President Donald Trump could reach for a nuclear weapon during an emotional outburst, warns a psychiatrist who put his name to an April letter demanding the president’s removal from office — and who says his alarm has only grown since. Dr. Henry Abraham, professor of psychiatry emeritus at Tufts University School of Medicine, made the comments in a radio interview Wednesday, September 2, 2026.
Radio host Dean Obeidallah asked him whether anything had changed in his conclusion about the president. An account of the exchange reported September 3 describes Abraham as having shared in the awarding of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize as a member of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) — the phrasing Abraham uses in his own biography. The Nobel went to IPPNW itself: one undivided award to the organization, not to any individual member.
“Yeah, if anything, it’s worse,” Abraham told the program.
A Psychiatrist Raises His Alarm
The interview circled back to a step Abraham took earlier in the year. In April, he joined dozens of other doctors in a public demand for the president’s removal, on the grounds — as those physicians contended — that he was not mentally fit for the job. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse entered their statement into the Congressional Record on April 30, on his own behalf and that of Senator Jack Reed, and it went public the following week. The physicians did not ask the president to resign. “If we were called upon under the 25th Amendment to judge the President’s present ability to discharge the duties of his office, we would have to conclude that he lacks the capacity to do so,” they wrote, adding that “steps to remove him from office must be undertaken with the greatest urgency.” Abraham’s name appears first among the signatories, and his entry carries no Nobel notation, though two other signers are identified as prize recipients.
Trump has not been diagnosed with any cognitive condition. Scrutiny of his mental acuity has nonetheless built steadily, fueled by how frequently he has appeared to doze off in public, by the run of cognitive tests he has taken and by how often doctors have seen him. Those results have been normal. After the president’s May 26 physical, White House physician Navy Captain Sean Barbabella reported a score of 30 out of 30 on a cognitive assessment, following a normal Montreal Cognitive Assessment the year before. Chronic venous insufficiency, the condition the White House disclosed in July 2025, is vascular rather than cognitive.
Abraham described the change as a matter of accumulation. “It’s subtle in terms of his mental status because a lot of it is more of the same,” he said. “But when you get confirmatory evidence that points in the same direction again and again, after a while you sort of know what you’re dealing with and you kind of know what needs to be done.”
Lessons From the Cockpit and the Operating Room
Making his case about fitness for work, the psychiatrist borrowed two examples from professions where mistakes are fatal. “I mean, if an airline pilot had half of the symptoms that the president of the United States has, we would not let him on an airplane; we certainly wouldn’t want to fly with him,” he said. A surgeon about to start a procedure, he argued, would be held to the same standard.
“We wouldn’t want a neurosurgeon to walk into the operating room and operate on — this doesn’t make sense — and yet, we have a system which enfolds the president’s health in a shroud of secrecy,” he said. That contrast between rigorous checks for safety-critical work and secrecy around the presidency was the thread running through his argument.
Warnings Over Nuclear Command
What compounds the danger, Abraham said, is the sheer breadth of presidential power, command of the U.S. military included. “When a person has sole access to the nuclear armamentaria, it’s crazy, and this is what we’re doing,” he said.
He was blunter still about the risk itself. “I think we’re in even more danger of Donald Trump using a nuclear weapon in a fit of pique or rage or confusion or poor impulse control than ever before,” he said. “So yes, he’s more dangerous.”
That is the same ground his organization covered on its way to international recognition. The Norwegian Nobel Committee handed IPPNW the 1985 peace prize “for spreading authoritative information and by creating awareness of the catastrophic consequences of nuclear war.” Abraham co-wrote the group’s constitution that year.
Inside his own profession, claims of the kind Abraham is making remain contested terrain. The American Psychiatric Association’s Goldwater Rule, adopted in 1973 and reaffirmed in 2017, holds that offering a professional opinion about a public figure who has not been examined is unethical for a psychiatrist, and psychiatrists have argued over it for years. Its signatories framed the April statement as an allegation about mental fitness rather than a clinical diagnosis, and the document opens by calling itself “not a political statement” but “a medical one.” Abraham has cast the debate as a public safety question, likening the presidency to jobs where fitness is routinely verified before anyone is handed the controls.
The remarks arrive with the midterm election cycle heating up and with the president’s health, stamina and decision-making running through the messaging of both parties. The White House has not responded to Abraham’s latest remarks. The show posted the full conversation to its YouTube channel.
