Dr. Bandy Lee, editor of the best-selling book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President,” told the New York Daily News on Thursday that she was contacted by members of the White House staff because the president was “scaring” them.
Lee made her comments to the Daily News during a week in which Donald Trump has erupted in “volcanic anger” at comments made about him in an anonymous New York Times editorial and in a new bombshell book from Bob Woodward.
The Yale University professor said that two officials from Trump’s White House officials contacted her a year ago due to their concerns about their boss’s increasingly erratic behavior.
“They said that Trump was ‘scaring’ them, that he was ‘unraveling,” Lee told the Daily News.
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“Not wishing to confuse the role I chose, as an educator of the public, and a potential treatment role, I referred them to the local emergency room without inquiring much further,” she added.
Lee said that she did not bring this news to the attention of the public before now because “I did not want to confuse my role an an educator to the public.”
“I thought I would be more effective by retaining my public role then getting involved in either the treatment of those who were feeling scared or in the actual intervention with the President,” she added.
Lee also wrote in an op-ed for the New York Daily News in February of this year in which she gave her opinion that the president is “a dangerous leader.”
In that op-ed, she listed examples of Trump invoking violence in speaking to rallies or in interviews, such as his “grab them by the p–sy” quotation from the “Access Hollywood” tape and his statement that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and [he] wouldn’t lose voters.”
“These are clear statements and acts of verbal aggression, sexual aggression, incitement to violence, endorsement of violence, encouragement of assassination, promotion of violent imagery, and actual threats and taunting of a hostile nation with nuclear power,” Lee wrote.
“Considering Mr. Trump as one of the authorities, I am following his words to say: Mr. President, please submit to a proper examination. If you do not wish to, you can always resign,” Lee wrote.
The New York Times op-ed was written by an anonymous “senior Trump administration official” who argued that the president’s actions are “detrimental to the health of the nation.”
In Woodward’s book he describes several scenarios in which frustrated White House officials tried to block Trump’s decisions because they were harmful.
Last year Lee was contacted by White House officials because they believed the President was “unraveling” a year ago. And we know that in the past year his mental state has deteriorated, and things are worse than they ever were.
This news from Dr. Lee confirms the information in the anonymous editorial and in the Woodward book. We are in a time of crisis because the most powerful person in the country — and in the world — is suffering from extreme mental illness and his behavior cannot be trusted. Steps must be taken immediately before further damage is done.
I am a lifelong Democrat with a passion for social justice and progressive issues. I have degrees in writing, economics and law from the University of Iowa.
