A psychiatrist who put his name to an April letter demanding President Donald Trump’s removal from office says his alarm has only deepened since then. Speaking on a radio program Wednesday, September 2, 2026, Dr. Henry Abraham, professor of psychiatry emeritus at Tufts University School of Medicine, warned that the president could reach for a nuclear weapon during an emotional outburst.
Radio host Dean Obeidallah asked the psychiatrist whether his conclusion about the president had changed at all. Abraham’s own biography says he shared in the awarding of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize as a member of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), and an account of the exchange published September 3 repeats that phrasing. The Norwegian committee handed the prize to IPPNW as an organization in a single undivided award, not to any individual member.
“Yeah, if anything, it’s worse,” Abraham told the program.
How the Assessment Has Hardened
The conversation returned to a step Abraham took earlier in the year. He and dozens of other doctors demanded publicly in April that the president leave office, arguing, as those physicians put it, that the job required a mental fitness he did not have. 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 was released publicly 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,” the physicians wrote, adding that “steps to remove him from office must be undertaken with the greatest urgency.” Abraham’s name comes first among the signatories. Two other signers are identified as prize recipients, while his own entry carries no Nobel notation.
No cognitive condition has been diagnosed in Trump. Scrutiny of his mental acuity has nonetheless kept building, fueled by the number of times he has seemed to nod off in public view, by the run of cognitive tests he has sat for and by how frequently doctors have examined him. Those tests have come back normal: the White House physician, Navy Captain Sean Barbabella, put the president’s score at 30 out of 30 on a cognitive assessment following his May 26 physical, and reported 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.
What the psychiatrist describes noticing is not dramatic on its face. “It’s subtle in terms of his mental status because a lot of it is more of the same,” Abraham 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.”
The Cockpit and the Operating Room
Abraham turned to two high-stakes professions to make his case about occupational fitness. “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 begin a procedure, he argued, falls under the same logic.
“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. The contrast between how the country handles safety-critical jobs and how it handles the presidency ran all through his case.
Worries Over Nuclear Command
The sheer scope of presidential power, command of the U.S. military included, compounds the danger, Abraham said. “When a person has sole access to the nuclear armamentaria, it’s crazy, and this is what we’re doing,” he said.
He put the risk in stark terms. “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.”
Nuclear war is the subject that brought his organization international recognition. The Norwegian Nobel Committee gave 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.
Within his own profession, claims of the sort Abraham is making remain contested terrain. Psychiatrists have argued for years over the American Psychiatric Association’s Goldwater Rule, which the association adopted in 1973 and reaffirmed in 2017; it holds that a psychiatrist acts unethically in offering a professional opinion on a public figure without having conducted an examination. Its signatories cast the April statement as an allegation about the president’s mental fitness, not a clinical diagnosis, and the opening lines call it “not a political statement” but “a medical one.” Abraham, for his part, frames the debate as a question of public safety, likening the presidency to jobs where someone verifies fitness as a matter of routine before the controls change hands.
The remarks arrive as the midterm election cycle heats up, with the president’s health, stamina and decision-making threaded through both parties’ messaging. The White House has not responded to Abraham’s latest remarks. The show posted the full conversation to its YouTube channel.
