Donald Trump phoned in to the Fox & Friends morning show on Friday, and in a manic, 53-minute interview made a series of false claims, including that impeachment witness Marie Yovanovitch, the ousted U.S. ambassador to Ukraine , refused to hang a portrait of Trump in the embassy.
But more importantly, according to an analysis by Yale University psychiatrist Dr. Bandy X. Lee, Trump’s phone interview revealed that “very self-defeating, blatantly abnormal signs that have raised alarms for psychiatrists and neurologists for years.” In her essay published by Raw Story , Lee said that the interview revealed that Trump is suffering from “declining cognitive functions.”
Lee is the co-author of the book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump , in which she and other mental health professionals say that Trump’s psychological condition presents a threat to national security. Lee also co-authored a psychological evaluation following the release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation report. Evidence contained in the Mueller report proved that Trump’s mental state constitutes a national “emergency,” she said at the time.
The Mueller report, Lee wrote, showed that Trump is incapable of rationally evaluating the risks of his own behavior. She made the same critique in her latest analysis of Trump’s mental state published on Saturday.
Listing a series of Trump’s recent actions, including his sudden order to pull U.S. troops back from the Syria-Turkey border, allowing a Turkish attack on the Kurds, Lee writes that Trump’s “impulsivity, recklessness, and erratic decision-making” have worsened and become more “consequential.”
She also cited Trump’s tendency to slur his speech , and to engage in “confabulations,” that is, the tendency to compensate for memory loss by simply making up stories.
Lee said that the Fox & Friends interview also showed that Trump has reached the point in his alleged cognitive decline where he can no longer easily put together “a single coherent sentence.”
That observation was echoed in a Washington Post account of Trump’s Friday phone-in interview. Media critic Erik Wemple said that Trump “had trouble putting together a coherent thought.”
Trump, in the interview, claimed that he knew the name of the whistleblower whose report on his July 25 phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky set in motion the chain of events that led to the current impeachment inquiry.
Trump also told Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy, “you know who the whistleblower is, too,” as quoted by The Washington Post.
Doocy then pushed back on Trump’s claim, saying on-air that Fox News had “no idea who the whistleblower is.”