Former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly was often faced with the unpleasant task of trying to second-guess then-President Donald Trump whenever possible. That couldn’t have been easy, since Trump is notoriously impossible to deal with. So Kelly, apparently trying to roll with the proverbial punches, secretly purchased a book in which 27 mental health authorities said Trump was mentally unfit to be president, The Guardian reports.

Kelly hoped to use the book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump as a guide for dealing with Trump’s famously irrational behavior. The news of Kelly’s secretive purchase has been revealed in the soon-to-be-released book The Divider: Trump in The White House, 2017 — 2021 by The New York Times’s Peter Baker, and The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser. The Guardian has obtained a copy of the book, due to be published next week.

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump became a bestseller in 2017. In a 2018 column for The Guardian, the book’s editor, then-Yale psychiatrist Bandy Lee described the book’s aims.

“While we keep within the letter of the Goldwater Rule — which prohibits psychiatrists from diagnosing public figures without a personal examination and without consent — there is still a lot that mental health professionals can tell before the public reaches awareness,” Lee wrote.

“These come from observations of a person’s patterns of responses, of media appearances over time, and from reports of those close to him. Indeed, we know more far more about Trump than many, if not most, of our patients.”

“Nevertheless,” Lee added, “the personal health of a public health figure is her private affair — until, that is, it becomes a threat to public health.”

Kelly’s struggles to impose some sort of order on Trump and those in his orbit, which was then followed by his heated falling-out with the president have been widely researched. When Baker and Glasser interviewed Kelly, they found out that the retired Marine Corps general 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.”

“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.”

And according to the authors, Kelly isn’t the only person to share this view, many unnamed senior officials felt the same way. The authors quote one as saying: “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.”

As Trump was nearing the end of his presidency, the potential of enacting the 25th Amendment, which provides for a president to be replaced if they are deemed unable to meet the demands of the job was brought into play, especially after he incited the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol building.

As you might expect, there’s no love lost between Kelly and Trump. Kelly isn’t afraid of attacking his former boss. In October 2020, Kelly pounced, telling friends he found Trump’s dishonesty “astounding … more pathetic than anything else,” and described Trump as “the most flawed person” he’d ever known, per CNN.

Trump snapped back that Kelly “didn’t do a good job, had no temperament and ultimately he was petered out. He got eaten alive. He was unable to handle the pressure of this job.”

One almost has to feel sorry for Kelly, who was clearly in over his head with this man. But in a way, it seems like those of us who weren’t Trump supporters were also in over our heads with this man, who while obviously mentally ill, managed to run the country into the ground.

And we’re still recuperating.