By John Mathew Smith & www.celebrity-photos.com from Laurel Maryland, USA - Ty Cobb Lawyer, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=80024542
President Donald Trump’s former lawyer is convinced his ex-boss has quite literally become a “madman” — and that he must be removed from office.
“We’re in a real crisis here in the US,” attorney Ty Cobb told The i Paper in an interview that ran on Sunday. He added that the president is a “dictator,” “a madman” and is “destroying our democracy.”
As one example, Cobb observed that Trump appears to be “desperate” and therefore increasingly dangerous as the war in Iran drags on despite his efforts to quickly wrap it up. In seeming response to these frustrations, Trump posted on one occasion that if Iran did not capitulate to him a “whole civilisation will die tonight,” and on another warned Iran to “open the F**kin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in hell.” On both occasions, the posts sparked concerns about Trump’s mental fitness.
To illustrate his concerns, Cobb told The i Paper that during Trump’s first term the two men would regularly talk at length about substantive policy matters, and where Trump would be open to people who pushed back against his ideas. That does not seem to happen during his second term.
“That’s different from now because there’s nobody in the White House [who] is assisting the President with acting lawful or morally,” Cobb told The i Paper. For example, officials like former attorney general Pam Bondi and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth have seemingly enabled Trump by reaffirming his opinions and not challenging him when he is incorrect or in danger of breaking the law. The result, Cobb asserted, is a “kakistocracy,” or a government of the least qualified.
“Trump created this because of the controls he faced the first time around,” Cobb said. “Now you have grifters and sycophants and that is not a minor deviation from norms: it’s unprecedented in American history.
He added, “It’s made us vulnerable domestically and internationally and it’s fuelled the divide in the country.” In particular Trump has a streak of “long-running malignant narcissism” which Cobb described as dangerous because “the narcissism has always been an issue for him but in an absence of the impulse control the frontal lobe provides it has unleashed furiously, which is why we see revenge, corruption, delusions of grandeur and [alleged] abuses of power.”
He concluded, ““There has never been a President before who announced war crimes he would commit at 4am or danced on the grave of decorated public servants like Robert Mueller.”
Cobb is not alone among observers who worry Trump is mentally unfit to be president. Writing a letter to Congress last month, mental health professionals including James Gilligan, M.D. Prudence L. Gourguechon, M.D., James R. Merikangas, M.D., Jeffrey D. Sachs, Ph.D. and Bandy X. Lee, M.D., M.Div. described him as cognitively incapable of serving in the office.
“We write to you today with a sense of urgency that we do not use lightly,” the doctors wrote. “The behavior and rhetoric of President Donald Trump have crossed a threshold that demands the immediate and bipartisan attention of Congress. This is not a partisan assessment. It is a judgment grounded in observable fact, consistent professional assessment, and the constitutional responsibilities that your offices carry.”
They added, “President Trump exhibits what forensic mental health experts have, across dozens of independent assessments, identified as the ‘Dark Triad’ of personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Rather than constituting a clinical diagnosis, this trait-based assessment is grounded in behavioral observation and is particularly useful for assessing the level of danger an individual poses in a political leadership position. We do not offer this as a clinical verdict. We offer it as the considered judgment of a substantial body of professional opinion, based on well-researched evidence that is consistent, accumulating, and impossible to dismiss.”
Speaking to this journalist for Salon Magazine in 2020, Lee predicted that Trump would attempt a coup after losing that year’s election because of his narcissistic traits.
“Past behavior best predicts future behavior, and we can expect that we are entering a very dangerous period,” Lee warned at the time. “The 76 days between now and the inauguration will likely be the most norm-shattering, law-defying, and potentially violence-inciting that we have experienced so far in this presidency. Donald Trump is about to engage in a fight for his life, having given himself no possibility of losing, and even his and our preservation cannot be assured, given the powers he has in his possession.”
Elizabeth Mika, a counselor and therapist who contributed to the book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” likewise told Salon at the time that "he is not going to accept defeat — he is psychologically incapable of that. So he will continue spinning the election results as a fraud and conspiracy to oust him, fomenting rage and hate among his followers, and social unrest which will serve as his revenge by proxy.”