged sexual predator whom generation after generation of students complained against. My politically-inconvenient outspokenness needed to be disposed of immediately, even if correct, while the sexual exploitation of students was tolerated year after year, even if egregious, as long as the infamous professor’s spouse (also a Yale Law School professor) served as its “pipeline to the U.S. Supreme Court.”

I joined my alma mater as faculty after turning down high-powered global positions, because of its principles. This meant at the time that I would have to build a global health program from scratch, but I was simply happy to be in a place that did not sell out everything for power; now, Yale has only become the latest to join in. The School of Medicine, which had recently praised me for “raising the Department’s stature to national and international levels,” had no compunction in letting me go, when the highly ethically-compromised lawyer Alan Dershowitz made a typo-ridden, poorly-reasoned ethics complaint against me.

I took it as an opportunity: perhaps we could finally have an ethics discussion on the APA’s public stance that it had been stonewalling (against its members and the request by myself, Robert Jay Lifton, and Judith Herman)? No such thing was allowed. Such is the face of contemporary “leadership”, busy buttressing one another and protecting only its image with paranoid opacity. After changing the face of Yale Law School into something far more sinister and self-serving, the dean who endorsed my dismissal has moved onto other high-powered positions, having proven herself a “team player.”

We are living in a time of unfit leaders, when leaders are causing more calamities than they solve, and when their “leadership” is worse than if there were no leaders at all. The last people who need to be in power are now the ones most aggressively seeking it, for the wrong reasons: self-aggrandizement, profit, criminal impunity, or a pathological need for domination. This is how we have come to have and keep Donald Trump, even as he drives us all to the brink of species annihilation.

SiriusXM host Dean Obeidallah asked me about his alarming United Nations speech, of which I quote a segment here:

I have a big decision to make:… do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again? Do I drive them into hell, with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?…

Obeidallah posed to me the question:

So, based on your expertise,… is Donald Trump a threat to the point where he should not only be removed from office, but be placed in some kind of institution?

I answered:

Well, that is something I argued since his first term, and I believe that, at this point, it will be hard to find a mental health expert who would say he is not institutionalizable—which is by the criteria of dangerousness to self or others based on mental impairment. And, of course, he is not just a danger to your next-door neighbor; he is a danger to the entire American public, if not all humankind.
One thing that the public often misunderstands is that assessments of dangerousness or unfitness are done not by a personal physician [through] a face-to-face examination,… but it is done through objective observations of behavior … in the actual office where he is posing a danger, through collateral reports … from coworkers and close associates…. That is actually the kind of information that mental health experts use to assess somebody’s fitness….
The reckless war on Iran that he has launched … has unleashed global conflict in the region. It may have unleashed the beginnings of World War III. He has severed our global alliances. He has destroyed the global economy. But these things, of course, are minor compared to the catastrophic violence that can occur if he were to reach for the nuclear button….
That is why physicians who understand the nuclear dangers as well as those who specialize in dangerous disorders … have come together to urge Congress to act, to lawfully remove him from an office where he could unleash this level of destruction on the planet.

I was citing our Statement of Medical Concerns, signed by 36 of the most eminent medical authorities in the country, composed in February 2026 and entered into the Congressional Record in April 2026. Had Congress acted upon it immediately, we would have had no war on Iran, no global economic crisis, and no World War III…. Had the APA not silenced us from all major media in early 2018, we may not have had a second Trump presidency, a January 6 insurrection, a Covid pandemic crisis, or such decline in America’s global stature as we see today…. Now, however late, is the time for true leaders to act on an existential psychiatric emergency.

Announcement:

Dr. Bandy X. Lee is appearing weekly on Meidas Touch, on “The Weekend Show” with Anthony Davis (there are already signs of active suppression of the information she has to give, and therefore please be sure to spread the word)! Now is a critical period when much burden lies on the people to protect themselves. Attend her interactive, strategy sessions, such as her next Project for Human Survival planning meeting on Wednesday, September 30, 2026, at 5 p.m. EST / 2 p.m. PST, or her action-oriented, “the Ongoing Presidential Psychiatric Emergency” meeting on Saturday, October 17, 2026, at 3 p.m. EST / 12 noon PST. Paid subscribers will receive links an hour before (paid subscriptions are for participant protection; please contact her if you cannot afford a subscription but would like to attend).