Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff secretly bought a book in which 27 mental health professionals warned that the president was psychologically unfit for the job and then used it as a guide in his attempts to tackle the behavior. Trump’s irrational
News of John Kelly’s surreptitious purchase breaks out in a new book by Peter Baker of the New York Times and Susan Glasser of the New Yorker. The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.
The book Kelly bought, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, was a bestseller in 2017. In January 2018, its publisher, then-Yale psychiatrist Bandy Lee, outlined his goals. in a Guardian column.
She wrote: “While we stay within the letter of Goldwater’s rule – which prohibits psychiatrists from diagnosing public figures without personal examination and without consent – there is still a lot that mental health professionals can say before the public realizes it.
“These come from observations of a person’s response patterns, media appearances over time, and reports from those close to them. In fact, we know a lot more about Trump in this regard than many, if not most, of our patients.
“However, the personal health of a public figure is their private matter, until they become a public health threat.”
Kelly, a retired general, become Trump’s second chief of staff in July 2017, after Trump fired Reince Priebus for tweeting, and left the job in January 2019.
His struggles to impose order on Trump and his subordinates and his virulent fights with the president have been widely documented. According to Baker and Glasser, who interviewed Kelly, the retired Marine Corps general bought a copy of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump because “he sought help in understanding the president’s particular psychoses and consulted it while running the White House, which was known to be referred to as ‘Crazytown’”.
“Kelly told others that the book was a useful guide for a president who came to see a pathological liar whose inflated ego was, in fact, the sign of a deeply insecure person.”
The authors report that Kelly’s opinion was shared by unnamed senior officials, citing one who said: “I think there is something wrong with [Trump]. He doesn’t listen to anyone, and he feels he shouldn’t. He just doesn’t care what other people say and think. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The 25th Amendment, which provides for the replacement of a president unable to meet the demands of the office, was seriously discussed at the end of the Trump presidency, after the attack on Capitol Hill that it incited.
Baker and Glasser say the amendment was tentatively discussed by cabinet members “within months of Trump taking office.” However, its flaws (were Trump to oppose its use, it would be nearly impossible to change) prevented further action.
Trump regularly dismissed claims about his mental health and his staff’s concerns about it. In January 2018, after the release of Michael Wolff’s eye-opening book Fire and Fury, Trump memorably told reporters that he was “a very stable genius”.
Kelly has regularly attacked Trump. In October 2020, CNN reported that Kelly told her friends that Trump’s dishonesty was “astonishing … more pathetic than anything else” and called Trump “the most flawed person” she had ever met.
Trump replied, claiming Kelly “didn’t do a good job, he didn’t have a temper and he eventually burned out. They ate him alive. She couldn’t handle the pressure of this job.”
The dangerous case of Donald Trump was a bestseller, acclaimed by the Washington Post as “the most daring book” of 2017. But it also controversy stoked about his discussion of the state of mind of a public figure.
In May 2020, Lee lost her job at Yale, in part, she said, about tweets about Trump. This month, a federal judge fired a lawsuit in which Lee said she was wrongfully fired.
