President's Mental Health Worries Family, Insiders Say

People have been casting aspersions on President Donald Trump’s mental health since he first announced his candidacy in 2015, and now even his eldest son may be questioning the president’s mental state.

Vanity Fair, quoting sources, reported earlier this week Donald Trump Jr. asked his siblings to help him convince the president to stop “acting crazy.”

Trump, who has flouted coronavirus mitigation guidelines and continuously downplayed the danger posed by the contagion, was diagnosed with COVID-19 last week and hospitalized at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. On Sunday night, he took a joyride around the hospital to greet supporters in a hermetically sealed, armored SUV, putting his Secret Service bodyguards at risk of infection and infuriating some doctors.

Since then he abruptly ended negotiations on the next round of coronavirus stimulus, insisted on restarting campaign rallies even though doctors have yet to clear him and tweeted frequently.

“Don Jr. has said he wants to stage an intervention, but [son-in-law] Jared [Kushner] and [elder daughter] Ivanka keep telling Trump how great he’s doing,” a source told Vanity Fair, adding that Don Jr. doesn’t want to confront his father alone. The situation sounds like a script from the HBO series, “Succession.”

The constant tweeting, in particular, has not only upset Don Jr. but other family members, as well, Vanity Fair reported.

Trump has been taking a powerful steroid – dexamethasone – known to interfere with thinking processes and to induce mania.

"Some patients may develop psychiatric symptoms after being treated with steroids including euphoria, mood instability, rage or psychosis," Dr. Lewis Kaplan, a president of Society of Critical Care Medicine, told ABC News.

"It is rare but occurs often enough that we recognize them as undesirable side effects of steroid therapy."

Trump has made chaos and combativeness a hallmark of his presidency, exhibiting hostility during briefings and presiding over a near-revolving door among staff. He also has stirred up divisions among the populace and shown a contempt for facts, taking an approach former senior adviser Kellyanne Conway famously dubbed “alternative facts” to describe his falsehoods.

Observers have called him a narcissist, a diagnosis supported by some 70,000 mental health professionals who signed a petition calling him dangerous.