And so is, again, repositioning America against this European ally and standing side by side with Moscow.

Yes, well, he not only overlooks the human rights abuses, he wishes to imitate them.

And he's highly attracted to the denigration and harm of the general population.

And the more they are oppressed, the more he will feel that he's he's in charge.

And so it is a very dangerous mental state, a kind of worldview and a psychological disposition where people are divided into superior and inferior, and the superior do everything they can to gain more power and to suppress those who are inferior to them.

And that is the opposite, of course, of democracy.

And I would try to illustrate democracy as an indicator for our collective state of mental health, because it comes from a willingness to share.

not just a huge shift practically and politically, but a gigantic shift mentally from citizens, because it takes the involvement of citizens to build a democracy.

And therefore, any effort to remove him is going to be worse than January 6th, in my prediction.

Oh, absolutely.

That is a given.

all the monuments in all his projects, his constant posting in social media, the frantic activity that he's trying to do to shape the narrative, reveals his psychic fragility and it's his psychological fragility that determines how violent he will become in trying to keep himself in power of course it's a desperate attempt again like a drowning man to keep himself psychically alive in his mind.

That will mobilize all kinds of energies and he has no other motivation or goals in life that his mind is drawn to.

He's simply at a stage where he's trying to psychically survive and he's going to be much more forceful than than anyone who is tethered to reality who is trying to make realistic goals and so in the immediate he's going to defeat anyone who tries to bring him down but but we have to recognize that this comes out of weakness it is not strength And if we mobilize based on reality and based on science and psychiatric principles, then we will be able to tackle this.

I mean, this is what psychiatrists do on a daily basis.

I mean, this just finally is laughable, but it also tells a very serious and dangerous story about this man and his insecurities.

So What do we do with people who don't really know where to put their vote, who maybe are hereditary and traditional Republican voters? What are they going to do? Are they able to kind of cross the aisle and vote for a Democrat?

Well, I think this is an opportune time to have them see the reality that perhaps they have been blocking out of their minds.

One of the reasons why I wish to talk about this topic is because I've had a full course of experience from the very beginning of the first Trump presidency when I reached out to every Trump supporter who would engage me, who wrote to me more than one line.

I had befriended them, wrote them long messages, and have had email exchanges, phone conversations, spent hours with Trump supporters, in fact.

And at that time, they were still able to question who he really was.

You know, they would reach out to me saying, you know, how could you say such awful things about our president? And so I would engage them, and they were at times quite surprised to find that I wasn't I wasn't trying to defeat someone they elected, but truly medically concerned.

And I love our country as much as they did, and I also believe in God, and so I connected with them from a position of faith as well.

Is it the fact that he was asked a question specifically about McConnell's failing health and that health kind of triggered him and he needed to divert? Or is it something else?

You know, so is that the sort of thing that you're talking about or does it go way beyond that?

Absolutely.

I mean, I think it goes far deeper than people generally believe, because we tend to be rational, conscious creatures who wish to believe that most of our thinking happens consciously.

But in fact, brain sciences show that... 95 to 98% of our mental processes are actually unconscious.

And so I have tried to educate the public about Trump contagion, sometimes also called shared psychosis, and can manifest more dramatically in individual settings than as Folie à deux, trois, quatre, depending on the number of people involved, and Folie à millions, as coined by the social psychologist Eric Fromm after the experience of Nazism.

And what I've been trying to say is that this emotional contagion through Donald Trump is what has largely allowed for the spread of even the most extreme policies, the most what we would ordinarily not accept in terms of violence, violence.

the level of loyalty that he demands even to Republican senators and others who had sworn themselves to abide by the Constitution, would rather sacrifice their careers and sacrifice their integrity in order to prove their loyalty to this one man.

Where does pathology and and culture being dysfunctional, but, you know, still being culture begin or how do those two things interact?

Could you talk to who he is behind the scenes?

Well, that he would become increasingly angry, furious, unsatisfied, and miserable to the point where he would have to lash out and be driven to destroy the world, ultimately, for not meeting his in his view, his emotional needs for not satisfying his need for a different kind of reality.

Because when he was given power, the first time he won the presidency, that is where his expectations had gone.

that his grandiose image of himself would transmogrify into delusions of grandeur, into megalomania and fantasies of unlimited power was only a matter of time because of the situation of handing power to an individual who could not handle it, was never fit or qualified to handle it.

And so this is a natural progression.

That is why we have said that his dangerousness would only increase with time.

and people's attempts to mollify him, to appease his anger, his grievances, his feelings of victimhood would only fuel those feelings and make him essentially never satisfied because they cannot be satisfied through any external means.

And that is all driven by what you describe is now propaganda, but actually started as almost like a psychological operation to reprogram people so that they don't know right from wrong.

Please tell us about the gravity of this warning that was put into the congressional record in April.

Yes, you are correct in that I have been trying to highlight the medical consensus that exists among psychiatrists and now increasingly other physicians, regarding the mental impairment of the commander-in-chief, and especially the situation that an American president has unfettered access to nuclear weapons, the second largest arsenal in the world, and over 1,700 of them ready to be deployed.

already deployed, in fact, and 3,700 ready to be used, and over 5,000 in stockpile.

And I believe that the public is not aware of the level of danger to all humankind that one man has the power to destroy all of humanity and the planet Earth as a human habitat for for all eternity or the rest of foreseeable future.

And there are no mechanisms in place to assess whether such an order is coming from someone who is fit to do so or anyone else, in fact, to countermand such an order.

There's only a mechanism in place to check if such an order exists.

has indeed been made.

Can you expand on this premise and perhaps offer a diagnosis of the current condition of the American populace and, if you can, suggest what might be needed to cure this disease in our population?

Please tell us about the gravity of this warning that was put into the congressional record in April.

Yes, you are correct in that I have been trying to highlight the medical consensus that exists among psychiatrists and now increasingly other physicians regarding the mental impairment of the commander-in-chief and especially the situation that an American president has unfettered access nuclear weapons, the second largest arsenal in the world, and over 1,700 of them ready to be deployed, already deployed in fact, and 3,700 ready to be used, and over 5,000 in stockpile.

And I believe that the public is not aware of the level of danger to all humankind that one man has the power to destroy all of humanity and the planet Earth as a human habitat for all eternity or the rest of foreseeable future.

And there are no mechanisms in place to assess whether... such an order is coming from someone who is fit to do so, or anyone else, in fact, to countermand such an order.

There's only a mechanism in place to check if such an order has indeed been made.

And so that means that All of humankind could go into extinction based on the decision, based on the whim of one individual, and there would be nothing we could do about it.

I joined forces with the physicians of the IPPNW or the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 for educating the public on the dangers, on the medical dangers of nuclear war, that essentially a nuclear war would be unwinnable that no amount of doctors and hospitals could be of any help in the case of a nuclear war.

Can you expand on this premise and perhaps offer a diagnosis of the current condition of the American populace And if you can, suggest what might be needed to cure this disease in our population.

And my concern is that if the panic is there to press the post button on Truth Social, what is to stop him from pressing the red button when all else fails?

Yes, and the extremely dangerous situation in which we find ourselves is that our structure, the setup that we have is that we have no way of of countermanding a president, fit or not, in an impulsive, in a fit of impulse or not.

There's no way to countermand the command of a nuclear weapon.

It's also an administration under which he has changed policies in ways that made it far easier to use nuclear weapons, has abrogated every treaty and allowed treaties to expire to the point where for the first time there are no treaties between the U.S. and Russia, the principal nuclear weapon holders.

And so we're in an extremely dangerous situation with someone of... as now even the most ordinary observer can see, severely impaired, mentally impaired individual in this position.

This has been our concern since the very beginning, the reason why I and my colleagues felt the need to come out and speak up, not just for the congressional record that we submitted a statement of medical concerns to Congress members, who requested the statement, and it went into the congressional record soon after the attacks and the threats against Iran started in April of this year.

But really, truly, since 2017, early 2017, when we held our ethics conference at Yale School of Medicine, decided we had an ethical duty to speak up.

So how important is it for people to recognize that this is a kind of once in a lifetime opportunity to kind of try to get America back on track and be that shining beacon on the hill that you described earlier?

Just explain that for us.

Well, what I'd like to emphasize is that there is a pattern here, and there's a very recognizable pathology, even.

that has been flowing through all his appearances.

And it's not entirely unexplainable.

In fact, it very much fits a pattern.

The more severely ill one is, the closer one will fit a pattern of disease rather than a healthy variation that is a part of illness.

everyday human life.

He didn't even deny it.

Yes, go ahead.

It almost did, but it was that critical moment in the beginning of his first presidency that when, in fact, our book became an unprecedented New York Times bestseller of its kind, instantly selling out, so much so that one of the big five publishers, Macmillan, took five weeks to to try to keep up with the demand, and finally caught up after five weeks.

And within three months, we were the number one topic of national conversation.

At that time, more than 50 Congress members were meeting with us, and what surprised me at the time was that they were depending on us.

that they were essentially telling us that we needed to educate the public so that they could intervene politically.

In other words, the medical education was critical to their political action.

And that is essentially why I have said that the American Psychiatric Association coming out and silencing us from the media was so detrimental.

But is this what we need to do? Do we need to kind of find the strength to remind people of the threat and what America and the rest of the world is facing?

Tell us about this.

Yes, it is actually a statement of medical concerns that senators have requested of us.

And so a group of three dozen renowned authorities in our field of psychiatry, as well as a few neurologists and general practitioners, including Nobel laureates and former department chairs, have gotten together to spell out the medical concerns that we have of the president that poses such a clear and imminent danger to our country, if not the world.

Well, from a medical perspective, we express the concerning signs that we see.

Our role is not to diagnose the president.

We are not his personal treaters.

But when we detect signs of danger for the sake of the safety and survival of the public, it is actually a professional obligation that we speak up and share our concerns.

And do you have any thoughts or are there any clues from history about how to get through to them?

Is there any precedent for countries pulling back from the brink, ejecting their unfit leaders, perhaps the rejection of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil or, you know, what South Korea just did with their leader? Or are those normal? Are those anomalies? I mean, what lessons can we learn from how other countries have dealt with this psychopathology of fascism with some success?

We can go in any direction, just as individual illness can be brought to greater states of health or be drawn and pulled further into a death spiral, as you described.

That's exactly the phrase I've been using since last year, or actually a couple of years even prior to that, of the state of our society.

Well, the further into the death spiral we are, the harder it is to pull ourselves out.

But it is always contest in a way between the sickness and our ability to have insight, awareness that something is wrong and to seek help for it, as well as to seek the proper help.

We have seen from our situation that we have this extremely destructive environment Mental health crisis, I would say, it's a public mental health emergency, and yet mental health experts were the first to be blacked out of the media when there are very few interventions that we could have other than education in public health.

That holds true across the board because we have to get other people's understanding as to what is happening, get their buy-in to collaborate and collaborate creating health, promoting structures, and to guarding our own mental health so that we don't get drawn in.

How can we as individuals best psychologically protect ourselves from Trump contagion, from this contagious psychopathology that has clearly seized pretty much the entire Trump administration and much of our Congress?