36 Mental Health Professionals Call for Trump’s Immediate, Lawful Removal from Office

Interview with Dr. Henry Abraham, professor of psychiatry emeritus at Tufts University School of Medicine and co-recipient of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize, conducted by Scott Harris

trump unfit for office

Dr. Henry Abraham talks about a group of 36 leading physicians and other doctors with expertise in mental health, who he’s acting as a spokesperson for, “who issued a statement calling for President Donald J. Trump’s immediate, lawful removal from office for medical reasons. His mental instability, coupled with his sole, unchecked authority to launch nuclear weapons, makes him a clear and present danger to the safety of all Americans.”

Dr. Abraham is co-recipient of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize for his role as the co-author of the Constitution of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and author of After the Genocides: Immigration, Education and the Prevention of Nuclear War.

SCOTT HARRIS: Dr. Henry Abraham, professor of psychiatry emeritus at Tufts University School of Medicine, co-recipient of the 1985 Nobel Prize for his role as the co-author of the Constitution of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. He’s also author of the book titled, After the Genocides: Immigration, Education and the Prevention of Nuclear War. Dr. Abraham, thank you so much for making time to be on our program tonight.
DR. HENRY ABRAHAM: Oh, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for asking me.
SCOTT HARRIS: So we’ve invited you here to talk about your role as spokesperson for the statement signed by 36 medical experts who declare that President Trump is too unstable to remain in office and certainly citing one of the worries I think many of us have about his unchecked power to launch nuclear weapons, certainly the most lethal arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world.
I wonder as we begin, if you would just tell us about the long journey of psychiatrists and psychologists who’ve been focused on the concern regarding Donald Trump’s mental health going back to the 2016 elections and the book. And we’ve talked about the book with Dr. Bandy Lee several times, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, that was a similar kind of compendium of concerns about Donald Trump’s mental state as he became president that first time out in 2017.

DR. HENRY ABRAHAM: Well, it’s a pretty big question. Certainly, Dr. Lee has been a pioneer in this problem area. But it seems like a lot of the original observations had to do with the president’s character and whether it was a disordered character and whether that disordered character was appropriate for a person to be the president of the United States. But as time has gone on … and I was not a part of that process. I’m a lifelong peace activist, but I wasn’t convinced that there was any strong psychiatric arguments to be made that Donald Trump was in some way a particularly defective president. We’ve had some pretty tough customers who’ve been presidents throughout our history and I was not an early believer that he was a true danger to the country. It took me 10 years to figure that out.

And in that time what accrued was a series of simply clinical signs and symptoms. We can never make a real diagnosis without a comprehensive assessment of a person. And whether or not they are voluntary is almost a secondary question because we diagnosed The Unabomber (Ted Kaczinski) and he was not necessarily signing up as a patient. And we put together evidence painstakingly over time to come up with a psychiatric diagnosis and even then it’s a label and it doesn’t really do justice to the larger context of the story.

And I was, for one, very slow to come to any conclusion that there should be a label applied to Donald Trump. And at this moment I still don’t feel confident about applying a label. But, that being said, I feel absolutely certain that he has exhibited a large number of psychiatric and some soft and neurological symptoms over time that have gotten worse and I’m afraid more dangerous. And finally, I have to say Donald Trump smoked me out and forced me to come forward and say, “This is not normal. This is not worse than not normal. This is dangerous stuff and I have to come out and speak out about this.” And my colleagues and I felt that way and I’m not sure why they asked me to be the tip of the spear of it.

I’m one of the oldest tips of the spear, so maybe I’m one of the dullest, so they thought, “Well, we’ll have Dr. Abraham do it.” In any event, the bottom line is that I’m representative of a large number of top flight American psychiatrists and neurologists and those people are … I have every confidence that they were on the right path and they asked me to do this job and so I’m happy to do it. But in other words, we don’t have a diagnosis for this guy. We shouldn’t. It doesn’t have scientific integrity as part of it, but what we do have are undeniable red flags on the field and whether or not they’re getting worse I think is a matter of clinical judgment. My own feeling is yes, they’re getting worse.

There’s a great quote from a psychologist who has been early on an observer of Trump and he has made a great, great point. He says, “Look, he believes that the president is developing dementia—more on that in a minute—but he believes that the president is developing a dementia, which is of course a terrible thing and absolutely the worst possible disorder for someone who’s a president in control of nuclear weapons. But he has a really good description of what dementia is like. And I’ve worked with dementia patients for many years. He says the person you see today is as good a person as you’re going to get going forward. And I think that’s true with respect to Donald Trump. The best version of Donald Trump is the one that we saw today and what that means is that it’s all downhill from this point.

Now the question is how quickly downhill? And I think that’s an argument. That’s a matter of debate. Some feel that he’s dropping off a cliff. I do not believe that, but I do believe that he’s getting worse in his collection of symptoms and signs. And I’ve written about that. I’ve gone public with it and Scott, I’m talking to you about it tonight.

SCOTT HARRIS: Right. Let me reintroduce you. We’re speaking with Dr. Henry Abraham, professor of psychiatry emeritus at Tufts University School of Medicine. And Dr. Abraham is acting a spokesperson for the statement signed by 36 medical experts who declare that President Trump is too unstable to remain in office citing the nuclear weapons risk as maybe number one on their list. Dr. Abraham, I wonder if you’d review for our listeners some of the symptoms and examples of Donald Trump’s behavior that have raised the red flags that have you and the other 35 medical experts saying that he’s really not fit to hold office.

DR. HENRY ABRAHAM: Well, saying that he’s not fit is almost like a punishment. And I’m not thinking in those terms. I’m thinking as a physician looking at someone who in all likelihood is developing a series of very serious and debilitating psychiatric and neurological disorders—which I’m not certain—but I can describe the symptoms quite clearly. Certainly he’s told more lies than any president in the United States ever as far as we can tell. And he could just say he’s a bad man. And I mean, you can make those moral judgments if you want, but as a clinician, I try not to make moral judgment. I try to say, does he know right from wrong? And I’m not sure he does. Has he ever? I’m not sure he has. And is that an evolving problem? I don’t think it is. And so early on I said, “Gee, this guy isn’t telling the truth. This is not making sense. He’s a dishonest person.” But I didn’t really push it farther than that.
But as time went on, this business about having won the election in 2020. He didn’t win the election. The crowd size wasn’t the biggest ever. And he kept saying these things again and again. And you wondered, is this just a salesman who’s making a pitch over and over until you buy what he’s selling?
Or does he believe something that’s false in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence? If it’s the second one, then he has a delusion and maybe a little delusion, it may be not overwhelming delusion, but it’s a delusion. It’s a psychotic symptom. If that is true, then we have something really to worry about.
And then his behavior began to get even more weird. He began to talk about himself as having essentially no limits. He could do “whatever he wanted. Nothing could stop him.” He was his own morality. And then following that in time, he began to really get even more bizarre in his grandiosity. He began dressing up like the pope in a way that makes my Catholic friends and their flesh creeps. And I think, well, okay, he’s just mocking the pope. But then he had images of himself acting like Jesus and shaking hands with God.
And it was like, “What’s going on with this guy?” Well, what’s going on is these are the clinical signs and symptoms of grandiosity. Why he’s grandiose I can’t tell you. You can probably take up the time of weeks and months of classes of medical students figuring out what the possible differential diagnosis is of this president. And that I think is kind of the take-home lesson. He’s a very complex man.
They’ll be writing about this guy for a long time and the labels that comprise the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association, of which I was one of the contributors for any number of additions, those labels don’t really begin to do justice to the signs and symptoms that he’s showing, but they do tend to pull together and in time, perhaps we will have answers to these questions. But why has he stayed up all night bingeing on tweets and posts that he would send out oftentimes 150 a night? You say, “That’s not normal. That’s not a normal thing.”
What about his attacks of rage or his impulsivity or his inability to stick to a policy and change his mind again and again and again?This doesn’t add up. It’s too erratic. It’s unpredictable.
SCOTT HARRIS: Dr. Abraham—
DR. HENRY ABRAHAM: I’ll close out my little point here. Not only is it unpredictable and erratic, but this is a guy who only has control of nuclear weaponry. He can launch a nuclear attack if in the middle of the night he’s on a binge and he’s enraged and he says, “I’m going to show these Iranians something really eye catching.” And in fact, he’s already made several threats in that direction. Anyway, that’s the overview of how this guy got me off the couch.
SCOTT HARRIS: Yes, he did. We’re speaking with Dr. Henry Abraham, professor of psychiatry emeritus at Tufts University School of Medicine and we’re talking about the statement that Dr. Abraham is acting as spokesperson for of 36 medical experts who declare President Trump too unstable to remain in office. Dr. Abraham, if you had your way, what would you like the cabinet of the Donald Trump administration to do right now in terms of the 25th Amendment?

DR. HENRY ABRAHAM: Well, I think the 25th Amendment has really never been applied and it’s hard from a historical point of view for me to imagine that his cabinet would say, “Yeah, Dr. Abraham, you’re making some serious points here. And we’re as worried as you are about him possibly nuking Tehran.” From a human and from a political point of view, I’d like to see the 25th Amendment applied, but I have a feeling that I don’t have great hope in that regard. The single best thing that I can think of, perhaps it’s a little cynical, but the single best thing would be for Donald Trump to take the money and run—that he’s essentially grifted out of the treasury and from the Saudis and from his business partners—and resign. That would be, I think, the least traumatic way in which we could get out of this terrible dilemma that we’re in, that this man seems to be declining and he has dangerously large powers available to him.

SCOTT HARRIS: Absolutely.

DR. HENRY ABRAHAM: It’s not my job. I mean, as a political person, I guess I could say there are three reasons why the president should be impeached. The impeachment is in addition to the 25th Amendment. Impeachment’s a possible solution to the problem. He can be impeached because he has moral turpitude, which is debatable. The MAGA people don’t think he does and I do.

Just for moral reasons, he should not be president. Then there are policy issues. He shouldn’t have gone to war in Iran. He shouldn’t have closed down the USAID. It’s going to cause the deaths of millions of kids in Africa. It’s terrible, terrible policy. It’s wrong policy, but it’s not mental illness. The third path is in fact psychiatric and neurological—that is, this man is losing the ability to function on a normal level and that threatens all of us. And that’s the only basis for impeachment that I would support.

SCOTT HARRIS: Well, Dr. Abraham, we’re almost out of time. I wanted to —

DR. HENRY ABRAHAM: Okay.

SCOTT HARRIS: Yeah, unfortunately we are. Definitely, there’ll be more to talk about in the coming weeks, I’m certain, but yeah, we will have you back. But how do our listeners find this statement of the 36 medical experts of which you’re a spokesperson for?

DR. HENRY ABRAHAM: Well, they can log onto my Substack page. I have written extensively about it and the documents are there and that’s henryabrahammd.substack.com. And that would be a good way to start.

SCOTT HARRIS: All right. Well, thank you so much for spending time with us and for your energy and time that you’re putting towards alerting the public to this menace, this danger to us all. And appreciate you spending time with us tonight. So thanks, Dr. Abraham.

DR. HENRY ABRAHAM: Thanks for the chance to share.

SCOTT HARRIS: Great. We’ll talk soon again. I hope we’ll be in touch. Thank you, Dr. Abraham.

DR. HENRY ABRAHAM: Bye-bye.

SCOTT HARRIS: Take care. That’s Dr. Henry Abraham, professor of psychiatry emeritus at Tufts University School of Medicine. This is Counterpoint. My name is Scott Harris.

 

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