The Daily Beast Podcast - Why Trump's More Dangerous Every Day: Psychiatrist

Episode Date: November 6, 2025

Dr. Bandy X. Lee, forensic and social psychiatrist, joins Joanna Coles to sound the alarm regarding President Donald Trump’s dire mental health problems. She explains how Trump’s paranoia, fear of exposure, and relentless need for power drive his behavior—from deploying guards to manipulating supporters—and how these patterns spread through society, creating true mental health contagion. Dr. Lee asks: How do we contain a leader whose fragility fuels his power? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Do you think that Donald Trump has a sense of his own limitations? Deep down, absolutely. And that is why he is constantly on guard. He's paranoid. He is doing whatever he can. People may think he's the most powerful man on the planet. Why does he need more and more? He's now accumulating ice agents as government police force.

He's now required every state to. deploy 500 National Guard members to function essentially as a guard for himself against the people. Because when he demands this kind of powerful positioning of it 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 unbelling. And so he will increasingly become more defensive and more dangerous. I'm Joanna Coles.

This is the Daily Beast podcast. And today's guest is someone that many of you have requested, Dr. Bandi Lee. She's a forensic and social psychiatrist turned whistleblower on power, violence and presidential pathology. After 17 years at the Yale School of Medicine and Yale Law School, with stints at Harvard Medical School and the World Health Organization, she became the voice shouting what many in Washington only whispered. The president was not well. Lee edited the dangerous case of Donald Trump. The 2017 bestseller that assembled 27 mental health professionals, warning that Trump's behaviour wasn't politics as usual, but a symptom of something darker, a national emergency in plain sight.

Her outspokenness ignited a professional firestorm over the Goldwater Rule, the American Psychiatric Association's edict forbidding psychiatrists from diagnosing public figures they hadn't actually examined. Yale said she crossed the line. Lee said she honoured her ethical duty to warn the public. The establishment called her reckless, her supporters called her brave. A top-tier academic with a taste for moral combat, Dr. Lee has taken psychiatry out of the ivory tower and into the political battlefield. And she's still standing and she's joining us now. Dr. Lee, let's get into it. So could not be more pleased to be joined by Dr. Bandi Lee. Now, as many of you who follow the podcast closely may know, may recognize from our comments,

you are singly the most demanded guest. People from everywhere, from Australia, from Europe, from all sorts of states in the US have said you need to talk to Dr. Bandi Lee. So we're very pleased to have you with us. And I know that in 2017, you became known for editing the very influential, the dangerous case of Donald Trump, which was a collection of arguments and essays by mental health professionals about why Donald Trump was not actually suitable to be president. What have you noticed since Donald Trump won? and the newly invigorated Donald Trump too. Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me.

I may summarize the first book's thesis as being that Donald Trump was more dangerous than he appeared to be, that he was bound to only increase in his dangerousness, and that if we fail to contain him early on, he would become uncontainable. And that was my warning. And as many of the listeners may know, it catapulted into the number one, and it became an instant bestseller. It was, it raised us to the number one topic of national conversation.

And within three months, we were speaking with more than 50 Congress members who were actually stating they were depending on us. to be able to educate them public medically so that they could intervene politically. And so we took it as a seriously important task and responsibility. But very oddly, the American Psychiatric Association came out right at the height of our influence, that we were being unethical and that it was violating. what is informally known as the Goldwater Rule. What were the prime reasons that the writers and the psychiatrists who you gather together for the dangerous case about Donald Trump? What were their key findings and what were the things, the symptoms, if you like, that were most alarming?

And then I want to ask you about those symptoms now because it can't have gotten better. Well, the book actually came out of a conference that I held at Yale School of Medicine, inviting long-term colleagues who are actually the most renowned members of the psychiatric profession, Robert J. Lifton, Judith Herman, James Gilligan, and others. and we had gathered there to speak about the ethics of publicly alerting about a mentally impaired president. And at that time, we were most concerned about exactly what we are seeing now, that he had a dangerous psychology, that his influence would spread through society, and that we would see anti-governing instead of governing, that we would see a malignant normality take hold instead of our usual normal reality testing,

and that our society would become self-destructive. And the specific symptoms that allowed us to see that were his violence-proneness, his, he was verbally aggressive. He was boasting about sexual assaults. He was attracted to violent dictators and dangerous weapons. He was inciting crowds to perform dangerous acts. He stated that he would support and pay the legal fees if people engaged in violent behavior. And this kind of stoking of violence was really what, um, he was, we were most concerned about because the greatest danger comes not from physically

punching out one person at a time, but rather the rhetoric and the psychological conditioning that would transmit his own attraction to violence and instigate violence through society. You mentioned the phrase malignant normality. Can you take us through what that actually means? Yes. I have worked most of my career in the public sector setting in prisons and state hospitals. And so I've actually seen many situations in which severely mentally impaired individuals are left untreated. So in other words, the proper intervention that I earlier expressed that should also apply to a president of first, the first citizen is also entitled to the medical standard of care that we apply to everyone else. But that was not done because of multiple factors.

And so what we saw in larger societies, actually, what I have seen multiple times and to very severe extents, what happens when individuals are not contained and they are allowed to continue in their households, in their street gangs, they're often, when it happens in dominant figures, such as in prison blocks, you see that the mental symptoms, it's not really the healthy people who contain

the individual with severe symptoms, it's rather the symptoms in that, prominent individuals that spread to earlier healthy individuals. And I tried to describe this in my book that I also rapidly wrote in 2024 called The Psychology of Trump Contagion, an existential danger to American democracy in all humankind. And what I was trying to illustrate there is that the severe pathology has. as a way of overriding because of emotional compulsion and the innate drive to, in other words, override reality and overcome it in order to convert it to a reality that is more acceptable,

more tolerable to oneself. Now, most of us who don't have severe symptoms don't experience this, because we're more concerned about adjusting to reality and fixing reality in a way that would be beneficial to us and truly bring about positive outcomes. But those who cannot, who do not believe that that is even possible, in part because of their own experiences and their own symptoms rising from the fact that reality was, somehow intolerable to them. The fact that one was, um, uh, one's own sense of inadequacy or, uh, incompetence would be so unacceptable to oneself that one would rather, uh, change all of reality and, and, uh, fix people and in important positions to be able to affirm that one's alternative reality or one's own, uh,

delusional sense of reality is is more correct than when that dried is greater, then there's less of a motivation to learn what reality is and to respond properly to it and to adjust in ways that will be productive and ultimately truly fulfilling. because fantastical thinking is usually never fulfilled. And the hunger even simply grows with time. Dr. Lee, if he were your patient and he came to you, how would you treat Donald Trump? Well, first, you need to set limits to show him that he cannot do all the things as he pleases

and actually pursuing power and influence and force everyone else is really not going to get him his end goals, which is to find himself acceptable and the world around him acceptable. So what I do with patients is, and I treat many individuals like him. In fact, I've probably seen at least a thousand individuals with his psychological structure. Good Lord. A thousand. Wow. Thank goodness they didn't all run for president. Yes. In fact, they're quite common, especially in the maximum security prison setting where I work. Right. What a great juxtaposition. So you've treated a thousand of them. How do you begin to set limits?

Well, first of all, there are limits set already by the time they're. come to treatment in prisons. But I also advise courts, prisons, and governments on containing individuals who are dangerous. And the first step is containing them, removing them from access to, essentially access to settings where they can cause harm. And part of that also is if they're a publicly influential person, then their policy. or rhetoric could also cause harm. And so it's advising these bodies to, with sentencing guidelines or treatment guidelines in terms of how much containment they need.

I usually recommend the minimum necessary, the minimally restrictive guidelines to be able to contain them, and keep society safe. So the first step is to keep society safe from such individuals. And that is where it's critical that mental health experts speak up. That is what we decided in very early at the onset of the first Trump presidency. That's why we all got together and decided. It was really an ethics conference that from which we unanimously decided that we had an ethical responsibility to society to warn of the dangers that we saw. And it's not common that mental health experts have such a public or societal role, but at that time, the situation was such that our voices became relevant and perhaps the most

relevant. And others thought so, too. Former White House Chief of Staff General John Kelly secretly bought our book and it was later publicized that he used it as an owner's manual for the dangers that were occurring in the White House. And I think General Millie bought it too, didn't he? I mean, I understand there was a sort of undercurrent of people around Trump all reading this book to try and figure out how to deal with him. But are you suggesting that he should actually be incarcerated? I mean, his power is limitless at the moment. How would you enforce limits on him?

So right now we have a very complex situation in which we have to truly mobilize all kinds of methods that we have, given the power that he's been able to co-opt in the meantime. We've warned that the longer that he is not stopped, that he would become unstoppable. And right now, frankly, many people are afraid, many people are afraid, many agencies and institutions that would have contained him in the past, or would have contained such an individual in other circumstances, have all cowered and have become fearful of his threats, intimidation, and bullying methods. But what's important to understand is that the longer we allow this to go on,

the more dangerous he will become and we will not be keeping ourselves. safe. So we're in the situation we're in. Is there anybody you see around him trying to contain him? Right now, I think it's truly up to the public and the nation and we should be doing it from every angle that we can. And the recent no king's protest was one. One example, where people turned up, but the people also need to make use of the agencies that are available, the specialized knowledge that is available, for instance, mental health, is not meant to be simply employed for private patients and those with wealth and power who can afford to consult with us, but rather it's knowledge that should be accessible and available to the people. And when mental health experts themselves came out in droves, my organization, the World Mental Health Coalition, at one point was 5,000 members, all professionals.

And we were all eager to speak. But it somehow got into the public understanding that mental health experts are the only persons not allowed to speak about mental health issues, which is quite absurd, if you think. about it? Yeah, it's very curious that the industry itself has been closed down not only by its own professional body, the APA, but as you say, mental health experts themselves have been derided for drawing attention to what they claim are Donald Trump's shortcomings. And yet, one can't deny he's been elected again. He's got all three chambers of government. Do you think that Donald Trump has a sense of his own limitations? Deep down, absolutely.

And that is why he is constantly on guard. He's paranoid. He is doing whatever he can. People may think he's the most powerful man on the planet. Why does he need more and more? He's now accumulating ice agents as government police force. He's now required every state to deploy 500 National Guard members to function, essentially, as a guard for himself against the people. And these kinds of acts come out of his own almost limitless insecurity that is further being fed by his being allowed.

the kind of power and position that he has been given, because when he demands this kind of powerful positioning of it 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 on fitness, his unbelling. And so he will increasingly become more defensive and more dangerous. And it simply doesn't benefit anyone to continue to enable this drive. Dr. Lee, we're going to stop for a quick ad break. And we're back with Dr. Bandi Lee discussing the president's mental health. Why do his supporters, in particular, find him as appealing as they do? Because he has enticed them, in a sense hypnotize them.

In political psychology, we actually call these individual spellbinders. And they use a kind of psychological manipulation through superficial charm, those who see through him, can see through him at once, but actually the longer he is allowed public exposure, the more effective he will become, even eventually, for those who initially saw through him and were not enticed. And then you're too far involved and perhaps of sacrifice too much, that even if you do not find that he is any longer anything that he said he was going to be, that you cannot let go.

It is too painful to think that you have invested so much for so long. And in some ways, it's more, he has made you fight for him for your own psychic survival, the way he fights for himself. And so it's not really by people's reasoned, informed consent that they have enlisted to buy into his views, but rather his spread of symptoms through exposure. And that's what I describe in my last book, The Psychology of Trump Contagent, that it's a contagious effect. and which eventually arrives at a state that's called shared psychosis, or more precisely, Foli a million.

It was initially discovered as a phenomenon 150 years ago, as folie a two. But it doesn't have to be two. It can be folia three, four, five, folia family, folia group, Fourier nation, and what we're seeing

is what the social psychologist Eric Fromm dubbed Foria Million, madness by the millions. It doesn't mean that each individual is affected by mental illness. It means that as a group, we would

not be able to make decisions in a healthy direction, but act as if we ourselves have lost reality testing and are attracted to self-destructive acts and will condone those acts. What is it like being in the inner circle of someone like Donald Trump? I'm thinking about the madness of millions, the Eric From Point, is so interesting. How do you think about, for example, Donald Trump's wife doesn't seem to be around at all at this point.

She was around a little bit during Trump 1, but seems to have pretty much disappeared for Trump 2 or only turns up at very few occasions. His daughter has sort of fled and said she doesn't want anything to do with politics. It's too cruel a game for her. The people that worked with him closely last time one thinks of Vice President Pence are nowhere to be. nor is John Kelly, his former chief of staff or General Millie. In fact, they're now sort of persecuted by Trump. And one thinks recently of Donald Trump calling Mike Pence a wimp, which Jonathan Carl reported in his book.

I mean, you've described very effectively the sense of the country coming under this thrall. But what is it like being close up with someone like this? I mean, it manifests in multiple forms. it's actually been recorded since 150 years ago, that there are those who are, those who are synergistic with his psychology and therefore are further activated in terms of their own predispositions. There are others who did not have his predispositions earlier, but then it's created them in them, if you will, because of their personality leanings. And then there's a third group, those who were previously healthy,

who then take on his symptoms and act as if they have the similar symptoms as he does. But in fact, once they're removed from influence, they would return to normal. and there's the fourth group who resist him for the longest time but then are either exhausted or are later converted. And those are the individuals that are hardest to turn back. But these clinical studies have shown time and again that once you remove the person from exposure, what actually happens in prison settings or state hospital settings is that after an entire family looks like they're schizophrenic because of one individual having schizophrenia in the household and they can even adopt bizarre delusions.

You take a careful history, figure out who was the one who spread the symptoms, hospitalize them, and they're the only one you need to hospitalize. The rest of the family returns to normal. And it's the same with streaking. I've never heard that before, that you can have one person with schizophrenia in the family and then other people adopt the same symptoms. And then you extract that person and the family goes back to normal. That's right.

It's a very impressive phenomenon. and very dramatic. And that is what people do not realize. When Donald Trump was elected for the second time, it was not entirely out of people's well-reasoned volition. It is a natural result of having an individual with severe symptomatology continue to be exposed to the public. We don't think of mental symptoms as being contagious,

but in fact they may be more contagious. ages than physical symptoms because you don't need physical exposure to catch what they have, but only emotional bonds. And we see that from social media studies, and we see how negative emotions spread more quickly than positive ones, but mental symptoms spread rapidly, almost uncontrollably. And therefore, the social media, the media environment has augmented his ability to capture the public's mind. And this does not mean that it will remain this way forever. In fact, removing the person, of course, that's not the only thing you do, but removing them from exposure will actually bring a lot of people back to their original state of mind where they were able to think for

themselves and to reason and to see and to resist mental manipulations. Currently, we're at a state of low resistance and a state of high influence because of the unfettered access he has had to the public and increasingly so with the second Trump administration. Well, and also with social media, right, because there's just so much more visibility. I mean, he seems 24-7 to be on either legacy media or social media. Yes. I'm assuming that social media has made this much more pervasive. Yes, absolutely. And what I usually emphasize is what's important is not simply to show how Donald Trump is or what he's doing. In fact, allowing him access to the media and allowing him to speak to the public, we have seen what happened with a COVID pandemic. We became the number one country of COVID deaths. And what.

might have, in my opinion, been contained, maybe even at the epidemic stage, we had all the ability to do so and had contained other diseases that way in the past, became a pandemic because of multiple actions. I mean, he eliminated experts from the CDC and China. He bled the CDC almost dry, and he did many actions. But most important of all was that he continued to speak to the public during this pandemic, to shape the public's mind in terms of how to think about COVID and how to implement public health measures. Essentially, he convinced the public that public health measures were actually limiting of their freedom and bad for them, whereas COVID itself was a hoax. Now, the same thing is happening with the mental health pandemic. In fact, I have said that the mental health pandemic was much more urgent than the COVID pandemic, even when it was occurring.

And we now see that 1.2, the vast majority of the 1.2 million American deaths were, unnecessary. And unfortunately, we're setting ourselves up for a much more dangerous pandemic the next time. There will be no effective voices to be able to convince the public to keep itself safe through public health measures. The greatest public health intervention is education, be it infectious disease or a mental health pandemic. And I'm afraid that when mental health professionals were blacked out of the media, that was really when I said that that was a most dangerous sign of authoritarianism spreading. And now it's not only our voices. Now it's academic voices in

general, intellectuals, journalists, those who would speak the truth have been silenced, or bought up or threatened to the point where they cannot speak, what they need to speak. And the truth is becoming much more muted in the face of what we were calling earlier a malignant normality, where falsehood becomes truth, criminality becomes innocence, and mental pathomology becomes health, which means that the The reverse is true for those who are truly speaking the truth or truly innocent and truly healthy. Dr. Lee, a quick break for some ads. And we're back with Dr. Bandi Lee, a psychiatrist,

analyzing the president's health. We're told that we're living through a mental health crisis in the U.S. and that there is a loneliness epidemic and I think one at 20%, so one in five. young women in particular are taking antidepressants. What's your sort of point of view on that? Why is that happening now? Yes, that goes hand in hand with the mental health pandemic that we are seeing from the aggressiveness and the violence coming out of the Trump presidency,

the two Trump presidencies and even in between. I have actually stated in my profile of a nation. a 2020 book that the Trump presidency would not end unless there is a proper intervention. And psychologically, it didn't end in many people's minds. The public continued to expect that he would return and became curious that he was not elected or that would rather believe that the election was false and that he was the true president. All of that fueled his return, and during his return, he will implement societal conditions that not only reproduce more individuals who are impaired the same way as he is, but others who feel isolated, traumatized, depressed, those who still try to hold on to reality, in the face of malignant normality

will be further weakened and vulnerable to, if they weren't before, they would be pushed in the direction of mental illness, situation of mental illness, such as anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress symptoms, and many of those who, have been victims of violence, have stated that they have flashbacks and unwanted memories

from watching the Trump presidencies unfold. In fact, there's a chapter in the original book that says that the Trump presidency is like being an abusive relationship. In fact, it's a national a situation of national abuse. So a final question then, how do we pull out of this sense of being captured by someone? Well, it's been extensively written about in the psychological and psychiatric literature of how individuals can adopt a kind of cognitive dissonance or cognitive state for survival. We call it battered person syndrome. It's a bit like Stockholm

syndrome where you get caught by your captive and take over there or you help yourself remain captive. Yes. Yes. And the Stockholm syndrome is a great example of traumatic bonding because you're in a situation where you're held under life or death by your. your captor. It is so intolerable that you would rather choose to put your captor in the right and to idealize them, to consider them your savior rather than your violator. And we're in a very similar situation. I've written most recently about how dangerous it is that we have such an impaired person in charge of the nuclear arson of our country, in such a devastatingly dangerous state of a risk of nuclear war by so many countries now holding nuclear weapons

and threatening to use them. One of the principal reasons why, from the very beginning, that I have stated that the Trump presidency was a public health emergency, in fact, an emergency for the human species and for our collective survival. And one part of that is nuclear danger. The other part is environmental danger. The climate crisis that we're in recently, we've learned that we've surpassed the 1.5 Celsius goal that the Paris Climate Accord would have allowed us to keep, and we know how he pulled out with that and how he pulled out of a number of new agreements. But the third great danger on par with the others is his ability to hijack the public's mind. through manipulation, gaslighting, through projection and reversal of reality.

And these are the kinds of things that the public is unaccustomed to confronting. Those who have been victimized by this in their personal lives, professional lives, their workplaces, there are more and more individuals with narcissistic pathology. and psychopathic popology. It's kind of a growing phenomenon. Those who have personal studies with this

have learned to recognize more. Hainfully so. But the rest of the population needs to be educated. In fact, it's usually I imagine, beyond the realm of

Camadonich, the most public. It's not what we normally encounter, and yet something that we need to be aware of as it's becoming more and more epidemic in our society. So Donald Trump could be used as an example where we educate ourselves, respond appropriately, and learn to protect ourselves in future. or we can take us on a path where ignorance leads us, really, a state of fear, unknowing what is before us, imagining all kinds of dangers that actually are greater in our imagination than if we truly understood it and knew about it. Because one thing about dangerous individuals, such as Don Trump, said once we contain him, we will see immediately how he would be reduced, who would fold in on himself and no longer be as threatening and intimidating as he sees right now when he feels, well, he himself is fighting for his psychic life, his own image. and continuing to prop this off will not help him or ourselves.

So my solution really is for all manner of institutions, agencies, stakeholders to please consider consulting us. Mental health experts who deal with these situations day in and day out. Containing danger is one of the main work that we do. assessing, measuring, measuring level of danger and appropriating the correct amount of containment that would be mandatory for our safety and survival.

So there we have it. Containment. Dr. Bandi Lee, thank you so much for a very comprehensive explanation of what an earth is going on in America and very possibly the world. Do you have a website we can send people to to read more about your work and to read your books? Yes, bandylee.com, B-A-N-D-Y-L-E-E dot com. I also have a substack publication, bandy-x-le-d-Substack.com. Great. All right. Dr. Lee, we would love you to come back again and talk more to us.

but thank you for giving us a professional perspective of what is going on with the president and some hope that we can, in fact, break free of our collective Stockholm syndrome and live to see another president. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for having me. I've never thought of mental health symptoms of being contagious in the way that physical symptoms are. And I thought Dr. Lee's explanation of this. that was incredibly interesting. So thank you to everybody who suggested we invite her as a guest.

I look forward to being in the studio with her next time. It's always difficult doing interviews on Zoom, especially when you're meeting the person for the first time. But I'm excited to meet her in real time in the studio when she's next in New York. So if you have been, thank you for joining us. Don't forget to subscribe to our podcast, wherever you get your podcast. leave a comment if you happen to be watching on YouTube and review us if you're on Apple or Spotify. And don't forget, subscribe to The Daily Beast too. We're independent media and we really appreciate your support.

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