Donald Trump’s America has become more dangerous than Vladimir Putin’s Russia because the world’s most powerful military, financial and technological machine is now under the command of a man whom American psychiatrists and psychologists have publicly described, as we have already shown, as marked by malignant narcissism, paranoia and sadism, with other specialists pointing to signs consistent with cognitive decline and even frontotemporal dementia.
World stability now depends on the impulses of a deeply unstable leader at the apex of the strongest military power on earth, a man surrounded by flatterers and fanatics who feed his grandiose delusions every day, to the point where he sees himself at once as emperor of the world, with the imperial grandiosity of a Caesar, the destructive exhibitionism of a Nero and the paranoia of a Stalin. For the rest of humanity, that accumulation of traits makes him look more and more like Hitler in command of a nuclear superpower. When such a man returns to the White House, the danger takes on the force of the state he is beginning to remake in the image of his own illness.
Trump did not come back alone. He returned with a cadre of enforcers drilled in absolute obedience, the people he needed to reshape institutions in the image of his own pathology and turn the leader’s delirium into a political disease spread from the White House through the entire federal apparatus. It is the same contagious madness history has already seen around Stalin, Hitler and Ceausescu, when one man’s delirium infected the whole state machine. That battalion includes loyalists, adventurers, propagandists, demagogues, religious fanatics, political enforcers and wreckers of institutions, methodically planted in the places from which America’s power is commanded: the White House, the Pentagon, Justice, the FBI, the CIA, Homeland Security, the Treasury, diplomacy and the public propaganda apparatus.
In their hands, federal power looks less and less like a state governed by law and more and more like a personal court built around the impulses, obsessions and vendettas of an unstable leader. This transformation did not begin in January 2025, or on inauguration day. It began the moment Trump’s hordes stormed the Capitol. That was when the raw human material of the regime first appeared in plain view: politically brutalized people, people with little civic or political understanding, conspiracy addicts, opportunists, hustlers and fanatics dragged out of the underground of American resentment and hurled against the institutional heart of the republic.
On January 6, 2021, that magma of hatred, political ignorance and fanaticism flooded into Congress. In the years that followed, it organized itself, acquired electoral legitimacy, was laundered by the media and, by 2024, settled into the White House and the federal apparatus.
Behind this internal capture there was also help from outside. The Mueller investigation found that Russia had intervened in the 2016 U.S. election in a manner that was „sweeping and systematic,” while the Senate Intelligence Committee report showed that the operation formed part of the „active measures” campaign ordered by Vladimir Putin.
We have already shown, on our site, how that machinery works: through social networks, data infrastructures, propaganda, political conduits and figures tied to the Russian apparatus of influence and espionage. That is the context in which Trump’s rise must be understood: an America degraded from within and manipulated from without.
The leader who benefited from an officially documented Russian influence operation is now steering the United States in a direction that weakens NATO, pressures Ukraine and fractures the Western alliance at the very moment when the Kremlin needs an America that is chaotic and hostile to Europe.
The fact that part of America already feels the nature of this danger can also be seen in the streets. On March 28, 2026, more than 3,200 „No Kings” demonstrations were organized across all 50 states against the Trump administration’s authoritarian drift, the war with Iran and the deportation campaign.
When millions of people take to the streets against the president in the name of democracy, the signal is unmistakable: part of America can already see that power has crossed the threshold of authoritarian administration and entered the logic of a captured regime.
To understand how the state that posed as the homeland of democracy could slide, in just a few months, toward a vast Trumpist satrapy with Stalinist reflexes, one has to map the network of enforcers who occupied its institutions in Donald Trump’s name.
In today’s America, power works through the cult of the supreme leader, through personal obedience, through purges and through the use of the coercive apparatus against the country’s own inhabitants. ICE has been thrown into the field as an instrument of internal manhunt, deportations have been accelerated through the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a wartime American law used by the White House for rapid expulsions, while thousands of „No Kings” protests have erupted across all 50 states against the authoritarian drift. At the same time, threats against Greenland have become public policy, and the war with Iran shows how quickly an administration already unleashed at home can slide into external aggression.
The key to this entire rot lies in Trump’s men, each placed at a command point within the state in order to wrench it out of its democratic course and put it to work for the will of a single man.
The White House, Congress and the beginning of the occupation
The capture of a state begins with the occupation of its command center and of the political mechanism that protects it. Trump now controls both levers: the White House and a Republican Congress that gives him cover and weakens oversight of the president and his administration.
In Washington, that means a president restored to power with his vice president, J.D. Vance, seated at the heart of the executive, a House of Representatives led by Mike Johnson and a Senate in which the majority leader, John Thune, is trying to hold together a Republican machine increasingly subordinate to Trump’s will. The political function of this arrangement is already clear: the White House sets the line, and the Republican Congress defends it, even when the price is institutional paralysis or deeper chaos. Mike Johnson blew up the compromise negotiated in the Senate to reopen most of Homeland Security, and Trump publicly demanded that Republicans tie the department’s funding to a new election law designed to favor his party. That is how occupation begins: with an executive that gives orders and a legislature that no longer checks power, but escorts it.
Within this political command, J.D. Vance plays the role of ideological lieutenant. Trump’s vice president has gone so far as to publicly challenge even the right of judges to constrain executive power, at a moment when courts were blocking DOGE’s access to Treasury systems, and his outburst was widely read as a sign that the new power no longer sees judicial review as a democratic safeguard, but as an obstacle to be removed. Mike Johnson, for his part, perfectly embodies the parliamentary shield of Trumpism: the man who helped the legal attempt to overturn the 2020 election now leads the House of Representatives and uses that position to block even compromises negotiated within his own party whenever they stray from the line imposed by Trump.
Before occupying the rest of the state, Trump consolidated his command center and the political shield around him. From there, the offensive moves against the security apparatus, the administration, the courts and the public sphere.
The security apparatus and the state turned into a personal weapon
Next come the institutions through which a regime imposes domination: the border, criminal investigation, surveillance, state secrecy and war. Homeland Security, ICE, the Pentagon, the FBI, the CIA and the upper reaches of the intelligence community form the machinery through which power decides who may be hunted, expelled, watched, silenced or struck. When those levers are handed over to a president displaying severe pathological traits and a clique of fanatical loyalists, the state changes its nature. It no longer defends the law. It executes the leader’s will. In Trump’s America, this is where one sees most clearly how one man’s pathology descends into institutions and begins to produce fear, repression and violence with federal cover.
One of Trump’s most dangerous generals is Pete Hegseth, the man put in charge of the world’s largest military in order to purge it of inconvenient professionals, crush legal restraints and inject an aggressive nationalist Christianity into the chain of command – a Christianity compatible with holy war and ideological obedience, and hostile to the constitutional neutrality of a military in a republic.
Hegseth began by decapitating the very zone that exists to tell power when its orders collide with the law: he fired the top military lawyers, saying they were not fit to advise when „lawful orders” are being given – a formula that makes perfectly clear what kind of Pentagon he wants: one in which military lawyers cover for the order and silence the law.
He then moved on to controlling the flow of information: a federal judge blocked the Pentagon policy that allowed the department to treat journalists as security risks and strip them of credentials through a discretionary power described in court as a tool for viewpoint-based restrictions, and after the ruling the department pressed ahead with new access limits and with escorting reporters through the building.
On top of that demolition of institutional brakes, Hegseth also built an apparatus of religious radicalization in the very heart of the Pentagon. At the monthly worship service held last week at the Department of Defense headquarters, in the middle of the war with Iran, he prayed that „every bullet would find its mark” and for „overwhelming violence” against those who „deserve no mercy,” in the name of Jesus Christ, while former military officials, chaplains and lawyers warn that this proselytizing campaign shatters the military’s religious neutrality, marginalizes personnel who do not belong to that camp and turns the armed force of the United States into a vehicle of ideological domination.
The same man treated military secrets with a recklessness that, in a normal administration, would have destroyed his career: he sent details of the U.S. attacks on the Houthis into a Signal group that included his wife, his brother and his personal lawyer. Trump has thus placed a religious fanatic and a dangerously reckless figure at the top of the American military – precisely the combination of exaltation, obedience and irresponsibility required by a leader preparing his state for internal revenge and external adventures.
Kash Patel – purge and revenge
At the FBI, Trump installed Kash Patel, a figure better known for political theatrics than institutional rigor, now placed atop one of the most sensitive agencies of the American state.
Before becoming director, Patel had called for shutting down FBI headquarters, stripping the Bureau of its intelligence arm and purging employees who refused Trump’s agenda, after already turning deep-state fantasies and theories of internal conspiracy into material for political agitation. Under Patel, the central accusation is one of political retaliation and professional degradation inside the Bureau: former agents filed lawsuits after being fired for their role in investigations into Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, and the wave of dismissals and reassignments thinned precisely the national-security side of the agency, including by removing agents with expertise on Iran and external threats at a moment of maximum military tension.
The warning issued by David Laufman, the former head of counterintelligence at the Justice Department, captures the danger exactly: the FBI risks being turned into a political investigative tool at the disposal of the White House.
Tulsi Gabbard – the politicization of intelligence
At the top of the intelligence community, Trump put Tulsi Gabbard in charge as director of national intelligence, overseeing the 18 agencies that gather and process the American state’s most sensitive secrets, even though she arrived with little experience in the field and a record that had already raised serious questions about her positions on Russia, Assad and Edward Snowden.
Under Gabbard, the office that is supposed to look outward, toward external threats, was redirected toward Trump’s electoral obsessions: she herself acknowledged that she was present, at the president’s request, during the FBI operation in Fulton County, and the presence of the head of national intelligence at a domestic action tied to the lies about the 2020 election produced shock and urgent demands for explanations in Congress.
Also under her command, people inside her office seized voting machines and copied election data from Puerto Rico in search of a supposed Venezuelan interference operation that yielded no clear evidence, and the episode was widely read as a sign that intelligence-community resources were being diverted away from real threats and toward the recycling of conspiracies feeding the Trumpist mythology of election fraud.
Gabbard then created the group called the „Director’s Initiatives Group,” a structure presented as a cure for politicization and later shut down after severe criticism, accusations of partisanship, serious errors and fears that her office had become a platform for political operations disguised as institutional reform.
In March 2026, the annual threat assessment presented under her leadership omitted any reference to foreign interference in U.S. elections for the first time since 2017, and senators from both parties attacked the way intelligence-community resources had been shifted away from external threats and toward the White House’s political wars.
John Ratcliffe – the CIA in the service of the supreme leader
At the CIA, Trump put John Ratcliffe, a party loyalist with a record of politicizing intelligence, in charge of America’s principal spy agency after he had been accused during the first term of injecting unverified Russian intelligence about Democrats into the political arena and of using state secrets for the leader’s benefit.
Once at Langley, Ratcliffe carried the same logic into the agency itself: he eliminated diversity programs at Trump’s order, fired people associated with them, withdrew or sent back for rewriting 19 intelligence assessments deemed ‘biased’ and embarked on a plan to cut around 1,200 posts at the CIA at a moment when the United States was facing simultaneous crises and former officials were warning that such cuts weaken national security.
In March 2026, in the middle of the war with Iran, Ratcliffe told the Senate that Iran posed an immediate threat, while lawmakers and members of the intelligence community contested the way intelligence assessments were being used to support the White House’s political line.
Tom Homan – the domestic hunt
At Homeland Security and around ICE, the regime’s field enforcer is Tom Homan, the White House’s man for the border and deportations, put in place to turn immigration into a permanent theater of force and fear.
Under Homan, Minnesota became the most brutal testing ground for this policy: by the end of January, the administration had sent roughly 3,000 armed immigration agents there, far above the usual level of around 150, and the operation triggered massive protests, violent repression and a national political crisis.
During that offensive, federal agents, turned into the regime’s assassins, shot dead two American citizens in Minneapolis, while federal judges rebuked administration officials after ICE was accused of defying dozens of court orders requiring the release of people wrongly detained.
Homan then announced that the operation was ‘unified’ under ICE, amid interagency conflicts and mounting criticism of the tactics being used – a sign that the deportation apparatus was being pushed forward even as it was beginning to crack from within.
In March 2026, the same Homan also backed the use of ICE agents in airports during the Homeland Security budget standoff and left open the possibility that they would remain there even after pay for TSA personnel resumed, expanding the presence of the immigration apparatus into yet another space of American civilian life.
With Homan as its hatchet man, Trumpism has given the immigration apparatus its most recognizable form: a machine of domestic pursuit that occupies cities, terrorizes communities, defies courts and keeps searching for more places from which to control, frighten and strike.
The administrative and digital nerve of the state
In the apparatus that decides who stays in the federal administration, who leaves, where public money goes and who gets access to government systems, Trump placed Elon Musk, Russell Vought and Scott Bessent. Each was given a zone of command from which the administration could be purged, the budget bent to political will and the state’s sensitive systems opened to the presidential network.
Elon Musk – inside the machinery of the state
At the Office of Personnel Management, Musk’s people received access to EHRI, the official electronic personnel file of the federal workforce, while career officials were removed from agency systems. That gave an outside network access to data on the careers, benefits and professional trajectories of millions of federal employees.
Mass pressure on federal workers was also unleashed through that same agency. The deferred-resignation program was sent to all federal employees, and then hundreds of thousands of people were ordered to explain, in five short bullet points and in barely more than 48 hours, what they had done in the previous week, under threat of dismissal. Trump publicly defended the practice, and the White House then sent additional loyalists into the Office of Personnel Management to consolidate political control over the agency.
Musk went deeper still. DOGE used Meta’s Llama 2 model to sort workers’ responses, and in at least one agency reports surfaced that artificial-intelligence tools were searching for wording deemed hostile to Trump or Musk. In April 2025, people from the DOGE network were working simultaneously in multiple agencies, and by November 2025 former members of the structure were still inside the administration, moved into other offices and other positions of influence. What Musk left behind was a durable form of infiltration inside the federal state.
Russell Vought – control of public money
At the Office of Management and Budget, Trump brought back Russell Vought, one of the authors of „Project 2025” and one of the chief theorists of expanding presidential authority.
Vought openly argues that the president can block money already appropriated by Congress. The theory was immediately put to work: in January 2025, the Office of Management and Budget issued a sweeping freeze order on federal grants and loans, with effects on education, housing and health, before the administration was forced by the courts to formally withdraw the order. The real aim was to shift control over public money out of Congress’s hands and into the president’s.
He then went to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where he told employees to stop almost all work, closed the headquarters and suspended investigations, litigation and oversight. The blow paralyzed one of the few institutions created to defend Americans from abuses by major financial companies.
Scott Bessent – the Treasury opened to the network
At the Treasury, Scott Bessent opened one of the state’s most sensitive zones to Musk’s network: a DOGE associate received „read-only” access to the federal payments system through which tax refunds, social benefits and other essential public transfers flow. Bessent also played a direct role in paralyzing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau after ordering an almost complete halt to its activity on the very first day of his interim leadership.
On March 26, 2026, the Treasury announced that Donald Trump’s signature would appear on future U.S. banknotes, alongside Bessent’s, an unprecedented step for a sitting president. The gesture showed how far the personalization of power had gone: the man put in charge of the republic’s finances accepted that one of the central symbols of the American state would bear the leader’s personal mark.
With Musk, Vought and Bessent, Trump struck at three components without which the federal administration cannot function: personnel, the budget and the public-payments system. The result was the same everywhere: purge, intimidation and the capture of the administrative apparatus by personal loyalty.
Justice and judicial control
In the justice system, Trumpism has sought total control, revenge for the supposed criminal ‘persecution’ of its evangelical strongman and cover for the crimes – including public killings – committed by the new power’s mercenaries. The target was clear: a justice system that validates political orders, protects the administration’s illegalities and punishes the leader’s adversaries.
Pam Bondi and Emil Bove – justice under political command
At the Justice Department, Pam Bondi and Emil Bove were installed to purge the institution of the people who had investigated Trump and to change its function. From day one, Bondi signaled that lawyers who did not support the administration’s positions could be fired, and the purges hit even the team of special counsel Jack Smith. Fear became a method of internal rule, and even the group created for the terrorism cases linked to the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, was emptied of prosecutors and agents.
Bove carried the same line further. At the end of January 2025, he demanded the names of the prosecutors involved in the January 6 cases and the FBI agents who had worked on the same investigations. In February, he ordered the closure of Eric Adams’s corruption case, and in June a whistleblower alleged that he had pressed his people to ignore court rulings and continue deportations, a sign that judicial orders were being treated as political obstacles, not as legal limits.
Ed Martin – Washington’s prosecutor of revenge
In Washington, Ed Martin, appointed by Trump as interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, carried the same vengeance into the cases tied to the Capitol assault: he launched internal reviews, purged the office of the prosecutors who had worked on those cases, and Denise Cheung resigned after refusing to open an investigation and freeze assets without sufficient evidence. Later, an investigation showed that prosecutors in the January 6 cases had themselves become targets for former defendants. The Justice Department was no longer protecting the law from political revenge. It had opened the door to it.
Alina Habba – prosecution from the inner circle
In New Jersey, Trump installed Alina Habba, one of his personal lawyers, as interim U.S. attorney. Her appointment broke with professional norms from the start, and the way the office was used immediately showed the aim: after the clash at Delaney Hall, she announced the arrest of Mayor Ras Baraka, then withdrew the charge while pressing ahead with the case against Congresswoman LaMonica McIver. Baraka sued her, and the court later ruled that Habba had served illegally in office. Federal prosecution had thus become an extension of the presidential entourage.
Immigration courts – courts for deportation
In the immigration courts, the administration worked in broad daylight to turn the judiciary into another link in the deportation machine. It fired nearly 90 immigration judges deemed too permissive, changed recruitment rules and pushed the system toward a logic of enforcement and political alignment.
The consequences were immediate. In Minnesota, Judge Nancy Brasel ordered ICE to ensure rapid access to counsel after people were being seized and moved so quickly that mounting a defense became almost impossible. Nationwide, federal judges ruled more than 4,400 times that ICE had unlawfully kept people in detention, and after the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Minnesota sued the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security for refusing to hand over evidence needed for the state’s investigation. From this angle, one sees clearly what Trumpism wanted from the law: accelerated deportation, a stripped-down right to defense and legal protection for the coercive apparatus.
The war on lawyers
The offensive did not stop with prosecutors and judges. The administration also went after law firms that defended causes hated by the White House or that had once employed some of the people involved in cases touching Trump. Through executive orders, it tried to suspend their security clearances, block their access to federal buildings and strike at the public contracts of their clients. Four federal judges blocked the measures, while nine other major firms preferred to cut deals with the administration and promised nearly a billion dollars in pro bono legal work for causes backed by Trump. The result is plain: inconvenient prosecutors are purged, prosecutors’ offices are handed to loyalists, immigration courts are cleared for deportation, and lawyers who can challenge abuse are intimidated. Justice is thus reduced to a single function: validating political orders, defending the administration’s illegalities and punishing its adversaries.
The informational and symbolic sphere
After the border, the prosecutors’ offices, the courts and the administration comes the terrain on which a regime tries to control the image of power, the freedom of the press and the symbols it seizes for the benefit of the supreme commander. Here Trumpism restricted access for inconvenient media, favored friendly channels, pushed one of America’s great platforms toward owner-imposed self-censorship, struck at U.S.-funded broadcasting abroad and even set up, inside the White House itself, a religious office headed by a religious grifter from the president’s spiritual entourage.
Karoline Leavitt – access as a weapon
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, belongs to the apparatus that turned access to the president into an instrument of political control over the press. In February 2025, the administration restricted Associated Press access to presidential events after the agency refused to adopt Trump’s imposed name for the Gulf of Mexico, and in April a federal judge ruled that the government could not punish a newsroom for the content it published and ordered access restored.
The White House went further, and in April 2025 changed the rules for the small pool of journalists who travel with the president, limiting access for the wire agencies that deliver real-time information to thousands of newsrooms in the United States and around the world. At the same time, the administration argued in court that the president is free to decide who gets in and who stays out.
This is where the new power’s censorship can be seen: access to information becomes a political weapon, and the independence of the press can be punished through isolation and exclusion.
Jeff Bezos – narrowing the range of opinion
At The Washington Post, the change came from within, at the owner’s direction. In February 2025, Jeff Bezos, the paper’s owner, announced that the opinion section would be devoted to defending ‘personal liberties’ and the ‘free market,’ and that opinions running against those two principles would be left to ‘others.’ The decision led to the departure of opinion editor David Shipley and marked an explicit abandonment of the editorial page’s old formula of broad pluralism.
In March 2025, Ruth Marcus resigned after management refused to publish a column critical of the new line imposed by Bezos, and later Eugene Robinson also left. The narrowing of admissible opinion thus turned into the elimination of established voices.
Voice of America – the offensive against external information
The assault on the informational sphere also reached the media institutions through which the United States communicates abroad. In March 2025, the agency overseeing Voice of America terminated contracts with Associated Press, Reuters and AFP and told journalists to stop using material from the major news agencies.
Then came the larger blow. After funding cuts and mass suspensions, a federal judge ordered in March 2026 that Voice of America resume full operations after the administration had effectively brought it to a standstill. During the same period, journalists at the broadcaster sued the administration and explicitly accused what remained of the institution of being pulled toward propaganda favorable to the White House.
The blow also hit Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. On February 27, 2026, the corporation announced that its Romanian and Bulgarian services would close on March 31, 2026, citing persistent budget difficulties and the fact that the U.S. Agency for Global Media had not signed the new funding agreement for the current fiscal year, although Congress had approved the money. The Hungarian service had already been shut down in November 2025. The retreat thus weakens the media infrastructure through which the United States projected independent journalism into Central and Eastern Europe.
Paula White – the religious grifter who sanctifies delirium
On February 7, 2025, Trump officially brought Paula White-Cain, a religious grifter, back to the White House as a special government employee and senior adviser to the new White House Faith Office. She was thus given an official role inside the presidential apparatus, handling relations with the religious sphere and helping lend religious legitimacy to the Trump administration.
Her profile says everything about the nature of this choice. Paula White is a prosperity-gospel televangelist, the religious racket that promises blessing, success and divine favor in exchange for submission and money.
In 2025, she asked for one thousand dollars in exchange for „seven supernatural blessings,” after previously soliciting so-called „resurrection seeds” at a fixed price.
„Is there anyone God is speaking to right now, telling you to hit the donation button after you minimize your screen? And when you do it, to give 1,144 dollars,” she said. „I do not often ask for something that precise, but God commanded me to do it and I want you to hear this clearly. It is not for everyone. It is for someone specific. When you give that 1,144 dollars, on the authority of John 11:44, I believe in resurrection power.”
Even in the American conservative world, she has for years been described as a „charlatan,” a „heretic” and a „false preacher.”
We have already revealed, on our site, how these evangelical frauds present the war against Iran to American military personnel during official combat-readiness briefings as part of a ‘divine plan,’ and how Trump appears in the same narrative as Jesus’s ‘anointed one,’ called to ignite Armageddon. In parallel, Pete Hegseth has turned the Pentagon into a platform of religious exaltation, with monthly evangelical services and prayers for ‘overwhelming violence’ against those ‘who deserve no mercy.‘ This atmosphere of holy war needs an apparatus of consecration, and Paula White is one of the people who supplies it.
That is why Paula White must be seen as part of the regime’s general mechanism. Hegseth clothes state violence in religious language, Trump cloaks his own delusions of grandeur in the same aura, and Paula White extends that consecration over the entire presidential court and presents it as a heavenly mandate. That is where the real danger of this religious grifter installed at the White House lies: she helps turn Trump’s madness into a state liturgy.
Foreign policy and diplomacy pulled out of institutions and shifted into family, business and patronage
In foreign policy, Trump weakened institutions and moved the most sensitive portfolios into the hands of relatives, friends and donors. In January 2025, about 160 staff members of the National Security Council were sent home in the name of alignment with the president’s agenda. In July 2025, the State Department fired more than 1,300 employees in the reorganization demanded by the administration. Into that newly thinned landscape, Trump advanced people chosen for personal proximity, family connections or the money they had poured into his political network.
Steve Witkoff is the clearest example. A real-estate magnate and old friend of Trump’s, with no diplomatic career and no government experience before 2025, he was used as a trusted envoy on Middle East, Ukraine and Russia matters all at once. On December 2, 2025, Witkoff entered the Kremlin alongside Jared Kushner and held talks with Vladimir Putin about the war in Ukraine. When a war dossier of that magnitude is taken out of the hands of professional diplomacy and placed in the hands of a close personal friend of the president, foreign policy ceases to be the business of institutions and begins to look like court politics.
Charles Kushner, Jared’s father, was sent as ambassador to France and Monaco after Trump had pardoned him in 2020. The Justice Department was already describing his conduct in devastating terms back in 2004: tax evasion, retaliation against a federal witness and false statements to election authorities. That means Trump sent to Paris, for a major diplomatic post, a former convict whom he had saved through pardon and who was also his in-law. At the same time, that man’s son was appearing in the Kremlin and in global-security files. The picture is clear enough: the convicted and pardoned father goes to Paris, and the son turns up in negotiations over war and peace. American diplomacy is thus moved into the family.
Massad Boulos shows the same logic. He is the father of Michael Boulos, Tiffany Trump’s husband, and was appointed by Donald Trump as senior adviser on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs in December 2024. On April 1, 2025, the State Department also gave him the Africa portfolio. Arab affairs, the Middle East and an important share of Africa thus landed in the hands of a man brought in from the president’s family entourage, not from a diplomatic career shaped by institutions and professional accountability.
Warren Stephens completes the picture of political clientele rewarded with diplomatic posts. Trump sent him to London as ambassador after Stephens had contributed $2 million in 2024 to a political action committee favorable to Trump. The Senate confirmed his appointment in April 2025, and the U.S. embassy announced his installation in London in May. This again shows the same practice: one of America’s most prestigious diplomatic posts ends up functioning as a form of reward for money poured into the leader’s political machinery.
Nor can Melania Trump be removed from this picture. On March 2, 2026, she presided over a meeting of the U.N. Security Council, a first for the sitting spouse of a head of state, precisely in the context in which the United States had joined the attacks on Iran. We have already shown, on our site, what that staging meant: one of the world’s central forums was used as a stage for the family’s will and for the theatricalization of power that toys with both the U.N. and war.
Trump and Hitler’s shadow
We have already revealed that several American psychiatrists and psychologists describe Donald Trump in terms of ‘malignant narcissism,’ the same conceptual framework Erich Fromm linked to Adolf Hitler and other tyrants of the last century. That is where the serious comparison between the two begins: from a psychological and political grid already used to describe leaders dominated by grandiosity, destructiveness, paranoia, mass crime and an appetite for limitless power.
The parallel first appears in language. Trump spoke of immigrants as people who are ‘poisoning the blood of the country,’ called political opponents ‘vermin’ and even allowed a video to circulate referring to a ‘unified Reich.’ Historians and the American press compared those formulas with the vocabulary through which Hitler and Nazism dehumanized entire populations and politically prepared violence against them. When a leader speaks of the nation’s ‘blood,’ of ‘vermin’ and of purification, he is no longer engaged in ordinary electoral propaganda. He is morally preparing the idea that certain groups must be removed from the political body.
The resemblance also extends to the moment through which each man opened his path to control of the state. Hitler used the Reichstag fire to create panic, invoke emergency and crush the constitutional liberties of the Weimar Republic. Trump spent years preparing the lie of the ‘stolen’ election, and it culminated in the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol, the point from which his offensive against institutions began. General Mark Milley said at the time that he feared a ‘Reichstag moment,’ meaning the use of crisis to justify an attempt to keep power above the law.
Then comes the obsession with total obedience. Trump said he needs ‘the kind of generals Hitler had,’ meaning men loyal to the person of the leader, not to the Constitution and not to the law. At that point the comparison with Hitler stops being one of language alone and becomes one of the structure of power. The leader demands an apparatus that will not correct him, will not resist him and will not remind him of limits. That is precisely why our text on America under terror shows such a clear sequence: first the White House and Congress, then the security apparatus, then justice, administration, the press and diplomacy. All are called to operate under the logic of personal loyalty.
The historical difference is immense and must not be erased. Hitler led Germany into full genocidal totalitarianism and the Holocaust. Trump leads an America that still retains constitutional forms, courts that can still stop him and a part of society that still resists him. But it is precisely that difference that makes the present danger even more insidious. Hitler destroyed the world from inside a state that had radicalized into total dictatorship. Trump is trying to wreak the same kind of devastation from within a superpower that still wears the costume of a republic and has at its disposal a military, financial, technological and symbolic force incomparably greater. And we have already shown how this man is also seeking religious consecration for war, including in the discourse on Iran and in the circle of religious grifters who sanctify his impulses.
Trump, a deeply unstable leader in command of the world
The United States has ended up under the command of a man with severe pathological traits, around whom there has gathered a network of loyalists, religious fanatics, obedient prosecutors, wreckers of institutions and influence peddlers, methodically placed at the points from which state power is commanded. Keeping such a man at the helm of the world’s greatest military, financial and technological power raises the threat to a historical scale.
For the citizens of the United States, that means the federal apparatus can be used ever more often as an instrument of internal coercion. Deportation becomes a spectacle of force, justice can be cleansed of inconvenient professionals and turned into an instrument of revenge, press access is filtered and punished when it does not conform, and administrative fear enters institutions as a method of command. In such a system, rights are left at the discretion of power. The citizen stands before an apparatus that can decide from one day to the next whom it protects and whom it crushes.
For the American constitutional order, the risk runs deeper still. The White House treats the law as a tool, the Republican Congress functions as a shield, parts of the judicial apparatus are purged, intimidated or bypassed, and the administration is emptied of professionals and repopulated with enforcers. Degradation thus settles into the very fiber of the republic. The institutions remain standing, but are compelled to work for the will of a single man.
For the rest of the world, the threat rises higher still. Donald Trump leads the country that has aircraft carriers on the oceans, military bases on several continents, sanctions capable of shaking whole economies, intelligence services with planetary reach and an intervention capacity that can alter the fate of a local crisis within hours. When such power is placed at the disposal of an impulsive, narcissistic, vindictive leader, religiously radicalized and surrounded by people who turn his obsessions into orders of state, every conflict becomes more flammable, every grievance can take on strategic consequences, and every delirium of the ruler can descend, through captured institutions, into the reality of the world.
That is why Trump is, in certain respects, a greater danger than Putin. The Kremlin leader operates coldly and methodically from inside a repressive apparatus already welded together and predictable in its cruelty. Trump brings a different kind of peril: more chaos, more instability, a greater need for spectacle, a greater vulnerability to flattery and a far greater readiness to confuse personal impulse with historical destiny. Around him there has also gathered a court of fanatics that gives him religious consecration, justifies his excesses and presents his brutality as a providential mission. From that combination emerges a risk rarely seen on the scale of a superpower: authoritarianism, pathology and religious fanaticism concentrated in the same command center.
That is the threat to humanity. America is under the command of a deeply unstable leader, protected by a network of enforcers who turn his resentments into public policy, his vendettas into state action and his delirium into a global menace. As long as such a man remains at the helm of the world’s greatest army, the international order lives under the permanent risk that one man’s impulse will become the violent fate of other peoples.
Note: This is the English-language version of an article originally published in Romanian on Investigative Report (Romanian version).