| | | Trump's mental state — not Biden's — is the real concern, mental health professionals say
David Knowles
Editor
Yahoo News•March 5, 2020
[ I don't think Biden will order a nuclear attack on a hurricane, but Trump might. Sure he's been told it wouldn't work and would create a massive fallout problem, but Trump doesn't listen and actually resents being told things he doesn't want to hear. ]
Mental health professionals who have expressed concern over what they see as Donald Trump’s declining faculties say that similar fears about Joe Biden’s are overblown.“A few stumbled words are not the same as the extreme danger that result from a list of signs that Donald Trump has shown,” Bandy Lee, a psychiatrist on the faculty at the Yale School of Medicine, told Yahoo News, “and none of them apply to Joe Biden.”
Lee edited a collection of essays written by 27 mental health professionals titled “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” which detailed what the authors see as the risks posed by a leader who they regard as mentally and emotionally unfit for the most powerful office in the world.
Yet since Biden’s reemergence as a front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, Lee has been flooded by requests to assess the former vice president’s string of stumbles in public appearances. In response, she published a piece on Medium correcting what she sees as the false equivalence between Trump’s “mental instability” and Biden’s occasional gaffes.
Trump frequently misstates or invents statistics or facts in his speeches, and in remarks last year seemed confused on the birthplace of his own father, saying he was born in Germany. (It was the Bronx.) Biden bungled an appeal for campaign volunteers at a debate last year, and recently shared what appeared to be a false memory of being “arrested on the streets of Soweto,” in South Africa, on his way to visit Nelson Mandela. (He was briefly detained at an airport during an official visit, but not arrested.)
Joe Biden and Donald Trump. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: AP (2), Getty Images (2))“
None of them are catastrophically alarming the way the signs have been with Donald Trump. I think there needs to be a measure of proportion here. On the one hand, we have such mental instability and such great cognitive decline as well as neurological signs that show imminent risk to the entire human civilization, compared with some gaffes perhaps. If we’re not addressing the former, why are we even talking about the latter?”
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