Producer’s Note: This is an excerpt of an interview originally broadcast on WPKN Radio’s Resistance Roundtable program, conducted by Ruth Anne Baumgartner, Scott Harris and Richard Hill on Sept. 17, 2026.
Dr. Bandy X. Lee, whose latest book is titled, The Psychology of Trump Contagion: An Existential Danger to American Democracy and All Humankind, explains why she believes that Trump’s mental instability and unfettered presidential powers create an extreme, unprecedented risk of global catastrophe.
SCOTT HARRIS: This is Counterpoint. My name is Scott Harris here Monday evenings, 8 to 9:30 p.m. We’re glad you could join us this evening. I’m going to introduce our next interview in just a moment with Dr. Bandy Lee. But I did want to mention an important event that’s coming up, Between the Lines Radio Newsmagazine was born here at WPKN 35 years ago, we’re celebrating our 35th birthday. And we’re going to be having a major event in downtown New Haven, Connecticut with a keynote address by Pulitzer Prize-winning author, journalist, and activist, Chris Hedges. And we hope you’ll attend. Chris has very generously volunteered to help us celebrate Between the Lines’ birthday, and that’s going to be happening Saturday, Oct. 17th from 2 to 4 p.m. at the First and Summerfield Church, which is at 425 College Street in New Haven. We’ll talk about it in the weeks coming up.
But if you’re interested in finding out more about that event, there’s a suggested contribution, but no one will be turned away. And you can go to our website at BTLonline.org, BTLonline.org, and you’ll find out more about it then. So right now we have our next interview coming up with Bandy Lee. Dr. Bandy Lee, a forensic and social psychiatrist. Got to interview her last Thursday on Resistance Roundtable with Richard Hill and Ruth Anne Baumgartner. And here’s an excerpt of that interview right now. Right now, we’re joined by Dr. Bandy Lee, a forensic and social psychiatrist who’s an internationally recognized expert on violence prevention. She’s extensively consulted for the World Health Organization, contributed to global prison reform and taught at the Yale School of Medicine and Yale School of Law for nearly two decades. She’s author of the bestselling book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, actually a collaboration of many psychiatrists and psychologists which analyzed the mental fitness of President Donald Trump.
Dr. Lee’s latest book on this topic, a couple of them, The Much More Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 50 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Warn Anew, and The Psychology of Trump Contagion and Existential Danger to American Democracy and All Humankind. Dr. Lee is a co-founder and serves as president of the World Mental Health Coalition. Dr. Lee, it’s great that you can join us. I know you’re very busy these days with a lot of concern about where our nation is at, so thanks for joining us this evening.BANDY LEE: Well, thank you for having me.
SCOTT HARRIS: You’ve been writing about and collaborating with other mental health professionals for over 10 years, expressing your concern and warning about candidate and then and now President Donald Trump’s impairment and detachment from reality and the danger he poses right now to democracy and humanity itself. On April 30th this year, I read that yourself and a group of 36 leading physicians and other doctors with expertise in mental health issues, they issued a statement calling for President Trump’s immediate lawful removal from office for medical reasons. Their statement was entered into the Congressional Record and their paramount concern was that Trump’s mental instability coupled with his sole unchecked authority to order the use of nuclear weapons makes him dangerous, a clear and present danger to our country and the world. Please tell us about the gravity of this warning that was put into the Congressional Record in April.
DR. BANDY LEE: Yes, you are correct in that I have been trying to highlight the medical consensus that exists among psychiatrists and now increasingly other physicians regarding the mental impairment of the commander-in-chief, and especially the situation that an American president has unfettered access to nuclear weapons, the second largest arsenal in the world and over 1,700 of them ready to be deployed, already deployed in fact, and 3,700 ready to be used and over 5,000 in stockpile. And I believe that the public is not aware of the level of danger to all humankind, that one man has the power to destroy all of humanity and the planet earth as a human habitat for all eternity, the rest of foreseeable future. And there are no mechanisms in place to assess whether such an order is coming from someone who is fit to do so or anyone else in fact to countermand such an order.
There’s only a mechanism in place to check if such an order has indeed been made. And so that means that all of humankind could go into extinction based on the decision based on the whim of one individual and there would be nothing we could do about it. I joined forces with the physicians of the IPPNW or the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 for educating the public on the dangers, on the medical dangers of nuclear war, that essentially a nuclear war would be unwinnable, that no amount of doctors and hospitals could be of any help in the case of a nuclear war. As Nikita Khrushchev said, “It would be a situation where the living will envy the dead.”
So that’s an overarching danger that has come to our greater attention. And so actually it was Sens. (Sheldon) Whitehouse and (Jack) Reed from Rhode Island who reached out to members of the IPPNW and myself, asking for a statement. And we issued this for them inviting other Nobel laureates and former chairs of departments, truly the most eminent medical scholars and clinicians in the country to join us in this statement, 36 of them, to make this urgent statement. We drafted it even before the reckless war against Iran was launched to the peril of widespread conflict in the region and trouble with the economy and global economy. And it was finally entered into the Congressional Record, as you said, well into the war in Iran and escalating dangers of nuclear war as well as global war.
SCOTT HARRIS: Thank you for that, Dr. Lee. Our other co-hosts have a question for you, but just a quick, I think important discussion here or just a note and that is Donald Trump is on the record of having said, “We have nuclear weapons. Why don’t we use them?” One of the most alarming statements from a president in my lifetime. And I wonder if you would just briefly comment on that because Richard Hill and Ruthanne Baumgartner both have points they’d like to raise with you as well.
DR. BANDY LEE: Yes. Nuclear weapons were overarching in my mind, partly because the setup we have. but also because of his psychology. He is drawn to nuclear weapons. He is attracted to them and moved to use them. His nuclear policy went extremely aggressive at the beginning of his first presidency. He’s annulled just about every nuclear treaty that we are in a state of no treaty for the first time with Russia since the Cold War. And exactly what you mentioned, he has made statements, “Why do we have nuclear weapons if we’re not going to use them?” Or “Fire and fury, my button is bigger than your button.” The nonchalance with which he has mentioned nuclear weapons and even now threatening to destroy a civilization, never to return overnight, which can only be nuclear war. And already twice he has posted social media memes where he is in a spaceship away from earth pressing the nuclear button.
He did so over the Labor Day weekend. These are alarming statements and signs by someone who truly has unfettered access to nuclear weapons and has the power to carry out his impulses if he were to choose to go there.
SCOTT HARRIS: Our cohost Richard Hill has a question for you, I believe. Richard.
RICHARD HILL: Thank you. Dr. Lee, it’s great to hear your voice, but I wanted to ask you, in your 2024 book, The Psychology of Trump Contagion, you frame fascism as a mental pathology which can infect the population at large. Can you expand on this premise and perhaps offer a diagnosis of the current condition of the American populace and if you can suggest what might be needed to cure this disease in our population?
DR. BANDY LEE: Yes, unfortunately, and I had warned since the very beginning that the mental pathology in one individual in a powerful influential office such as the U.S. presidency indicated a public health emergency because the longer he stayed in office and the longer he had maintained public exposure, his symptoms would spread. Now this is not commonly, it’s not evident for those who are used to common experiences where most individuals are not so mentally impaired. But I, having worked in state hospitals and prisons most of my career where individuals with severe mental symptoms may go untreated for a very long time, I’ve actually seen this a lot where symptoms can spread among family members, among street gangs, prison blocks, especially when the symptoms are coming from a powerful individual, a dominant individual. And we call them primary persons with the illness. Eventually the entire population, be it the household or the prison block, looks as if every person has the same illness, even something as severe as schizophrenia, say.
And what you do for treatment at that time is not—you don’t have to hospitalize everybody. You take a careful history and figure out who the primary individual is and you just hospitalize that person or separate that person and all the secondary individuals return to their original state. In other words, they could have varying states. They could be predisposed to the illness by their personality.
They could actually have features of that disorder. Or they could have been normal and yet they all later look as if they have the illness themselves. This is actually not a new phenomenon. It’s been documented for 150 years. It’s known popularly as folie à deux (French for “madness of two”) or folie à millions (“madness of millions”) if it affects millions. Eric Fromm postulated that it could and the German American social psychologist and Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung had warned that psychic epidemics are more dangerous than any other affliction humankind can confront because it affects us insidiously and without our awareness. This speaks to the psychosocial nature of psychiatric symptoms and the fact that we’re actually far more interconnected than we realize, such that when there’s mental pathology, where symptoms are driven by emotional compulsion, that they spread much more rapidly than say strategic lies or disinformation, ordinary propaganda and so forth.
SCOTT HARRIS: Thank you, Dr. Lee. Just to reintroduce you to our audience. We’re speaking with Dr. Bandy Lee, a forensic and social psychiatrist who’s an internationally recognized expert on violence prevention and she’s the author along with a host of other psychologists and mental health professionals of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.
Dr. Lee, we’re almost out of time, but I wanted to squeeze in this question before we say goodnight and that is since Donald Trump’s re-election in 2024, he’s been openly engineering a multi-pronged plot to interfere with and manipulate the outcome of this November’s midterm election. The plots included attempts to legislate new election rules that would have disenfranchised millions of eligible voters, take over mail-in voting, mid-decade gerrymandering across the country, and threats to prevent the certification and seating of Democrats who could win their congressional seats this November. But perhaps the most dangerous threat is Trump’s signaling that he’s prepared to declare a national emergency, invoke the Insurrection Act and order the U.S. military or a combination of ICE agents in the U.S. military to seize ballots, close down polling sites, and/or repress nonviolent protests that would likely erupt if he attempts to prevent a free and fair election or illegally reject the results of the election.
What are your concerns about Trump’s state of mind when it comes to what he’s capable of regarding intervention in the November election?
DR. BANDY LEE: I think he has done anything and everything to try to rig the elections. He will not stop at anything. And I think we’re approaching the most dangerous election season that we’ve experienced in our nation’s history. If the elections do not turn out his way, I think there’s grave danger of violence, his instigation of violence. You mentioned he now has mobilized, amassed a private army and martial law, escalation of global war, even nuclear war are not off the table as his response to an election loss. So I think we are in very dangerous times. There are reasons to be concerned about the need to act even before the election. That’s something I’ve been emphasizing and why I’ve started appearing in a show, the weekend show at Midas Touch weekly in order to warn against his danger and to try to encourage the public to consider the powers that they do have.
Because one thing about a bully or a violent individual whom I have specialized in treating my entire career is that they are, as surprising as this may sound, they are actually looking for containment. They are themselves afraid of their own out-of-controlledness and their own violence. So not to set limits, as much as he will protest and as much as he will threaten and intimidate, actually to step in with limits would be far less dangerous than to let him loose and let reality catch up with him in ways where he’s not under protected circumstances. I’m talking about his actual steep fall and popularity, which he is aware of more than anybody and that is why he is resorting to such extreme actions and preparing for extreme actions as well as instigation of crowds, mobilization of his private army and any means militarily or not at his disposal.
And these are very frightening times. But the solution could also be quite simple because once they’re intervened with, they actually become quite subdued. We just haven’t done it for too long.
SCOTT HARRIS: Thank you, Dr. Lee. Before you go, please leave our listeners with your Substack space address and maybe say a quick word if you would about the new book that’s coming out soon.
DR. BANDY LEE: Yes, you’ve been following me well. My Substack address is bandyxlee.substack.com, B-A-N-D-Y-X-L-E-E @substack.com. Or more simply, you can go to bandylee.com and click on “newsletter.” And the new book that will be coming out at the end of the year, we hope, is The Extremely Dangerous Case of Donald Trump in which we will be featuring non-psychiatric physicians as well who have joined us in warning against the medical dangers of president, which warrant immediate removal from office through lawful means.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, thank you so much for spending time with us on Resistance Roundtable this evening. And I hope we can call upon you again. Certainly the outlook for this dangerous time we’re living in is not going to fade anytime soon, unfortunately. So we’ll look forward to our next conversation. Appreciate it.
DR. BANDY LEE: I do as well. Thank you very much.
SCOTT HARRIS: Take care. Good night.
DR. BANDY LEE: Good night.
SCOTT HARRIS: That was Dr. Bandy Lee, forensic and social psychiatrist. Again, her most recent book is The Much More Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 50 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Warn Anew. That was recorded this past Thursday on Resistance Roundtable with co-hosts Richard Hill and RuthAnne Baumgartner.
