The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. Episode 1
The Bill Press Pod
BP Pods
4.7 • 601 Ratings
🗓️ 4 August 2020
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Pundits have labeled Donald Trump crazy, a toddler, a narcissist. To get beyond the punditry we went to actual mental health professionals for this series of special podcasts based on the New York Times bestseller, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. In conversations with a dozen psychiatrists and psychologists, we explore the pathologies that make Donald Trump the terrible person and worse president he is. Today’s episode features the editor of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, Dr. Bandy Lee, a psychiatrist on the faculty of the Yale Medical School. Also Dr. James Gilligan who was on the faculty of The Harvard Medical School and was for 13 years, the director of the Harvard Institute of Law and Psychiatry; Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, one of the most prominent psychiatrists in America and one of the originators of the field of psycho-history, which is the study of psychological motivations for war, terrorism, and genocide. He wrote the forward to the first edition of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. He was a lecturer at The Harvard Medical School and is a professor emeritus at The City University of New York. And Stanford Professor Emeritus, social psychologist Phillip Zimbardo; Stephen Soldz, a clinical psychologist and director of the Social Justice and Human Rights program at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis and Harvard Psychiatrist, Dr. Harry Friedman. Drs. Gilligan, Zimbardo, Soldz and Friedman all contributed chapters to The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, friends, and welcome to a very special edition of the Bill Press Pod. |
| 0:11.2 | Today, we start an exclusive series of podcast developed with authors of the New York Times |
| 0:16.9 | bestseller, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, and the subtitle is key. |
| 0:22.1 | 37 psychiatrists and mental health experts assess a president. |
| 0:28.0 | In this special podcast series on the Bill Press pod, we worked with the editor and several |
| 0:33.4 | of those top mental health experts to bring their updated findings to you based on over three |
| 0:39.6 | years of Donald Trump in the White House. Why now? Well, a couple of reasons. One, because as he |
| 0:46.0 | desperately fights for re-election, we may be facing the most dangerous points so far in Trump's presidency. |
| 0:54.1 | And two, because we think it can explain some of Trump's completely irrational behavior lately. |
| 1:00.6 | His mental capacity is so limited, he can't even take steps that would benefit him in the |
| 1:06.2 | real world. |
| 1:07.3 | He's so driven by his own distorted sense of reality that what seems incomprehensible to us |
| 1:14.2 | makes perfect sense to him in his own warped mind. |
| 1:19.1 | Now, no doubt, you've heard pundits say that Donald Trump's mentally ill, a narcissist, and a toddler. |
| 1:25.9 | But what you've rarely heard are actual psychiatrists and other mental health experts |
| 1:31.0 | giving their professional opinions about Donald Trump's mental state. |
| 1:36.5 | And you know what? |
| 1:37.1 | There's a good reason for that. |
| 1:38.3 | It's called the Goldwater Rule. |
| 1:41.2 | Actually, it's not a rule, but a policy of the American Psychiatric Association. A short history. |
| 1:48.6 | Back in 1964, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater was a Republican nominee for president. |
| 1:54.9 | A lot of people thought he might be too willing to use nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union, |
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