President Donald Trump’s political opponents, who tried to imprison him, bankrupt him, remove him from the ballot, and make him politically irrelevant by introducing a partisan committee to investigate January 6 — and whose inflammatory rhetoric created a ripe environment for two assassination attempts — are now suffering health issues, according to health experts.
Doctors say the issues include anxiety, uncertainty, despair, guilt, depression, insomnia, grief, fear, and panic.
“There is an element of chaos right now,” Georgetown University psychology professor Andrea Bonior told Axios. “A sense of not knowing what’s coming and not being able to control what’s coming is really hard on the stress response.”
Trump took immediate action after taking the oath of office in January. In just three weeks, he signed over 75 executive orders, memos, and proclamations, outpacing previous presidents. Read more on those actions here.
As Trump took swift action, Democrat lawmakers enlisted psychologists to help them cope. Republicans mocked the move.“As humans, we don’t love uncertainty,” said Bonior, who sees patients in Washington, DC. “It’s something that we don’t tend to tolerate well. And then when we’re anxious, it’s excruciating.”
Dr. Glenn Burnett, an internist from Wyoming, told journalist Mark Halperin on Thursday that the health issues have “a lot to do with Donald Trump and the fears of what he’s going to do or what’s happening in the country.”
“We are dealing with depression, anxiety, all kinds of medical problems that are related to that, like insomnia, chest pain, chest pressure,” he said. “And then people are that [sic] — there’s some genuine fear, panic.”
Burnett said he advises his patients to turn off computers and televisions to restore their mental health.
“I think we can take so much of something before the human brain just like peters out and says, ‘I can’t keep up,'” neuropsychologist Sanam Hafeez from New York told Axios.
“We are in an unprecedented time that we have so many collective stressors going on, and the rapid fire of media coverage of these policy changes, it’s just adding to that broader collective stress,” added Daniel Relihan, a researcher at the Silver Stress and Coping Lab at University of California, Irvine.
In October, Halperin predicted that if Trump won the election it might be the “cause of the greatest mental health crisis in the history of the country.”
He told Tucker Carlson:
I think tens of millions of people will question their connection to the nation, their connection to other human beings, their connection to their vision of what their future for them and their children could be like. And I think that it will require an enormous amount of access to mental health professionals. I think it’ll lead to trauma in the workplace … I think there’ll be alcoholism. There’ll be broken marriages.
MENTAL HEALTH EXPERTS SEE "MASSIVE INCREASE" IN DEM PATIENTS
— Real America's Voice (RAV) (@RealAmVoice) February 11, 2025
Can you say TDS? Claims come after President Trump comes into office - "mental health professionals say even people who don't see themselves directly affected, are frazzled by Trump's dizzying pace." @charliekirk11… pic.twitter.com/dVmyCKWwbn
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.
