Dr. Allen Frances

Opinion contributor

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., has introduced a bill suggesting that Vice President Pence "quickly secure the services of medical and psychiatric professionals" to begin the process of removing President Trump from office, due to his alleged disqualifying mental disorder.

Trump's daily dramas and predictably unpredictable behavior has already stimulated a petition signed by 61,000 people, including many mental health workers, claiming that: “Donald Trump manifests a serious mental illness that renders him psychologically incapable of discharging the duties of president of the United States.”

These efforts are misguided and impotent — more psychological name-calling than a serious step in reducing the real risks of this Trump presidency. Trump is transparently and unashamedly a world class narcissist, a chronic conspiracy theorist, a deceitful con man, a reckless gambler and a peevish spoiled child. But we must not confuse his lifelong pattern of bad behavior with mental illness.

Trump is a dangerous president because of his terrible judgment, behavior, speech and tweets — not because he is psychiatrically sick. Lumping Trump with the mentally ill stigmatizes them, without helping us control him.

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The solution to Trump is political, not psychiatric. Psychological name-calling is useless bull-baiting that fails to provide the institutional controls necessary to tame Trump and make him safer.

Psychiatry can’t rescue us from Trump, but Congress can. It must, before it is too late, assert adult supervision over our immature president. The effort should cut across party lines — a rare triumph of patriotism over partisanship.

Trump's being so bad at his job provides the clearest possible warning that we must curb the growing powers of what has become an increasingly imperial presidency. No one person should be in control of the apocalyptic nuclear button. And presidents should no longer be allowed to bypass Congress' exclusive power to declare war, established under Article 1, section 8 of the Constitution but recently routinely ignored by them. We don’t want to awake one morning to discover that instead of a tweet storm, restless Trump has impulsively started a devastating war with North Korea.

And Congress should pass a bill of formal censure chastising Trump for his encouragement of Nazi and Ku Klux Klan aspirations. Congressional censure falls far short of impeachment and carries no legal authority, but it does set a standard for our country to counteract Trump's political opportunism and moral blindness.

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I don’t blame Trump for his bad behavior any more than I would blame a skunk for smelling bad. It is his nature, and he is incapable of changing it.

I do blame the Republicans in Congress for, so far, enabling his behavior in the hope they can use Trump as a vehicle in passing their radical right agenda. Even more, I blame Fox News, the Koch brothers and the Tea Party movement for creating the degraded political environment that greased the wheels for a would-be dictator like Trump to become president.



Ridding ourselves of Trump through impeachment or medical disqualification will be treating the symptom and ignoring the underlying societal disease that it signals. And Pence and House Speaker Paul Ryan would create a whole new set of problems for our country because they are more plausible purveyors of Trump's harmful medical, tax and environmental agenda.



Mislabeling Trump as mentally ill distracts Congress from exercising its constitutional responsibility to provide legislative checks and balances against Trump’s unrestrained abuse of executive power. The solution to Trump is political, not psychiatric. This is a moment of truth for congressional Republicans.

Dr. Allen Frances was chair of the American Psychiatric Association task force that wrote the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV and was chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University. He is the author ofTwilight of American Sanity: A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump.

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