Dr. Henry Abraham, professor of psychiatry emeritus at Tufts University School of Medicine, was one of the signers of an April letter calling for President Donald Trump’s removal from office — and he says his alarm has only grown since. Speaking on a radio program Wednesday, September 2, 2026, he warned that the president could reach for a nuclear weapon during an emotional outburst.

Radio host Dean Obeidallah asked him whether anything about his conclusion had changed. An account of the exchange, published September 3, says Abraham shared in the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize as a member of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) — the wording Abraham himself uses in his biography. 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

The conversation returned to a step Abraham had taken months before. Dozens of other doctors joined him in April in publicly demanding the president’s removal from office, arguing — as those physicians contended — that he was not mentally fit for the job. 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 went out publicly the following week. The statement 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 appears first among the signatories, with no Nobel notation attached to his entry, though the list marks two other signers as prize recipients.

No cognitive condition has been diagnosed in Trump. Scrutiny of his mental acuity has nonetheless mounted anyway, driven by how often he has appeared to nod off in public, by the string of cognitive tests he has sat for and by the number of his visits with doctors. Normal results came back from those tests. Navy Captain Sean Barbabella, the White House physician, reported a score of 30 out of 30 on a cognitive assessment after the president’s May 26 physical. The year before, the physician recorded a normal Montreal Cognitive Assessment. 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

Pressing his point about occupational fitness, the psychiatrist reached for two comparisons from high-stakes professions. “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. He kept returning to the same gap: the country polices fitness in safety-critical jobs, but not in the presidency.

Fears Over Nuclear Command

The sheer scope of presidential power compounds the danger, Abraham said, including command of the U.S. military. “When a person has sole access to the nuclear armamentaria, it’s crazy, and this is what we’re doing,” he said.

“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.”

That warning circles back to the very subject that made his organization internationally known. The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the 1985 peace prize to IPPNW “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, reaffirmed in 2017 and holds that offering a professional opinion on a public figure without having conducted an examination is unethical for a psychiatrist. Its signatories cast the April statement not as a clinical diagnosis but as an allegation about mental fitness, and its opening line calls it “not a political statement” but “a medical one.” Abraham has cast the debate as a matter of public safety, likening the presidency to occupations in which someone’s fitness gets checked as a matter of routine before the controls are handed over.

His remarks came with the midterm election cycle intensifying and with both parties threading 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.