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. Dr. Henry Abraham, professor of psychiatry emeritus at Tufts University School of Medicine, warned on Dean Obeidallah’s SiriusXM program that the president could reach for a nuclear weapon during an emotional outburst. The White House called him “a disgrace to the medical profession.”
Obeidallah asked the psychiatrist, during a Wednesday, September 2, 2026, appearance, whether his conclusion about the president had changed at all. “Yeah, if anything, it’s worse,” Abraham told the program, in an exchange reported the following day.
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, and the reporting repeats that phrasing. Much of the coverage went further and billed him as a Nobel winner outright. The Norwegian committee handed the prize to IPPNW as an organization in a single undivided award, not to any individual member.
How the Assessment Has Hardened
The conversation returned to a step Abraham took earlier in the year. He and 35 other doctors signed a statement in April demanding that the president leave office, arguing that the job required a mental fitness he did not have. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse asked that it be printed in the Congressional Record on April 30, on behalf of himself and Senator Jack Reed, and it was released publicly on May 5. The physicians did not call on him to resign, framing their demand as removal instead. “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 comes first among the signatories, though the list runs alphabetically by surname. Two other signers are identified there as prize recipients — IPPNW co-founder Eric Chivian for 1985 and Ira Helfand for 2017 — while Abraham’s own entry carries no Nobel notation at all.
Trump has not been diagnosed with a cognitive condition. Scrutiny of his mental acuity has nonetheless kept building, fueled by the number of times he has seemed to nod off in public view 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 the Montreal Cognitive Assessment after his May 26 physical this year, the same perfect score recorded at his April 2025 exam. Chronic venous insufficiency, the condition the White House disclosed in July 2025, is vascular, not cognitive.
The change the psychiatrist describes 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.
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.”
His organization won its international recognition on exactly this subject. 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.” By Abraham’s own account, he and the cardiologist Jim Muller negotiated the final draft of the group’s constitution at The Hague with physician leaders from more than 40 countries.
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, adopted in 1973 and reaffirmed in 2017, which holds that a psychiatrist acts unethically in offering a professional opinion on a public figure without having conducted an examination. The April statement’s signatories cast it as an allegation about the president’s mental fitness rather than a clinical diagnosis, and its opening lines call it “not a political statement” but “a medical one.” The association has not responded to Abraham’s latest remarks.
The White House hit back hard. “President Trump is the sharpest, most accessible, and energetic president in American history,” spokesperson Davis Ingle said, reprising a formula the administration has used before when the president’s health comes up. “Henry David Abraham is a Trump Deranged loser engaging in armchair diagnosis for political purposes. He is a disgrace to the medical profession.” The remarks arrive as the midterm cycle heats up, with the president’s health, stamina and decision-making threaded through both parties’ messaging. The show posted the full conversation to its YouTube channel.
