Dr. Henry Abraham, professor of psychiatry emeritus at Tufts University School of Medicine, used a radio interview Wednesday, September 2, 2026, to deliver a blunt warning: President Donald Trump could reach for a nuclear weapon during an emotional outburst. Abraham, one of the signers of an April letter calling for the president’s removal from office, said his alarm has only deepened since.
Radio host Dean Obeidallah asked whether his conclusion about the president had shifted at all. An account of the exchange published September 3 repeats the wording of Abraham’s own biography: that he shared in the awarding of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize as a member of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW). IPPNW received the prize as an organization, in a single undivided award; no individual member did.
“Yeah, if anything, it’s worse,” Abraham told the program.
A Psychiatrist’s Escalating Assessment
That answer revisited a step Abraham had taken months earlier. Dozens of other doctors signed on with him in April, publicly demanding that the president leave office. Their reasoning, as those physicians put it, was that he lacked the mental fitness the job requires. 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. It 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, and his entry carries no Nobel notation. Two other signers are identified as prize recipients. No cognitive condition has been diagnosed in Trump.
Scrutiny of his mental acuity has nonetheless kept building. Driving it are the occasions on which he has appeared to doze off in public, the series of cognitive tests he has taken and the frequency of his visits with doctors. Those tests have come back normal. Navy Captain Sean Barbabella, the White House physician, put the president’s score at 30 out of 30 on a cognitive assessment following his May 26 physical, and the year before that a Montreal Cognitive Assessment came back normal. Chronic venous insufficiency, the condition the White House disclosed in July 2025, is vascular rather than cognitive.
“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 Pilot and the Surgeon
The psychiatrist borrowed two comparisons from high-stakes professions to press his point 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. The same logic, he argued, would apply to a surgeon about to begin a procedure.
“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 through his argument.
Fears 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 went on to state 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 also 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 was 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 not as a clinical diagnosis but as an allegation about mental fitness, and the opening line calls it “not a political statement” but “a medical one.” Public safety is how Abraham has framed the debate, likening the presidency to jobs in which fitness gets checked as a matter of routine before anyone takes the controls.
The midterm election cycle is heating up as the remarks arrive, and both parties are threading arguments about the president’s health, stamina and decision-making through their messaging. No response to Abraham’s latest remarks has come from the White House. The show posted the full conversation to its YouTube channel.