A prominent forensic psychiatrist is raising fresh concerns about President Donald Trump’s mental state, suggesting that his grip on reality is slipping further.
Appearing on an episode of MeidasTouch’s The Weekend Show, Dr. Bandy Lee, an Ivy League-trained mental health professional who has tracked Trump’s psychological fitness since his first term, said his latest attempt to insert himself into the story of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks exposes “how fragile he is in his sense of self.”
The 80-year-old president has never settled on a consistent version of where he was or what he did during the attacks, offering a different account every few years for a quarter century. His latest telling came during a 9/11 commemoration ceremony earlier this month, where Trump claimed first responders pulled him from the rubble of one of the World Trade Center towers and that he personally dispatched teams to help with the response.
Fact-checkers say neither claim holds up. Even Trump’s own nephew, Fred Trump, 63, who leveled a string of allegations against his uncle in his 2024 memoir All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way, dismissed the story as BS.
To Lee, that kind of self-insertion tracks with the behavior of a small child trying to be “king or queen of the universe,” she said, adding, “It is abnormal and pathological when it involves a fully-grown adult, whether it is because of arrested development or because one has regressed to that state.”
Lee, who now serves as president of the World Mental Health Coalition, isn’t just pointing to the 9/11 remarks. She’s also flagged a string of moments where Trump appeared to doze off in public, including cameras catching him with heavy eyelids during a 9/11 memorial as victims’ names were read aloud.
The pattern, Lee argued, reflects the sheer weight of the cognitive strain Trump is under right now. She pointed to polling showing Democrats carrying momentum into the midterms and to the economic fallout from the war in Iran as pressures bearing down on him.
Even Trump’s social media habits made the evidence list. Lee singled out a meme he posted of himself piloting a spaceship and blowing up the entire world as a symptom of just how cornered he feels.
“Alarming indications of how endangered he feels psychologically and how he needs to fight back, and become the most powerful and dangerous person on the planet,” she said. “That is where his mind is going.”
The stakes, in Lee’s telling, go well beyond embarrassing headlines. She warned that Trump’s psychological state has left the world in an “extremely dangerous” position, since a leader determined to protect his self-image could be willing to reach for devastating force to do it.
“The setup that we have is that we have no way of countermanding a, fit or not ... there’s no way to countermand a nuclear weapon,” she said.
Lee’s warnings about Trump go back to his first term, when she assembled two dozen mental health experts for the bestseller The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a project that later earned her an invitation to brief lawmakers on Capitol Hill about the president’s fitness for office.
That work came at a cost. In 2020, Lee drew backlash from Trump’s inner circle after writing in a social media post that his supporters were experiencing a “shared psychosis,” and that Alan Dershowitz, then part of Trump’s legal team, had “wholly taken on Trump’s symptoms by contagion.”
Yale fired her shortly after, citing a violation of the American Psychiatric Association’s Goldwater Rule, which bars psychiatrists from offering professional opinions on someone they haven’t personally examined and been authorized to assess.
The White House has been approached for comment.
