In July, a congressional hearing will be held to determine whether or not President Donald Trump is mentally fit to be leader of the free world, and the result could well determine whether or not impeachment hearings begin to remove Trump from office.
The Hill reports:
“House Budget Committee Chairman John Yarmuth (D-KY) said he and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD.) will host Dr. Bandy Lee, a Yale School of Medicine psychiatrist who edited the best-selling book ‘The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.’
“’We are planning to do something where she can make a presentation to other members, so that they’ll be aware of what she’s been working on,’ Yarmuth told The Hill in a brief interview.”
Such a hearing is controversial because none of the doctors who will testify have actually treated Trump, and the American Psychiatric Association (APA) prohibits members from speculating about the mental state of public figures.
Despite that, Yarmuth noted that the safety of the American people is paramount, and that alone is reason enough to solicit testimony from experts in the field:
“Even though none of them had actually treated Trump, they in their practices, and their experience, they recognize certain patterns of behavior, and when it’s their professional responsibility to alert people who may be endangered by someone’s behavior. And in this case it’s the American people.”
Trump has certainly done and said things that have made many question his mental fitness for office. Consider these points made by Justin A. Frank, M.D., a clinical professor of psychiatry at George Washington University Medical Center and author of Trump on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President:
- A worrisome escalation of Trump’s cognitive limitations was heard in his inability to follow the thread of a conversation, as when he jumped from getting a card for Melania’s birthday to talking about Macron’s wife to talking about Iran — all in a span of three sentences. He said things that just don’t make sense, like there is “a horrible group of deep-seated people” out to get him.
- The paranoid portrayal of himself as victim continued in a similar manner. “It’s a witch hunt,” Trump said, “and they know that. … I would give myself an A-plus. Nobody has done what I’ve been able to do and I did it despite the fact that I have a phony cloud over my head that doesn’t exist.”
- Also on display was the now-familiar disconnect between Trump’s language, meaning, and the truth, most conspicuously when he contradicted himself while railing against his perceived enemies on “fake news” networks: “I don’t watch them at all. I watched last night.”
While the hearing next month may not change any minds on Capitol Hill, it needs to be held, if only because it’s sure to infuriate the notoriously thin-skinned Trump.