Psychiatrist Bandy Lee Claims Donald Trump Is 'Severely Impaired' as She Sounds Alarm Over His Behavior

A leading psychiatrist has raised questions about whether President Donald Trump has regressed to a childlike mental state.

Discussing the president's ever-changing account of what he was doing around September 11, 2001, Dr. Bandy Lee, president of the World Mental Health Coalition, suggested that Trump's pattern of painting himself as "king of the universe" "tracks with the behavior of a small child."

"It is abnormal and pathological when it involves a fully-grown adult, whether it is because of arrested development or because one has regressed to that state,” she said.

Trump has infamously delivered several, increasingly embellished accounts of where he was during the 2001 cleanup of the Twin Towers. In 2026, he told a tale about burly firemen having to physically drag him away from cleaning up rubble because a nearby building was threatening to collapse.

None of Trump's fantastical tales of helping the FDNY or sending employees to help with cleanup have ever been corroborated. Trump notably and falsely bragged that his Trump Tower was the new tallest skyscraper in New York the day the Towers fell.

Lee told MeidasTouch's The Weekend Show that the tall tales expose "how fragile he is in his sense of self."

The lies weren't the only thing Lee also sounded the alarm over.

She pointed to Trump's increasing propensity to doze off during public appearances and his self-aggrandizing social media posts as evidence that the 80-year-old president was feeling the weight of his tremendous unpopularity — his approval rating dipped into the 20s in a recent poll — and lashing out.

“Alarming indications of how endangered he feels psychologically and how he needs to fight back, and become the most powerful and dangerous person on the planet,” she said. “That is where his mind is going.”

Lee has been tracking Trump's mental health for years. In the president's first term, she and a team of psychiatric professionals wrote The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, where they wrote about their impressions of the president's mental fitness. She spoke to lawmakers on Capitol Hill about Trump's fitness for office shortly after the book's publication.

In 2020, she drew backlash for saying Trump's supporters engaged in a "shared psychosis," and said former Trump lawyer Alan Dershowitz had “wholly taken on Trump’s symptoms by contagion.” Yale fired her shortly after the remarks for offering professional opinions on someone they haven’t personally examined.

Trump's mental fitness has long been a top question of his presidencies. While The White House continues to put out statements praising his "sharpness, unmatched energy and relentless work ethic," Trump rarely displays those qualities in public.

He regularly confuses names and places, falls asleep on camera whenever he isn't speaking, and spends much of his time golfing.

He has been given numerous cognitive assessments. Trump has claimed to ace them, misidentified them as "IQ tests" and called them "very difficult." The test Trump has taken, the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, has such questions as "draw a clock" and "identify a squirrel."