US President Donald Trump’s displays of power could get more dangerous as he advances further into his second term in office, an Ivy League-trained psychiatrist warned on Thursday.
According to Dr Bandy X. Lee, Trump’s hardline crackdown on immigrants by mobilising Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in large numbers, as well as the deployment of National Guard troops—both of which took place this year—had dark, psychological reasons behind them.
“Do you think that Donald Trump has a sense of his own limitations deep down?” The Daily Beast Podcast host Joanna Coles asked Dr Lee.
“Deep down, absolutely—and that is why he is constantly on guard. He’s paranoid,” the mental health professional responded.
“When he demands this kind of powerful positioning of himself, he’s doing so from a place of pathology. It’s not a healthy demand. So he’s doing so in a way that actually fuels his sense of insecurity, his own unfitness, his unbelonging, and so he will increasingly become more defensive and more dangerous,” Dr Lee added, saying that his quest for power “simply doesn’t benefit anyone”.
The podcast also discusses Trump’s purported abilities to psychologically manipulate the American populace and use social media as a sounding board.
“One of the principal reasons why—from the very beginning—that I have stated that the Trump presidency was a public health emergency … one part of that is nuclear danger … the other part is environmental danger,” she said.
Indeed, the former Yale psychiatrist gathered 27 people from the mental health field for her 2017 novel, ‘The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump’, which pointed to her reasons for calling him dangerous.
Three years later, Dr Lee was let go from Yale. The university cited a breach of the American Psychiatric Association’s Goldwater Rule, as the reason.
According to this rule, it is unethical for psychiatrists to offer a professional opinion on a public figure unless they examined the person and were authorised to make such statements.
“Once we contain him, we will see immediately how he would be reduced, he would fold in on himself and no longer be as threatening and intimidating as he seems right now,” Dr Lee said.
