President Donald Trump is “dangerous” and “incapacitated,” and Congress must act immediately to force him to undergo a mental health evaluation, a coalition of mental health professionals warns.
As The Independent reports, World Mental Health Coalition has been warning for some time that Trump’s mental state is compromised, causing him to act rashly and without thought of the consequences. Now that Trump has ordered military action in Iran and brought the U.S. and the Middle Eastern country to the brink of war, the matter is even more urgent, the group says.
“We have been seriously warning about this for some time. The US Congress must act immediately and forcefully without further delay,” the group said in a statement.
Further, the coalition says, Trump is “psychologically and mentally both dangerous and incapacitated [and has a presentation that is] consistent with a person who, when his falsely inflated self-image is questioned, or when his emotional need for adulation is thwarted, lashes out in an attempt to restore his sense of potency and command over others.”
Americans “cannot wait any longer to deal with the dangerous situation caused by a mentally compromised person acting in erratic, reckless, impulsive, and destructive ways,” the group says.
The group’s president, Yale University professor Dr. Bandy Lee, said that evidence of Trump’s supposed mental state can be seen in the fact that Trump ordered the airstrike that killed Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani the “most extreme” of the options presented to him.
The group claims that it has been warning for some time that Trump’s mental state is compromised, adding that being impeached could cause his mental state to deteriorate further. His purported fragile ego is unlikely to recover from such a wound, according to the group.
The group urges Congress to consult with them in order for the two sides to develop a profile or even an evaluation, albeit one done without the presence of the patient — something that is generally considered not a best practice in the psychiatric community.
However, one member of the group, George Washington University Professor Dr. Richard Zinner, brushes those concerns aside, stating that the American Psychiatric Association’s code of ethics states that a psychiatric professional has a duty to society at large, not just to his or her patients.
Of course, there is no process in the Constitution or in case law that allows for a president to be forced by Congress to undergo a psychiatric evaluation against his will.
Even if he did submit to such an examination and it was conclusive that his mental state is compromised, or if such a conclusion was reached without him, the odds of this information being used to remove him from office, in the case of Donald Trump anyway, are quite slim.
As Fortune noted in 2018, the 25th Amendment lays out what would happen if the president is unable to execute his duties. In order for a president to be declared incapacitated against his will, it would take a majority of his cabinet members to make that determination. And if the president resists, it would take a two-thirds majority vote in both chambers of Congress to forcibly remove him from office.
