‘THE MUCH MORE DANGEROUS CASE OF DONALD TRUMP’
Greetings from the World Mental Health Coalition and Dr. Bandy Lee!
We are at an extremely critical time, more than ever before in our lifetime. That is why we are organizing this major, unique, and critical emergency conference on September 27, 2024, in the Ballroom of the National Press Club in Washington, DC.
There is an unspoken reality: if Donald Trump wins in this presidential election, it will surely be the end of American democracy and very possibly of all humankind. Even if he does not win, there will be great dangers from which our nation will need urgently to heal. These are the consequences we warned against since 2017, when we assembled at Yale School of Medicine and decided to publish our proceedings in the instant New York Times bestseller, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. Those who heeded our warnings were able to be effective: former White House Chief of Staff General John Kelly, for example, used our book as an “owner’s manual” according to the Guardian, and possibly prevented nuclear war with North Korea! When we were invited to meet with over fifty Congress members, they told us that their “acting politically” depended on our “educating the public medically.”
Indeed, had our warnings and “Prescriptions” been heeded, we would not have had 1.2 million American deaths from Covid-19; a violent insurrection that came too close to overturning our democracy; escalating threats of political violence; and the upending of an alliance-based World Order. Now, we are facing greater dangers than ever but do not have the language or understanding to deal with it, because of the sidelining of mental health experts from the media.
However: We at the World Mental Health Coalition believe we have a rare opportunity and imperative to highlight the issue that we have been trying to call attention to since Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency: Trump’s tremendous danger to the public because of his mental unfitness. A failure to contain him is explainable through what Dr. Bandy Lee has termed, “Trump Contagion” and explained in her newly-released book. The emotional contagion of Trumpism is vastly underestimated. The media, which Trump has been able to “mesmerize” have not only been ineffective against him but has served largely to spread his symptoms. Pundits have been unable to explain him—since it takes a mental health expert to do so—essentially normalizing and sanitizing him, no matter their genuine efforts to do the opposite.
We hope to remedy this impasse by bringing together top experts from all different domains to speak about the importance of mental fitness in leadership. The year before the 2020 election, we held just such a major conference. Our theme at that time was, “The Dangerous State of the World and the Need for Fit Leadership.” The conference was considered important enough to be broadcast in full on C-Span. As never before or since, we brought together thirteen highly respected experts from many different areas of expertise including psychiatry, law, political science, economics, fascism studies, journalism, climate science, and nuclear science. The conference was convened by Dr. Bandy Lee, moderated by Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, and among other notables included Dr. Jerrold Post, the psychiatrist who established the CIA’s program for psychologically evaluating foreign national leaders who applied his experience and knowledge to warn against the dangers of Donald Trump. Please watch this 17-minute video that opened the past conference as well as some highlights of the conference itself.
At this critical time, we cannot turn away from the most critical issue, as we have so far. This conference will help spearhead a refocusing toward and not away from the central peril at hand. Mental health experts know that, when a threat seems to loom too large, the solution is to face it directly and to resolve it. And mental health experts deal with precisely these issues in their routine, everyday practice. Ignoring it will not make it go away, as we saw after the 2020 presidential election.
Dr. Lee was recently invited to discuss this very issue on “The Weekend Show.” As in every episode before, viewership exploded, with nearly a million views in less than 24 hours (every time she is interviewed, her viewership exceeds all previous shows combined, or all other shows that month—demonstrating how the public is thirsting for this information). Very significantly, in recognition of the unique qualifications and insights of Dr. Lee as well as the potential importance of this upcoming conference, she has been invited, as no one else before her, to be the featured guest on this influential Meidas Touch program, continuously, every week through the election.
All this is to say, just like our unprecedented New York Times bestseller, and our becoming the number one topic of national conversation within three months of publication, the public is hungry to hear more. Our focus may not be the central theme right now, but this does not change the reality that the issue is central, at this critical time leading up to the election, and our voice together has the potential to be historic. Your commitment to joining us may determine whether our nation recovers, or whether it fails for not seeking the right help at the right time for an eminently preventable condition.
Here are the Elements All Coming Together to Make this Conference of Major Significance on September 27, 2024
NEW BOOK: A new book titled, The More Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 40 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Warn Anew, will be published by the World Mental Health Coalition and featured at the conference. Dr. Lee became nationally known when she conceived and quickly edited The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, which became an instant New York Times bestseller in the first year of the Trump presidency. The new book will be a major update as well as an expansion, applying mental health principles to what is happening nationally and globally, and proving solutions for collective healing.
PARTICIPANTS: These are the top experts from multiple areas of expertise who participated in the previous conference. These and other expert persons are all being invited to join us again at this new conference:
Bandy Lee – Leading Forensic Psychiatrist, President World Mental Health Coalition, and Author of “Profile of a Nation” and “The Psychology of Trump Contagion”
Jeffrey Sachs – Leading Economist, University Professor at Columbia, and Coauthor of a recent landmark report on Avoidable Covid-19 Deaths in the U.S. Will present “First 100 Days” recommendations at conference.
Richard Painter – former Chief White House Ethics Counsel for the Bush/Cheney Administration, Professor of Law at University of Minnesota, and Coauthor of the recent devastating report on the Department of Justice under Attorney General William Barr
Ruth Ben-Ghiat – Leading Historian, Professor at New York University, and Author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present”
Jason Stanley – Leading Philosopher of Language and Epistemology, Professor at Yale and Author of “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them”
Gar Alperovitz – Leading Political Scientist, former Professor at the University of Maryland, and former Legislative Director of the U.S. Congress and Special Assistant in the U.S. Department of State
Joseph Romm – Leading Climate Expert, Physicist, former Acting Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy, and Editor-in-Chief of Front Page Live
David Cay Johnston – Pulitzer Prize-winning Investigative Journalist; Reporter on Worldwide Tax, Public Finance, and Business; and Founder of DC Report
Mehdi Hasan –Journalist and CEO of Zeteo
Philip Zimbardo – Leading Social Psychologist, Professor Emeritus at Sanford University, and Principal Investigator of the famous Stanford Prison Experiment
Jerrold Post – former Leading CIA Psychological Profiler and Director of Political Psychology Program at George Washington University
Noam Chomsky – Leading Linguist, Cognitive Scientist, and Cultural Critic
Jamie Raskin – U.S. Representative for Maryland, Lead Impeachment Manager for the Second Impeachment of Trump, and Member of the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack
John Dean – Former White House Counsel for President Richard Nixon, Coauthor of “Authoritarian Nightmare”
BUDGET: Considerable funds are needed to put on this very special conference in the main ballroom of the National Press Club in Washington DC, to advertise and promote the Conference, and to try to get major media and members of Congress to attend and take note of the conference. In addition to all of the costs associated with the conference, there will also be a reception including hors d’oeuvre and drinks, followed by a private dinner for conference panelists to meet with Washington media persons. Most importantly, if funding allows, we plan a full-page promotional pages in Politico to make the conference known, attended, talked about, and consequential. As of early September we have raised about two-thirds of the $67,500 budget. Now in the days ahead we have to raise the rest, especially the significant amounts needed to promote the conference with national media. The more funds we raise, the more promotion and media engagement we will be able to pursue to make the conference of exceptional quality and notoriety.
TIMELINE PREPARING AND PROMOTING THE CONFERENCE: Realizing how critical it is to inform the nation about “The Much More Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” – both the theme of the conference and the title of Dr. Lee’s new book that will be released at the conference – we began preparing the conference a few weeks ago in mid-August. The dedicated website will be opened very soon now in advance of the conference: DangersOfTrump.org. Invitations and arrangements for the many expert panelists is underway. Promotion of the conference with the media is now being assisted by a well-established professional media company. Arrangements with the National Press Club are underway, as are arrangements to have the conference professionally videoed and quickly edited for watching throughout the nation in the critical weeks preceding the election. If funds permit, we are planning a full-page announcement of the conference in Politico as well as social media. Immediately after the conference, the full conference will be available online, but very importantly we will also have our video persons quickly select key short segments to be individually available as well as a one-hour documentary made from the full conference. Then throughout the critical month of October, right up until election day, our newly retained media relations company will be continually working to promote awareness of the conference, with Dr. Lee the key spokesperson, with major media.