Praise for American Nero

Whenever Richard Painter appears in public to offer his lacerating opinionson Donald Trump's unethical actions, I stop to listen. In this revealing book,Painter and writer Peter Golenbock, place those sharp opinions in a fascinatinghistorical context.

—David Maraniss, author of The Red Scare and My Father

A quintessential book! Usually, political experts do not understand or appreciate enough of the psychological domain, and psychological experts enough of the political domain, for the two areas to meet. This has proven a debilitating deficiency in the era of Donald Trump. Richard Painter and Peter Golenbock take an important step to correcting this. Through their keen awareness of the importance of psychological soundness in a leader, they demonstrate the devastations that can result—not just to democracy and the rule of law but to the survival of humankind—when we hand power to a dangerously disordered one. Through parallels with this sick presidency, they issue a stark warning before we go the same route as two other empires that collapsed, both more established and longer in duration than we so far, because of a leader’s psychological defects.

—Bandy X. Lee, professor at Yale School of Medicine and editor of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump