Since President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, questions about his cognitive health have intensified, fueled by a growing number of mental health professionals and political observers who cite his increasingly meandering speeches, pathological lying, episodes of drowsiness or sleeping in meetings and policy decisions viewed as erratic.
There are many examples of President Trump’s decisions that critics, policy analysts and former officials have described as impulsive, inconsistent or difficult to explain. These include repeatedly imposing, postponing, modifying and reinstating major tariffs targeting dozens of countries around the world; political attacks against longtime U.S ally Canada; demanding U.S. ownership of Greenland; and launching the U.S. war on Iran with no credible rationale or strategy, while repeatedly threatening to annihilate Iran’s civilization.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Dr. Bandy Lee, a forensic and social psychiatrist who serves as president of the World Mental Health Coalition. Dr. Lee is editor of the bestselling book, The Much More Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, and The Psychology of Trump Contagion. Here she discusses the statement issued by 36 leading physicians and mental health professionals, who called for President Trump’s immediate, lawful removal from office for medical reasons, which was entered into the Congressional Record in April this year, and expresses her concerns about Trump’s effort to subvert the outcome of this November’s midterm election.
Producer’s note: This segment is an excerpt of an interview originally broadcast on WPKN Radio’s Resistance Roundtable program, conducted by Ruth Anne Baumgartner, Scott Harris and Richard Hill on Sept. 17, 2026.
That means that all of humankind could go into extinction based on the whim of one individual and there would be nothing we could do about it. I joined forces with the physicians of the IPPNW or the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 for educating the public on the dangers, on the medical dangers of nuclear war, that essentially a nuclear war would be unwinnable, that no amount of doctors and hospitals could be of any help in the case of a nuclear war. As
Nikita Khrushchev said it would be a situation where the living will envy the dead. That’s an overarching danger that has come to our greater attention. And so actually it was Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and Jack Reed from Rhode Island who reached out to members of the IPPNW and myself asking for a statement. And we issued this for them, inviting other Nobel laureates and former chairs of departments, truly the most eminent medical scholars and clinicians in the country to join us in this statement—36 of them, to make this urgent statement. We drafted it even before the reckless war against Iran was launched to the peril of widespread conflict in the region and trouble with the economy and global economy. And it was finally entered into the Congressional Record, as you said, well into the war in Iran and escalating dangers of nuclear war as well as global war.
SCOTT HARRIS: Dr. Lee, since Donald Trump’s re-election in 2024, he’s been openly engineering a multi-pronged plot to interfere with and manipulate the outcome of this November’s midterm election. The plots included attempts to legislate new election rules that would have disenfranchised millions of eligible voters, take over mail-in voting, mid-decade gerrymandering across the country, and threats to prevent the certification and seating of Democrats who could win their congressional seats this November. But perhaps the most dangerous threat is Trump’s signaling that he’s prepared to declare a national emergency, invoke the Insurrection Act and order the U.S. military or a combination of ICE agents and the U.S. military to seize ballots, close down polling sites, and/or repress nonviolent protests that would likely erupt if he attempts to prevent a free and fair election or illegally reject the results of the election. What are your concerns about Trump’s state of mind when it comes to what he’s capable of regarding intervention in the November election?
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