Former President Donald Trump’s second chief of staff, John Kelly, surreptitiously bought and used a book assessing his boss’s mental state, according to a new report.
The purchase appears in The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, a book written by Peter Baker of the New York Times and Susan Glasser of the New Yorker due to be released next week.
Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general who served as Trump’s chief of staff from July 2017 to January 2019, bought a copy of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump as he “sought help to understand the president’s particular psychoses and consulted it while he was running the White House, which he was known to refer to as ‘Crazytown,’” according to the Guardian.
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The book Kelly bought, which has been updated and expanded since its original 2017 release, features assessments by 37 psychiatrists and mental health experts warning about Trump’s mental health.
“Kelly told others that the book was a helpful guide to a president he came to consider a pathological liar whose inflated ego was in fact the sign of a deeply insecure person,” according to Baker and Glasser, who interviewed Kelly.
Kelly’s concerns were shared by other senior officials, who were not named, including one who said: “I think there’s something wrong with [Trump]. He doesn’t listen to anybody, and he feels like he shouldn’t. He just doesn’t care what other people say and think. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Trump defended his mental fitness over the years. In 2018, he called himself a “very stable genius.”
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There have been reports on Trump and Kelly being critical of each other ever since Kelly left the government. Trump “is the most flawed person I have ever met in my life,” Kelly said in 2020, according to CNN. “The depths of his dishonesty is just astounding to me,” he reportedly added. “The dishonesty, the transactional nature of every relationship, though it’s more pathetic than anything else.”
Also in 2020, Trump said Kelly “didn’t do a good job, had no temperament, and ultimately he was petered out.”
