Why Trump's More Dangerous Every Day: Psychiatrist

Summary

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Podcast Summary: The Daily Beast Podcast

Episode: Why Trump's More Dangerous Every Day: Psychiatrist
Host: Joanna Coles
Guest: Dr. Bandy Lee (Forensic Psychiatrist, Author & Whistleblower)
Date: November 6, 2025

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Overview

This riveting episode features Dr. Bandy Lee, the renowned forensic psychiatrist and editor of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. The discussion is a sweeping—and urgent—analysis of Donald Trump's mental health, his effect on the American psyche, and the profound dangers posed by an unchecked leader with pathologically insecure, violent tendencies. Drawing from her extensive experience in psychiatry, prisons, and public health, Dr. Lee explains why she and other mental health professionals have issued persistent, public warnings about the psychological and societal contagion unleashed by Trump—and what must be done to contain it. The conversation explores psychiatric ethics, mass psychology, Stockholm syndrome, and how truth becomes “malignant normality” under authoritarian rule.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

The Origins of Psychiatric Warnings about Trump

• Danger Beyond Appearance:
  • Dr. Lee summarizes the thesis of her 2017 bestseller (The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump): Trump is “more dangerous than he appeared to be,” and if not contained early, “he would become uncontainable.” (05:59)
• Professional Backlash and Ethics:
  • The American Psychiatric Association (APA) invoked the Goldwater Rule to silence public diagnoses, a move Lee describes as paradoxically unethical because “mental health experts have an ethical responsibility to society to warn of the dangers that we saw.” (15:44)
  • Her warnings were embraced privately by high-level figures, including General John Kelly and General Mark Milley, who reportedly circulated her book to manage the presidency’s unpredictable dangers. (17:42)

Symptoms and Syndromes of Danger

• Key Signs Identified by Dr. Lee and Colleagues:
  • “Violence proneness... verbally aggressive, boasting about sexual assaults, attracted to violent dictators and dangerous weapons, inciting crowds to perform dangerous acts.” (08:01)
  • “The greatest danger comes not from physically punching out one person at a time, but rather the rhetoric and psychological conditioning that would transmit his own attraction to violence and instigate violence through society.” (09:12)
• Malignant Normality:
  • Lee describes how “severe pathology has a way of overriding... the healthy people who contain the individual with severe symptoms, it’s rather the symptoms in that dominant individual that spread to earlier healthy individuals.” (10:30)
  • This collective shift leads to societies “acting as if we ourselves have lost reality testing and are attracted to self-destructive acts.” (27:31)

Mechanisms of Influence & Mass Psychology

• Trump as a "Spellbinder":
  • “He has enticed them, in a sense hypnotized them. In political psychology we actually call these individuals spellbinders.” (26:06)
  • Lee explains the concept of “shared psychosis” (folie à millions), as first noted by Erich Fromm, where millions adopt a kind of induced delusional thinking through exposure to an authoritative, pathological personality. (27:34)
• Impact of Social Media:
  • The “contagious effect” of his pathology is amplified by continued, unfettered public exposure and a media environment that enhances “his ability to capture the public’s mind.” (33:20, 34:28)
  • Parallels are drawn to COVID-19: "Allowing him access to the media and allowing him to speak to the public...was the most important of all," referencing the spread of disinformation during the pandemic. (36:00)

The Psychological Impact on the Nation

• Abuse on a National Scale:
  • "Many of those who have been victims of violence have stated that they have flashbacks and unwanted memories from watching the Trump presidencies unfold... the Trump presidency is like being in an abusive relationship... a national situation of national abuse." (41:24)

The Containment Imperative

• Professional Containment Strategies:
  • As with violent, psychopathic inmates, the first priority is “removing them from access to settings where they can cause harm... and keep society safe.” (15:30)
  • “The first step is to keep society safe from such individuals. And that is where it’s critical that mental health experts speak up.” (16:44)
  • Lee likens the Trump phenomenon to a “contagion,” noting clinical cases where, “after an entire family looks like they're schizophrenic because of one individual... you hospitalize them, and the rest of the family returns to normal.” (32:29)

Failure of Institutions and the Public's Role

• Widening Danger:
  • “The longer we allow this to go on, the more dangerous he will become, and we will not be keeping ourselves safe.” (18:05)
  • Lee asserts that now “many agencies and institutions that would have contained him…have all cowered and have become fearful” under intimidation and bullying. (18:27)
• Call to Action:
  • "It’s truly up to the public and the nation, and we should be doing it from every angle that we can." (19:13)
  • She urges collective education and empowerment, arguing that mental health knowledge must be accessible to all, not just “those with wealth and power who can afford to consult.”

Coping with Collective Trauma

• Battered Person/Stockholm Syndrome:
  • Lee draws a parallel between America’s psychological state and "battered person syndrome" and "Stockholm syndrome"—where the captured identify with or idealize their captor for psychic survival. (43:34 - 44:04)
  • “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.” (44:04)

The Existential Stakes

• Core Dangers:
  • Dr. Lee outlines three existential threats from an unchecked leader: nuclear risk, environmental hazard, and psychological manipulation of the populace. (44:51)
  • “My solution really is for all manner of institutions, agencies, stakeholders to please consider consulting U.S. mental health experts who deal with these situations day in and day out. Containing danger is one of the main work that we do...” (48:30)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Donald Trump was more dangerous than he appeared to be, that he was bound to only increase in his dangerousness, and that if we failed to contain him early on, he would become uncontainable.” — Dr. Bandy Lee [05:59]
• “He has enticed them, in a sense, hypnotized them. In political psychology we actually call these individuals spellbinders... it’s the contagious effect” — Dr. Bandy Lee [26:06]
• “Malignant normality... is when falsehood becomes truth, criminality becomes innocence, and mental pathology becomes health.” — Dr. Bandy Lee [37:04]
• “It’s a national situation of national abuse.” — Dr. Bandy Lee [41:34]
• “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.” — Dr. Bandy Lee [27:08]
• “Removing the person 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.” — Dr. Bandy Lee [33:05]
• “Containing danger is one of the main work that we do, assessing, measuring, level of danger and appropriating the correct amount of containment that would be mandatory for our safety and survival.” — Dr. Bandy Lee [48:30]

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Important Timestamps

• Trump's pathologies as President and his appeal to supporters: [02:12] [26:06]
• Origins and ethics of “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump”: [03:18], [05:59], [17:42]
• Symptoms and ‘malignant normality’ explained: [08:01], [10:06]
• Dr. Lee on containment strategy: [15:30]
• Failure of institutions and why public action is needed: [18:05], [19:13]
• Explanation of shared psychosis and group contagion: [27:34], [32:29]
• The role of social media and loss of resistance: [34:15], [36:00]
• Parallels to mass abuse and Stockholm syndrome: [41:24], [43:34]
• Existential stakes—nuclear, climate, and psychological risks: [44:51]
• Final call for containment and consultation with mental health experts: [48:30]

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Conclusion

Dr. Bandy Lee delivers a sobering, science-rooted examination of the Trump phenomenon, not merely as a matter of politics, but as a “public health emergency”—one with potentially lethal ramifications for democracy, global stability, and individual well-being. She calls for the mobilization of all sectors, especially mental health professionals, to contain this “psychological pandemic,” halt its spread, and restore collective reality testing. Lee’s arguments, grounded in both clinical experience and academic research, make this episode essential listening for anyone seeking to understand the intersection of psychology, leadership, and national crisis in America today.

For more on Dr. Lee’s work:

• bandylee.com
• bandy-x-lee.substack.com

Transcript

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[Joanna Coles (Host, The Daily Beast Podcast)]

Do you think that Donald Trump has a sense of his own limitations deep down?

[Dr. Bandy Lee (Forensic Psychiatrist and Guest)]

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 governmentgovernment 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 himself. He's doing so from. From a place of path 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.

[Joanna Coles (Host, The Daily Beast Podcast)]

I'm Joanna Coles. This is the Daily Beast podcast and today's guest is someone that many of you have requested, Dr. Bandy 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 Steven 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 behavior 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 honored 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. Bandy 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. Bandy 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?

[Dr. Bandy Lee (Forensic Psychiatrist and Guest)]

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 failed 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 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.

[Joanna Coles (Host, The Daily Beast Podcast)]

What were the prime reasons that the writers and the psychiatrists who you gathered together for the dangerous case about Donald Trump, what were their keys 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.

[Dr. Bandy Lee (Forensic Psychiatrist and Guest)]

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, 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. 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 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.

[Joanna Coles (Host, The Daily Beast Podcast)]

You mentioned the phrase malignant normality. Can you take us through what that actually means?

[Dr. Bandy Lee (Forensic Psychiatrist and Guest)]

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, the proper intervention that I earlier expressed that should also apply to a president at first. The first citizen is also entit 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 dominant 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 and all humankind. And what I was trying to illustrate there is that the. The severe pathology has a way of overriding because of emotional compulsion and the. The innate drive to. To, in other words, override reality and. 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's own sense of inadequacy or incompetence would be so unacceptable to oneself that one would rather change all of reality and fix people in important positions to be able to affirm that one's alternative reality or one's own delusional sense of reality is more correct, then when that drive 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.

[Joanna Coles (Host, The Daily Beast Podcast)]

Dr. Lee, if he were your patient and he came to you, how would you treat Donald Trump?

[Dr. Bandy Lee (Forensic Psychiatrist and Guest)]

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.

[Joanna Coles (Host, The Daily Beast Podcast)]

Good Lord. A thousand. Wow. Thank goodness they didn't all run for president.

[Dr. Bandy Lee (Forensic Psychiatrist and Guest)]

Yes, in fact, they're, they're quite common, especially in the maximum security prison setting where I work.

[Joanna Coles (Host, The Daily Beast Podcast)]

Right. What a great juxtaposition. So you've treated a thousand of them. What, how do you begin to set limits?

[Dr. Bandy Lee (Forensic Psychiatrist and Guest)]

Well, first of all, there are limits set already by the time they 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 policies or rhetoric could also cause harm. And so it's advising these bodies 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 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 other 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.

[Joanna Coles (Host, The Daily Beast Podcast)]

And I think General Milley 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, suggesting that he should actually be incarcerated? I mean, his power is limitless at the moment. How would you enforce limits on him?

[Dr. Bandy Lee (Forensic Psychiatrist and Guest)]

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. Unstoppable. And right now, frankly, 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, intimidations 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.

[Joanna Coles (Host, The Daily Beast Podcast)]

So we're in the situation we're in. Is there anybody you see around him, trying to contain him right now?

[Dr. Bandy Lee (Forensic Psychiatrist and Guest)]

I think it should. 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 Kings 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.

[Joanna Coles (Host, The Daily Beast Podcast)]

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?

[Dr. Bandy Lee (Forensic Psychiatrist and Guest)]

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 himself, he's doing so from. 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 own. His unbelonging. 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.

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[Joanna Coles (Host, The Daily Beast Podcast)]

And we're back with Dr. Bandy Lee discussing the President's mental health. Why do his supporters in particular find him as appealing as they do?

[Dr. Bandy Lee (Forensic Psychiatrist and Guest)]

Because he has enticed them, in a sense, hypnotized them. In political psychology we actually call these individuals 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, were not enticed. And then you're too far involved and perhaps have sacrificed too much that even if you do not find that he is any longer anything that he said he was going to be that, that you cannot let go. It's too painful to think that you have invested so much for so long. And in some ways it's, 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 Contagion, that it's the contagious effect and which eventually arrives at a state that's called shared psychosis or more more precisely, folie amel in it was initially discovered as a phenomenon 150 years ago as folie a deux and. But it doesn't have to be two. It can be foly etoi gatre cinq folie ethamine. And what we're seeing is what the social psychologist Erich Fromm dubbed 40amillion 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.

[Joanna Coles (Host, The Daily Beast Podcast)]

What is it like being in the inner circle of someone like Donald Trump? I'm thinking about the madness of millions. The Erich Fromm point is so interesting. How do you think aboutfor exampledonald? 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, too, 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 is 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 found. Nor is John Kelly, his former chief of staff, or General Milley. In fact, they're now sort of persecuted by Trump. And one thinks recently of Donald Trump calling Mike Pence a wimp, which Jonathan Karl reported in his book. I mean, you've described very effectively the sense of the country coming under this thrall. But, but what is it like being close up with someone like this?

[Dr. Bandy Lee (Forensic Psychiatrist and Guest)]

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. Than our own predispositions. There are others who did not have his predispositions earlier, but, but then it's, 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, 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.

[Joanna Coles (Host, The Daily Beast Podcast)]

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.

[Dr. Bandy Lee (Forensic Psychiatrist and Guest)]

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 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, 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.

[Joanna Coles (Host, The Daily Beast Podcast)]

Well, and also with social media. Right, because there's just so much more visibility. I mean, he seems 247 to be on either legacy media or social media.

[Dr. Bandy Lee (Forensic Psychiatrist and Guest)]

Yes.

[Joanna Coles (Host, The Daily Beast Podcast)]

I'm assuming that social media has made this much more pervasive.

[Dr. Bandy Lee (Forensic Psychiatrist and Guest)]

Yes, absolutely. And what I usually emphasized 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 the 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, because of multiple actions. I mean, he eliminated experts from the CDC in 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 and 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 the 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 pathology becomes health. Which means that the reverse is true for those who are truly speaking the truth or truly innocent and truly healthy.

[Joanna Coles (Host, The Daily Beast Podcast)]

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[Dr. Bandy Lee (Forensic Psychiatrist and Guest)]

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[Joanna Coles (Host, The Daily Beast Podcast)]

And we're back with Dr. Bandy Lee, a psychiatrist analyzing the President's health We're told that we're living through a mental health crisis in the US and that there is a loneliness epidemic and I think one 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?

[Dr. Bandy Lee (Forensic Psychiatrist and Guest)]

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 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 furious that he was not elected or that would rather believe that the election was false and that he was a 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. Situational 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 in an abusive relationship. In fact, it's a national situation of national abuse.

[Joanna Coles (Host, The Daily Beast Podcast)]

So a final question, then. How do we pull out of this sense of being captured by someone?

[Dr. Bandy Lee (Forensic Psychiatrist and Guest)]

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 have. We call it Battered Person Syndrome.

[Joanna Coles (Host, The Daily Beast Podcast)]

It's a bit like Stockholm syndrome, where you get caught by your captive and take over there, or you help yourself remain captive.

[Dr. Bandy Lee (Forensic Psychiatrist and Guest)]

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 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 arsons 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. We 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 that and how he pulled out of a number of nuclear 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, 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 pathology. It's kind of a growing phenomenon. Those who have a personal experience with this have learned to recognize it, painfully so. But the rest of the population needs to be educated. In fact, it's usually, I imagine, beyond the realm of imagination, 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 Donald Trump said, once we contain him, we will see immediately how he would be reduced, would fold in on himself and no longer be as threatening and intimidating as he seems right now. When he feels well, he himself is fighting for his psychic life, his own image, and continuing to prop this up will not help him or ourselves. My solution really is for all manner of institutions, agencies, stakeholders to Please consider consulting U.S. 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, level of danger and appropriating the correct amount of containment that would be mandatory for our safety and survival.

[Joanna Coles (Host, The Daily Beast Podcast)]

So there we have it. Containment. Dr. Bandy Lee, thank you so much for a very comprehensive explanation of what on earth is going on in America and very possibly the world. Do you have a website we can send people to read more about your work and to read your books?

[Dr. Bandy Lee (Forensic Psychiatrist and Guest)]

Yes bandylee.com b a n d y l e e.com I also have a substack publication, bandy xle.substack.com Great.

[Joanna Coles (Host, The Daily Beast Podcast)]

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 lived to see another President. Thank you very much.

[Dr. Bandy Lee (Forensic Psychiatrist and Guest)]

Thank you very much for having me.

[Joanna Coles (Host, The Daily Beast Podcast)]

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 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. And of course, most importantly, don't forget to be beast and a shout out to our beast level members. Herbie, Andrew Mellor.

[Dr. Bandy Lee (Forensic Psychiatrist and Guest)]

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[Dr. Bandy Lee (Forensic Psychiatrist and Guest)]

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[Joanna Coles (Host, The Daily Beast Podcast)]

Sandra Clark, Bonzo, Val Love San Francisco Bocock D.C. karen White, Heidi Ripley, Sharon Shipley, Andrea Hodel and Connie Rutherford. And thanks to our production team, Devon Rogerino, Anna Von Erson and our editor, Jesse Millwood.

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[Dr. Bandy Lee (Forensic Psychiatrist and Guest)]

Check out our comedy podcast the Last Laugh and our Star Studded the Daily.

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[Dr. Bandy Lee (Forensic Psychiatrist and Guest)]

Episode, consider becoming a Daily Beast subscriber. Subscribing is the best way to feed the Beast and support all of your podcasts as we cover what might become the darkest timeline. Head to thedailybeast.com membership podcast and sign up today.