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When 74-year-old Special Counsel Robert Mueller essentially exonerated 72-year-old President Donald Trump March 22, Democrats looked for any excuse to move the goal posts. After saying for nearly two years they’d accept the Special Counsel’s report, as soon as the results were favorable to Trump House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her lieutenants House Judiciary Chairman Jerold Nadler (D-N.Y.) and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) doubled down on their assertions that Trump colluded with Russia and obstructed justice. All three rejected Atty. Gen. William Barr’s March 4 “bottom line” conclusion that the Special Counsel would not indict Trump or his inner circle for Russian collusion or obstruction of justice. Democrats placed all their hopes for the 2020 presidential election on Mueller finding Trump guilty on collusion and obstruction.

Democrat strategists hoped they could ride the Mueller Report all the way to the White House. Now that House Democrats are battling with Barr to get a so-called “unredacted” report, the 2020 election strategy has changed. Exploiting anti-Trump psychiatrists claiming Trump suffers from a deteriorating mental condition, Democrats hope, once again, to smear Trump, like they did in the 2016 campaign. Leading the charge against Trump then and now is 48-year-old Yale Psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee. Lee violated the 1973 American Psychiatric Association Goldwater Rule, named after 1964 Republican nominee Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Az.) who was slammed by psychiatrists as unfit for duty. Bandy ignored the rule claiming Trump suffers from some mysterious mental illness, calling him, among other things, a “malignant narcissist,” the same diagnosis given to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

Bandy worked with Trump-hating members of Congress, especially Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), to say Trump was unfit for duty, seeking to remove him from office under special circumstances of the 25th Amendment. Lee heads the “World Mental Health Coalition,” holding a conference last month titled, “The Dangerous State of the World and the Need for Fit Leadership,” largely referring to Trump. “His mistakes are growing more and more bizarre,” Lee said. “If we match the pattern of his deterioration against pathology, what disease states look like, we can say he’s not well,” said Lee, careful to avoid diagnosing Trump from her Yale office. When Lee refers to Trump’s mistake, saying his father Fred Trump was born in Germany, she sees this a dementia. Trump, of course, meant his grandfather, misspoke, referring to his paternal grandfather’s birthplace in Germany.

Lee takes one mistake on Trump as a sign of dementia, when, in fact, her insistence on crossing the line between politics and professional ethics shows far worse behavior. “Continually, we have been seeing that his erratic thought and behavior are more consistent with mental pathology than strategy. Now we are seeing a pattern of cognitive decline,” Lee said, refusing to give examples, other that one error about his father’s birthplace, actually the Bronx in 1905. Lee edited the book in 2016 called, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” a collection of partisan articles from Democrat mental health workers looking to smear Trump. Democrats looking for any advantage in 2020 no longer looking to Mueller but to partisan psychiatrists like Lee, willing to violate professional ethics. Jumping on Lee’s unethical critiques are Democrats looking to impeach Trump’s fitness for office.

Lee offers the most vague descriptions of Trump’s mental health, referring to pathology but not specifying a specific diagnosis. “We are talking about the profound danger of the mentally unstable individual who holds the highest office in the country, and most power single office in the entire world,” said Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, buying Lee’s flimsy arguments. Sachs is in no position on Trump’s mental health but wouldn’t dare question his performance on the U.S. economy. By anyone’s metrics, Trump has improved U.S. Gross Domestic Product [GDP], something former President Barack Obama couldn’t do in his eight years. Making an honest mistake at a campaign stop, Trump has been crucified as “demented” by Lee and her anti-Trump network of academics and mental health workers. Lee’s disgraceful use of psychiatry for political purposes goes unpunished.

Unable to use the Mueller report as cannon fodder for the 2020 race, Democrats have dealt from the bottom of the deck, exploiting unethical psychiatrists like Lee to defame a sitting president. Used by Democratic operatives to discredit Trump, Lee has no sense of professional ethics, diagnosing Trump when she has no facts. Citing campaign gaffes, like the mistake that his father Fred was born in Germany, Lee and others leap to the conclusion that Trump suffers from dementia or some serious form of mental illness. “He’s rapidly declining,” Lee said in response to Trump misstatement about his father. “His rallies have been increasingly less coherent, with greater signs of paranoid responses, increasing attraction to violence, increasing espousal of conspiracy theories . . . ,” Lee insisted. Lee sees nothing other than her partisan blindness impacting her professional judgment.