The Psychiatrist Who Warned Us That Donald Trump Would Unleash Violence Was Absolutely Right

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

On the afternoon of February 1, 2016, as Iowa voters prepared for that evening’s caucuses, Bandy Lee sat by the bedside of her mother, who was terminally ill with cancer. An assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Yale, Lee had been too preoccupied with her mother’s condition to pay attention to the nascent presidential race, so she was taken aback when she saw footage of a Donald Trump rally airing on the hospital room’s small TV. What shocked her was the way Trump interacted with the crowd. “He said something about how his supporters should knock the crap out of hecklers,” she recalls, “and that if they did, he would pay their legal bills.”

His belligerent behavior meant more to Lee than it might to a casual viewer. As part of her clinical work in prison settings, she had evaluated and treated hundreds of violent offenders, including leaders of prison gangs. A native New Yorker, she had assumed that Trump “was just a shady businessman,” Lee told me, but “I suddenly realized that he had a lot in common” with those patients. “Trump was engaging in the predatory manipulation of his vulnerable followers.” In some cases, gang leaders might “ask their members to engage in violence and then issue bogus promises of protection. Like Trump, these leaders also often project extreme self-confidence, and that appeals to their followers, who tend to feel a deep emotional need for protection, connection, and identity.”

Fast forward to November 9, 2016, the day after the election. Lee’s friends and colleagues were bombarding her with calls and emails. Would Trump’s victory herald an increase in hate crimes? “You are a violence expert,” one implored. “Can you do something?”

She decided to jump into the fray, organizing an academic conference that took place in New Haven the following April. Titled “Does Professional Responsibility Include a Duty to Warn?” the meeting featured a handful of prominent psychiatrists, including Robert Jay Lifton, author of The Nazi Doctors (1986), who addressed Trump’s mental state and the risks they believed it posed to the health and safety of Americans. Their consensus was, as Lifton put it, that psychiatric professionals had a compelling ethical duty to “bring our experience and knowledge to bear on what threatens us and what might renew us.” The event was initially sponsored by Yale’s schools of public health, medicine, and nursing, but Lee ended up running it independently to avoid the perception of “politicization.”

-more-

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/08/donald-trump-violence-mental-health-dangerous-jan-6-fbi-mar-a-lago-civil-war-bandy-lee-psychiatry-goldwater-rule/

[TheRealNorth]

1. A lot of us were not surprised by Jan 6th

I had my M1A ready if the Red Hats tried anything in Minnesota.

[halfulglas]

2. I wasn't surprised by the attempt.

My surprise was how successful it was. I didn't realize how Trump burrowers in the government had undermined warning, Capitol defense and reinforcement efforts. I think if it was pushed back early and effectively, it would never have been as violent and lasted as long.

[Lovie777]

3. shithole talked violence way before he ran for president .....

I saw it coming miles away which kinda reminded me of those pesky mosquitoes that can smell me 50 miles away

[applegrove]

4. I though Trump was a clownish, Queens, mattress salesman.

[Chainfire]

5. If Trump ever comes to the conclusion that he is going down, he will not be subtle

in the call to arms. Many will answer, but that can not affect the way the game is to be played.

[dalton99a]

6. Kick

[slightlv]

7. Did anyone else

go over to Mother Jones and read the whole article? I found the last few paragraphs very enlightening.

Holding Trump accountable for his criminal behavior, from Lee’s vantage point, could act as an antidote of sorts to the violent sentiments of his supporters. “I have found that once gang leaders are taken into custody, their followers soon stop believing in the delusions that they had all shared,” she says. “And their behavior often returns to normal.” To those who worry that his prosecution could lead to an uptick in violence, Lee counters that “doing nothing would be much more damaging to the country in the long run.”

Which is why Lee and her supporters stress that the APA needs to acknowledge its mistake and free mental health experts to rejoin the national conversation about how best to contain this particular epidemic. “The course of violence is not inevitable; we can change it,” Lee says. “And it seems counterproductive to prevent those who have spent their careers studying violence from speaking up at all.” As the specter of even greater violence looms over our fragile democratic experiment in the run-up to 2024, we can ill afford to ignore the red flags any longer.

I've been following Lee's work since she first tried to warn us all and got shot down. I hope the PTB hear her now, and turn those who study violence free on society as a whole to work their "magic." It may be one way to turn down the heat and help us back away from a bad situation of Trump's design. It could also possibly help some of those magats turn away from voting from people like desatan and others like him, if they see how badly they were led down the garden path. I look for miracles, I know... but she has an impressive history behind her.