The Problem with the Trump Regime is 'Psychiatric, Not Political,' Expert Says

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Bandy X Lee, a psychiatrist and expert on violence, has campaigned for years to keep Donald Trump out of the White House, on the grounds that he’s “a seriously psychologically dangerous and disturbed person.”

In her March 22 Substack column, entitled “We Need to Recognize that the Problem is Psychiatric, Not Political,” she expanded on this theme and called for action: “We are in the most dangerous days of our lifetimes, days pregnant with an escalating World War and the very real possibility that a severely mentally-incapacitated American president… may escalate to nuclear weapons.”

In 2017, shortly after Trump’s first inauguration, Dr. Lee and a coalition of psychologists, psychologists and other mental health professionals organized the Duty to Warn conference at the Yale School of Medicine on the psychological risks posed by Trump and published a collection of essays titled “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.” She has since organized an interdisciplinary conference on the Trump’s unfitness for office at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., and published updated editions of the book, including “The Much More Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 50 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Warn Anew” in May of 2025. Today, she is imploring Americans to demand change.

“Our situation is more ominous than ever. Donald Trump’s moves, because they come from a pathological drive for destruction, are growing more and more dangerous, egregious, and unconstitutional,” Lee wrote earlier this month. “We can no longer continue to make excuses. We either rescue our country before it falls into ruin, or go down with the ship.”

She wrote that she found hope in an “astonishing number of student-led anti-ICE protests around the country,” including those organized by high school students, and noted that the No Kings demonstrations scheduled for March 28 “could become the largest nationwide protest in U.S. history.” (She suggests holding simple but actionable signs like “Have Trump take a full psychiatric exam” and “End the unconstitutional war on Iran.”) She also suggests that they refuse to leave – showing the administration as well as each other that the “seat of power is ours, not theirs.”

“Our time to do something bold has come,” Lee wrote, “and it may be our last.”