Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was warned by doctors and mental health professionals about Donald Trump’s mental health in 2019, according to her upcoming book.
The Guardian obtained an advance copy of Pelosi’s book The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House, which will be released next week. In the book, Pelosi recounted what she was told by several “doctors and other mental health professionals” at a memorial service for a psychiatrist.
They told her that they were “deeply concerned that there was something seriously wrong” with Trump, “and that his mental and psychological health was in decline.”
“I’m not a doctor,” Pelosi wrote, “but I did find his behaviors difficult to understand.”
The 2019 memorial was a service for Dr. David Hamburg, whom Pelosi refers to as “a distinguished psychiatrist who … served as the president of the Carnegie Corporation, where he had been a great voice for international peace.”
Pelosi elaborated further on her opinions of Trump’s mental health.
Before the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021, “I knew Donald Trump’s mental imbalance. I had seen it up close. His denial and then delays when the Covid pandemic struck, his penchant for repeatedly stomping out of meetings, his foul mouth, his pounding on tables, his temper tantrums, his disrespect for our nation’s patriots, and his total separation from reality and actual events. His repeated, ridiculous insistence that he was the greatest of all time,” Pelosi wrote.
Pelosi also described how Trump’s staff members, such as Mark Meadows, Trump’s final chief of staff, allowed Trump to listen in “surreptitiously” on private meetings with congressional leaders, causing Pelosi to ban cell phones from her meeting rooms on Capitol Hill.
She also wrote about Trump calling her on the phone, sometimes late at night, including one call where Trump told her that missile strikes he had just ordered against Syria were his predecessor Barack Obama’s fault. Pelosi told him “It’s midnight. I think you should go to sleep.”
On January 6, Pelosi said she was calm because she was “already deeply aware of how dangerous Donald Trump was.”
She wrote that she realized that she had “more respect for the office of president of the United States than Trump. “It was clear to me from the start that he was an imposter – and that on some level, he knew it.”
Pelosi’s remarks show that Trump’s ongoing cognitive decline isn’t something new and, in fact, was noticed by those around him years ago. In recent months, he’s confused members of Congress, fumbled during speeches, gone on incomprehensible rants, and made enough gaffes for critics to make brutal supercuts. Pelosi’s new revelations show just how much his mental state may have put the country in danger when he was president—and serve as a warning that another presidential term would likely be worse.
