Why Trump's More Dangerous Every Day: Psychiatrist

The Daily Beast Podcast

The Daily Beast

News & Politics

4.6 • 7.9K Ratings

🗓️ 6 November 2025

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dr. Bandy X. Lee, forensic and social psychiatrist, joins Joanna Coles to sound the alarm regarding President Donald Trump’s dire mental health problems. She explains how Trump’s paranoia, fear of exposure, and relentless need for power drive his behavior—from deploying guards to manipulating supporters—and how these patterns spread through society, creating true mental health contagion. Dr. Lee asks: How do we contain a leader whose fragility fuels his power?

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Do you think that Donald Trump has a sense of his own limitations?
0:06.1	Deep down, absolutely.
0:08.4	And that is why he is constantly on guard.
0:11.0	He's paranoid.
0:12.1	He is doing whatever he can.
0:15.2	People may think he's the most powerful man on the planet.
0:18.7	Why does he need more and more?
0:20.7	He's now accumulating ice agents as government
0:25.6	police force. He's now required every state to deploy 500 National Guard members to function,
0:34.6	essentially as a guard for himself against the people.
0:41.0	Because when he demands this kind of powerful positioning of it himself, he's doing so from a place of pathology.
0:53.4	It's not a healthy demand. So he's doing so in a way that actually
0:58.4	fuels his sense of insecurity, his own unfitness, his unbelling. And so he will increasingly
1:07.9	become more defensive and more dangerous.
1:12.8	I'm Joanna Coles. This is the Daily Beast podcast, and today's guest is someone that many of you have requested.
1:21.6	Dr. Bandy Lee, she's a forensic and social psychiatrist turned whistleblower on power, violence and presidential pathology.
1:31.5	After 17 years at the Yale School of Medicine and Yale Law School, with stints at Harvard Medical School and the World Health Organization, she became the voice shouting what many in Washington only whispered.
1:46.2	The president was not well.
1:48.7	Lee edited the dangerous case of Donald Trump, the 2017 bestseller that assembled 27
1:56.0	mental health professionals warning that Trump's behavior wasn't politics as usual, but a symptom of something
2:02.5	darker, a national emergency in plain sight. Her outspokenness ignited a professional firestorm
2:12.0	over the Goldwater Rule, the American Psychiatric Association's edict forbidding psychiatrists from diagnosing public
	...

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