Donald Trump crossed the line of political eccentricity long ago. According to a growing number of American psychologists and psychiatrists, he now occupies ground described not by campaign rhetoric but by psychiatry. After years of compulsive lying, bursts of cruelty, fantasies of power, delusional claims and decisions with global consequences, the public record around the American president has grown so vast that several psychologists and psychiatrists now say openly that he fits the profile of „malignant narcissism„, the term Erich Fromm used for Hitler. In Trump’s case, then, the issue is a pathological personality structure – and the danger posed by a man like this when he reaches the controls of the world’s most powerful military state.
In the United States, that raises a question with direct implications for public safety and constitutional order: is Donald Trump still mentally fit to exercise the presidency with sound judgment? A Reuters/Ipsos poll published on February 24, 2026 found that 61% of Americans believe Trump has grown more erratic with age, while the share of those who consider him „mentally sharp and able to handle challenges” has fallen to 45%, down from 54% in 2023.
At that point, the debate over Trump’s mental health stops being mere commentary and becomes a question of public safety and constitutional order. It also sharpens the question already raised by experts and commentators: can Section 4 of the 25th Amendment still be sidestepped when the president appears unable to discharge the duties of his office with sound judgment?
The Diagnosis American Psychiatrists Have Put on Trump
For American psychologist John Gartner, founder of Duty to Warn and one of Trump’s most outspoken critics over the past decade, the illness at issue is „malignant narcissism.” In an interview with The Washington Diplomat, Gartner said he is convinced that Donald Trump – whom he has never treated – suffers from malignant narcissism, a diagnosis Erich Fromm later applied retrospectively to Adolf Hitler. If that is true, much of what is already known about Trump stops looking like mere excess of temperament and starts to cohere as a pathology of power in which lying, aggression, self-idolatry and the pleasure of hurting others belong to the same structure.
Gartner describes the disorder through five components: 1) narcissism in the strict sense – the man who sees himself as the measure of all things, the only one capable of ending wars, rebuilding the economy, closing conflicts and redrawing the world order; 2) antisocial personality disorder, or psychopathy in the sense he invokes – repeated lying, deceit, rule-breaking and harm inflicted without remorse; 3) paranoia – the permanent sense of being under attack and the right he grants himself to answer with revenge; 4) grandiosity – the need to dominate and stand above everyone else, visible in the way he declares himself „the best president in history” or the man who knows more than anyone about tariffs; 5) sadism – the pleasure of causing chaos, destruction and humiliation.
That diagnosis changes the way the public record reads. These are no longer isolated eruptions. They begin to look like expressions of the same psychological structure Gartner describes: the delight he showed at Mueller’s death, the Pearl Harbor joke delivered to Japan’s prime minister, the fantasies about the Nobel Prize, Greenland and the „Peace Council,” the war on American institutions and the administrative brutality directed at migrants.
In Trump’s case, narcissism goes well beyond vanity. It is a pathological fixation on his own exceptional status. From that fixation comes the claim to arbitrate peace and war above everyone else, the conviction that he alone can decide who deserves protection and who deserves punishment, and the need to project his will onto the global order. It also feeds his constant hunger for validation and the inflation of his own image into that of a providential figure.
The antisocial and paranoid components make the picture darker still. In Gartner’s account, Trump operates through systematic falsehood, aggression without remorse and a warped reading of the world in which every limit becomes an attack, every opponent becomes an enemy and every act of resistance calls for retaliation. That helps explain how quickly his public reactions become vendettas, how easily he rewrites reality from one day to the next and how absolute the obedience is that he demands from those around him.
Sadism is one of the hardest components to ignore. Gartner speaks of the pleasure of causing humiliation, destruction and chaos. That is exactly what appears in the way Trump seems to relish mockery, pursue the humiliation of others and turn cruelty into political theater. A central part of the danger lies there.
Gartner then adds hypomania. He uses the term to explain Trump’s excessive energy, reduced need for sleep, impulsiveness, arrogance and the errors of judgment that flow from his certainty that he is always right. This is where brutality and grandiosity connect to the mechanics of decision-making. In that mix, impulse can easily pass for strategy, and permanent acceleration can be mistaken for strength even as it may signal the weakening of self-control.
Gartner also speaks of cognitive decline. He says the deterioration becomes striking when Trump’s speech today is compared with the way he spoke in the 1980s, when he was more articulate and more coherent. His formula is blunt: „the only thing more dangerous than an American Hitler is an American Hitler with dementia.” The digressions, linguistic breakdowns, contradictions uttered within minutes and uncontrolled verbal sprawl therefore take on a far graver meaning.
Other psychologists and psychiatrists go further still, pointing to signs consistent with cognitive decline and even frontotemporal dementia at the very moment when the man under those suspicions holds the power to start wars, threaten states, destabilize alliances and throw entire markets into chaos.
Frank George, an American psychologist and neuroscientist and the author of The Gaslight Report, argues that Trump moved from pathological narcissism to malignant narcissism under the combined influence of his family environment, military school and, later, absolute power. In George’s view, even the few restraints that once kept Trump within recognizable limits disappeared in his second term. He also sees signs consistent with frontotemporal dementia, a deterioration that strikes directly at planning, rational judgment and self-control. George points to confabulation, paraphasia and obsessive repetition. In that light, chronic lying, distortion of reality and compulsive insistence become even heavier evidence, because they may also reflect the breakdown of the mechanisms that keep a person tethered to reality.
Vince Greenwood, an American psychologist, founder of the Washington Center for Cognitive Therapy and a specialist in psychological diagnosis and forensic assessment, reinforces the case through the method itself. He says that, in cases involving psychopathy and enduring personality traits, a direct clinical interview is not indispensable when there is an enormous body of publicly available material about a person’s life history. In Trump’s case, that material is overwhelming: decades in the spotlight, hundreds of appearances, interviews, recordings, books and testimonies. That gives the discussion a basis that is difficult to dismiss. The public record is massive, repetitive and long enough for patterns to emerge with unusual clarity.
Bandy X. Lee, a forensic psychiatrist, violence-prevention specialist and the editor of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, moves the discussion from Trump’s individual profile to the danger radiating outward from him. She says his cognitive decline has deepened and the level of risk has risen dramatically, including because his symptoms have spread politically and socially. At that point, the problem includes the environment he has infected: the party, the state apparatus, public discourse and the electorate mobilized around the same distortion of reality. For Bandy X. Lee, the Trump case belongs to public health as much as to democratic safety.
Those assessments are constantly met with the Goldwater rule, adopted by the American Psychiatric Association after the Barry Goldwater controversy and invoked ever since against diagnoses offered without a direct examination. But in Trump’s case, John Gartner, Bandy X. Lee and the others who have chosen to speak argue that silence itself becomes irresponsible when the man under these suspicions leads the United States and has war, weapons, alliances and executive power in his hands. That is where the idea of a duty to warn begins: in the face of exceptional danger, professional restraint can no longer serve as an alibi for refusing to say publicly what is plainly visible.
Once that diagnosis is on the table, Donald Trump’s entire public record starts to read differently. The lies, bursts of cruelty, grandiosity, revenge, decision-making chaos, messianic exaltation and habitual falsification of reality no longer look like scattered episodes produced by temperament, improvisation or plain political brutality. They begin to look like symptoms of the same illness. That is the lens through which the rest of the record must now be read: the way the structure described by experts surfaces in Trump’s words, gestures and decisions.
Narcissism and Grandiosity as Projects of Personal Power
In Donald Trump’s case, narcissism goes well beyond vanity. It is a pathological obsession with his own exceptionality. From it flow the need for constant validation, the claim to stand above the ordinary rules of politics and the conviction that peace, war, protection and punishment must all pass through his will. In John Gartner’s framework, that is where grandiosity begins: the moment a man no longer sees himself as merely important but as indispensable, entitled to tower above everyone else and redraw the world order in his own image.
In January, Trump explicitly linked his frustration over not receiving the Nobel Peace Prize to the escalation of pressure on Greenland. In the message sent to Norway’s prime minister, he said that once Norway chose not to award him the Nobel for „stopping eight wars,” he no longer felt obliged to think „purely in terms of peace.” The sentence says almost everything about his relationship to power: global recognition is treated as a personal entitlement, and its denial becomes fuel for geopolitical resentment. In Trump’s mind, prize, territory and force all belong to the same logic.
Within that logic, Greenland is not just a strategic obsession. It is the point at which grandiosity hardens into territorial claim. Trump spoke about the island as though it were an object available to his will, and in support of that ambition he circulated the historical falsehood that the United States had „given Greenland back to Denmark” after the Second World War, even though Greenland never belonged to the United States. The lie tries to lend legitimacy to a claim born of the same fixed idea: that the world can be redrawn around Trump’s desires and that the map itself can be treated as an extension of his vanity.
The same impulse appears in the way Trump places himself above the international order. The „Peace Council,” presented by his administration as a solution for Gaza and then expanded to other crises, was designed with Trump as president for life, limited terms for other states and the possibility of buying a permanent seat for one billion dollars. This was a blueprint for personal power: peace turned into a commodity, membership into a protection fee and leadership of the world into the prerogative of a single man. We described that construction as a „pocket-sized UN„, and the phrase captures the project well.
The text made it clear that ordinary states would get terms of no more than three years, while permanent seats were reserved for those who paid and for those inside the circle of power drawn by Washington. Trump did not want only to decide wars, sanctions and alliances. He wanted to sit atop the mechanism that decides who gets to make peace, where peace is made and on what terms. Here grandiosity reaches political maturity: no longer satisfied with control of the American state, it demands symbolic control over the order of the whole world.
The new decision by the U.S. Treasury carries that same logic into the symbolic core of the state. On March 26, 2026, the Treasury announced that Donald Trump’s signature would appear on future U.S. banknotes, while the U.S. Treasurer’s signature disappears from paper currency for the first time in 165 years. The official explanation invokes the 250th anniversary of American independence, but the language used by those who imposed the measure points somewhere much darker. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent described banknotes bearing Trump’s name as the highest form of recognition for his „historic achievements,” while U.S. Treasurer Brandon Beach cast him as the architect of the economic rebirth of a new American „Golden Age.” For anyone who has lived under a cult of personality, the reflex is instantly familiar: obedient state officials glorify the leader, attach his name to republican symbols and turn national currency into an instrument of personal consecration. What we see here is not just narcissism and grandiosity. It is an apparatus manufacturing the leader’s prestige and normalizing a cult of personality with unmistakably dictatorial reflexes.
The Nobel Prize, Greenland, the „Peace Council” and the Treasury’s decision to put Trump’s signature on future banknotes are not disconnected episodes. They reveal the same structure: wounded pride, a claim to exceptional status, resentment converted into state policy and the need to place himself above everyone else. With Trump, grandiosity does not remain rhetorical. It turns into a project of personal power, sustained by obedient officials helping to build a cult of personality grimly familiar to anyone who lived through Romania’s „Golden Age”: the beginning of the road to dictatorship.
Lying as State Policy
In John Gartner’s account, one of the heavy components of Donald Trump’s illness is antisocial personality disorder – psychopathy in the sense he invokes: repeated lying, deceit, rule-breaking and harm inflicted without remorse. That is why the public record of Trump’s falsehoods cannot be dismissed as campaign rhetoric, brutal style or the mythomania of a politician. In his case, lying is a method of power. It is how he attacks reality, rewrites it to suit himself and demands that others inhabit the version he has made up.
Donald Trump built his return to power on the lie that the 2020 election had been stolen from him. He repeated that fiction for years, even though the allegation was rejected in court and disproved by official reviews, and then went so far as to pardon or commute the sentences of nearly everyone charged in the January 6 assault on the Capitol, including leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. The fraud lie did not remain a slogan. It received political validation and legal shelter, and the violence born from it was rehabilitated by the very man who unleashed it.
In the war with Iran, the same method carried even greater weight. After escalation, ultimatums and strikes on Iranian infrastructure, Trump stepped back and floated the invented story of a peace supposedly in the works, complete with „major points of agreement,” direct contacts and even a 15-point ceasefire plan. Tehran publicly rejected the story. At the same time, Trump changed the stated aims of the war, its timetable and his description of the confrontation from one day to the next. The peace story served as cover for the retreat and as a screen for the decision-making chaos that had taken hold in the White House in the middle of a military crisis.
He also used lies as a weapon of economic coercion on a global scale. Trump threatened dozens of countries with punitive tariffs, sent markets into convulsions and then suspended or diluted some of the announced measures after violent reactions from stock exchanges, companies and trading partners. He used the same tactic when he tied commercial threats to his ambitions over Greenland. This is a president who manufactures global economic panic through maximalist declarations and then repackages his retreats as tactical victories.
On the historical and geopolitical plane, he used the same falsehood to lend legitimacy to claims rooted in force and expansion. He said the United States had „given Greenland back to Denmark” after the Second World War, though Greenland was never American. He credited himself with ending eight wars, though the claim is a crude fabrication. On immigration he used the same formula again: migrants supposedly emptied out of prisons and psychiatric institutions, imported crime on a massive scale, non-citizen voting presented as widespread. Each lie serves the same purpose: to legitimize territorial fantasies, manufacture a historical stature unsupported by facts and create the siege mentality required for internal repression.
With Trump, then, lying works in several directions at once: it attacks democratic order, covers a military adventure, prepares economic coercion and feeds internal repression. That is why, in the logic laid out by the experts, falsehood is not incidental to his politics. It is one of the illness’s central manifestations. A man who fabricates his own reality and demands that the world live inside it can no longer be read only as an impostor or a demagogue. He also has to be read as the expression of a grave pathology that has reached the summit of power.
Paranoia, Revenge and War on His Own Citizens
In the hands of a man whom psychologists and psychiatrists describe in terms of malignant narcissism, paranoia, antisocial personality and sadism, domestic power starts to look like a campaign of punishment directed at society itself. The first blow falls on the systems that keep people alive. The Trump administration pulled back roughly $12 billion in federal grants to state health departments – money used for infectious-disease control, mental-health services and addiction treatment. Later came new cuts worth hundreds of millions more, aimed above all at Democratic-led states. When you strip money from a system that keeps people alive, you strike at the population’s most basic protection.
Then come fundamental rights. Trump tried to restrict birthright citizenship, and the courts repeatedly said his order collides with the 14th Amendment and federal law. He treated protest, universities and academic freedom the same way: funding cuts, federal investigations, lawsuits and direct pressure on campuses over pro-Palestinian protests, diversity policies and institutional autonomy. When constitutional rights and institutional independence are reduced to obstacles that must be removed, what you are looking at is the will to subjugate everything that refuses to submit.
The American judiciary forms part of the same internal war. Judges who blocked Trump’s orders became targets of threats, doxxing and intimidation, including threats against their families. Cases documented by Reuters show judges under U.S. Marshals protection, violent messages and calls, systematic pressure and public demands for removal. In Trump’s mind, the courts do not appear as a separate branch with their own constitutional standing. They appear as tools required to ratify his will. When a court blocks him, the judge becomes the enemy. Once that signal is sent, his political and media entourage understands it perfectly.
In Trump’s hands, ICE was turned into a legion of federal killers, deployed in major cities – especially in Democratic-led states – under the pretext of „restoring order.” From that moment on, the agency ceased to be merely an administrative instrument of immigration policy and became the armed wing of a power that wants to intimidate, crush and make examples of people. Trump gave these men not only power but political absolution: the message from above is that, in the name of the republican order he claims to defend, force may go all the way and the law may be treated as an obstacle rather than a limit.
That is clearest in Minneapolis, where two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were killed by federal agents. In Renee Good’s case, the frame-by-frame analysis published by our site shows three gunshots. In the street killing of Alex Pretti, we counted exactly ten shots. Two names, two Americans, two killings carried out in public view by armed agents of the state in a campaign that, officially, was not even aimed at them. In that light, ICE’s mercenaries appear as Trump’s public assassins, and the political protection they receive from above tells them that however far they go, power will cover them.
Universities and public media came under the same pressure. Harvard and other campuses were hit by an increasingly aggressive federal offensive, with protests, accusations of antisemitism and ideological conflict used by the administration as pretexts for control. NPR and PBS were attacked through executive orders, funding cuts and lawsuits in an effort to make the president the arbiter of editorial content. ICE, the campuses and public media are not separate stories. They are different expressions of the same illness of power: a president who wants to punish, silence and break everything that resists him.
Under Trump, the federal state begins to move according to the impulses of a man experts describe as mentally ill and dangerous. Public health is weakened, rights are narrowed, justice is treated as subordinate to his will and executive force reaches into the daily lives of his own citizens. This is what happens when the power of the state falls into the hands of a gravely mentally ill man.
Sadism at the Top of Power
Another component of Donald Trump’s illness is sadism: the pleasure of causing humiliation, destruction and chaos. The issue here is the satisfaction of humiliating others, the need to hurt and the conversion of cruelty into spectacle. When that trait belongs to the man leading the United States, part of the danger lies in the pleasure with which he strikes.
Trump’s reaction to Robert Mueller’s death exposed, in a way that is hard to ignore, the moral squalor, vindictiveness and sadism that define him. Robert Mueller was not simply the special counsel appointed to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election and its links to Trump’s circle. He had been FBI director for 12 years, a federal prosecutor and a decorated Vietnam veteran – one of those American figures long associated with the idea of legality and public service. His investigation produced dozens of indictments, including against Trump associates and Russian intelligence officers, and his report concluded that Russia had intervened in the American election on a broad and systematic scale. That is why Trump’s delight at Mueller’s death looks even more repellent: this was not the death of a mere adversary, but of a man who, for part of America, embodied the principle that the law should reach the powerful as well. At the death of such a man, Trump reacted publicly with delight: „Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!” The contrast is even uglier when one remembers that Mueller was a decorated Vietnam veteran, while Trump avoided the draft through five deferments, one of them based on a bone-spurs diagnosis that, according to the doctor involved at the time, was arranged as a favor to Donald Trump’s father. Faced with Mueller’s death, Trump chose not restraint but revenge. In a handful of words, personal hatred, loss of measure and the pleasure of striking even the dead all came together.
The same trait was visible in the Oval Office scene, when Trump cracked the Pearl Harbor joke in front of Japan’s prime minister to explain why he had not warned allies before the attack on Iran. The line reduced a historical trauma that killed more than 2,400 people to drawing-room mockery. Instead of the gravity his office required, Trump chose to shock, swagger and humiliate through ridicule. When a president treats the memory of such a massacre this way, the pleasure of hurting fuses directly with the display of power.
Sadism also appears in the way Trump treats opponents, migrants and every category he turns into a public target. Mockery, humiliation, degrading labels and the satisfaction of watching people defeated or humiliated recur throughout his public record. That is why cruelty does not read as a passing outburst. It becomes a method of rule. The leader punishes and appears to feed on the spectacle of punishment.
This is one of the starkest differences between Trump and a despot concerned only with control. Trump appears to want the pleasure of humiliating the other as well. That is why, when the psychologists and psychiatrists studying him speak of sadism, they are not reaching for theatrical language. They are naming a trait visible in the facts, one that makes his access to power more dangerous still. His cruelty is not only an instrument. It is also a source of gratification.
A Mind Adrift, with the World at the Controls
In the war against Iran, hypomania, strategic chaos and signs of cognitive impairment – potentially even dementia – become visible almost without disguise. Trump threatened to strike Iranian energy infrastructure if Tehran did not fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz, then shortly afterward announced that there were „major points of agreement” with Iran and that a deal could come quickly. When reality forced him to lower the temperature, he presented the retreat as diplomatic progress. What shows through here is the impulse of a man who changes reality as he speaks it.
The same instability appears in the way he changed the war’s objectives from one day to the next. He spoke of surrender, harsher strikes, the end drawing near and, at the same time, continued military pressure until Iran accepted Washington’s terms. At the March 26 Cabinet meeting, Trump said Iran had to choose between peace and more bombing, insisted that Iranian leaders „want a deal,” and in the same breath admitted that he did not know whether a deal was actually close. The contradiction reveals a judgment that lurches from one position to another, changes its own criteria midstream and treats war as an extension of personal instability.
His relationship with Netanyahu carries the same disorder into an even graver zone. Trump said Washington „knew nothing” about the Israeli strike on the South Pars gas field, then claimed he had asked Netanyahu not to repeat such strikes and, in the same public appearance, said the actions of the two countries were nevertheless „coordinated.” Reuters reported that Israeli officials said the strike had been coordinated with the United States and that Washington had been informed in advance, even if the operation was not being presented publicly as joint. In the middle of a regional military crisis, the American president was putting out mutually incompatible versions of events. That is what judgment looks like when it buckles under the weight of its own contradictions.
When the war reached Hormuz and seriously disrupted global energy flows, Trump tried to pass the cost to others. He called on other states to help secure the strait, said the route’s beneficiaries should guard it and attacked NATO after allies refused to come immediately to Washington’s aid. In the same spirit, he described it as a „gift” that Iran had allegedly allowed some tankers through and treated that as proof of his own effectiveness, even though the crisis had been triggered by the war he himself declared. The pattern repeats: he causes the earthquake, refuses to bear its full cost and turns alliances into instruments of personal coercion.
This is where the connection between the illness described by experts and Trump’s actual exercise of power becomes impossible to miss. Hypomania produces acceleration, arrogance and impulsive decisions. Cognitive decline appears in contradictions, in the constant rewriting of reality and in the inability to hold the same line from one day to the next. Strategic chaos is the political result of that mix: a president capable of setting an entire region on fire, rattling global markets and then demanding that others pay the price while he markets his own retreats as victories.
Messianism and the Sanctification of Delirium
Around the war with Iran, a religious aura has also been built that pushes the Trump case into an even darker zone. Here, grandiosity, cruelty and strategic chaos are given mystical sanction. According to the revelation published by Investigative Report, American military personnel complained that during official combat-readiness meetings they were told the war was part of God’s „divine plan,” that Revelation and Armageddon were already unfolding and that Donald Trump had been „anointed by Jesus” to light the fuse in Iran. Once a president is elevated within the military apparatus to the status of divine instrument, the power exercised by a mentally ill man enters a more dangerous frame: it no longer demands only political obedience, but faith and adoration as well.
We presented the complaint of an American noncommissioned officer who described an official combat-readiness briefing in which a commander told subordinates to reassure the troops because operations in Iran were part of „God’s divine plan„. The same account contains explicit references to the Book of Revelation, to Armageddon and to the „imminent return” of Jesus, while Trump is presented as the chosen man meant to trigger this absurd scenario – a fantasy existing only in the diseased minds of those who invented it and of those who believe and circulate it. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation said it had received more than 200 complaints from over 50 bases and military facilities, all describing the same pattern: commanders turning military preparation into apocalyptic preaching. This is not harmless biblical folklore. It is the contamination of an army, led by mentally unwell men, with a mystical vision of war.
But the problem does not end with a few deranged speeches about Armageddon in military meetings. Around Trump, the other face of this pathology has also taken shape: militant evangelical Christianity, which sacralizes his impulses and recasts them as mission. The White House officially created the Faith Office and put the fervent Paula White-Cain in charge of it. At the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth opened monthly Christian services and explicitly introduced religious language into the leadership of the armed forces. Under those conditions, the war with Iran risks being judged not only strategically but as a mystical clash between a self-proclaimed Christian power and a Shiite theocracy cast as absolute evil. If Trump is presented as a chosen leader and that theology begins to circulate around military decision-making, the distance from Ayatollah Khamenei’s regime starts to collapse. In Iran, theocracy is openly declared. In Washington, it arrives through the Faith Office, courtroom preachers and the providential fixation on the „chosen one” and the Voltaren-anointed champion of the Trumpist God.
Paula White is not ornamental. She comes out of the world of televangelists and prosperity theology, the doctrine that binds success, money and power to divine favor. Her appointment to head the Faith Office shows that Trump and the loyalists around him are not satisfied with using religion as campaign scenery. They are institutionalizing it at the center of executive power itself. Which also means he is not the only fanatic in the White House.
Here, messianism does not merely sit beside illness as ideological decoration. It consecrates it. Trump, described by psychologists and psychiatrists in terms of malignant narcissism, grandiosity, paranoia and sadism, is recast in this discourse as a providential figure authorized by God to launch an end-times war. At that point, any political, legal or moral limit can be dismissed as an obstacle to divine mission. That raises the danger to another level, because a mentally unstable man is being fed by language that sanctifies his impulses and turns his disorder – his madness – into destiny.
In the militant evangelical Christianity orbiting Trump and his camp, religious authority moves through preachers, networks, Pentagon services, „Bible studies” fused to power and the obsession with the „chosen one.” The effect is the same: religion becomes fuel for military decision-making, while the adversary is transformed into a character from an apocalypse story.
That is precisely why Trump may become even more vulnerable to Netanyahu’s influence, the criminal already accused by the International Criminal Court of war crimes, while Israel is also defending itself in South Africa’s genocide case over Gaza. Reuters reported that Trump’s decision to approve the operation against Iran followed a phone call in which Netanyahu argued directly for the attack and pressed hard for that option. If on the American side there is already a president marked by malignant narcissism, grandiosity, paranoia and cognitive decline, and on the Israeli side stands Netanyahu, the combination is explosive. A mentally ill leader flanked by militant Christianity may find it even easier to read Netanyahu’s agenda not as the cold interest of an ally but as a historical, moral and even sacred calling.
Around Iran, then, all the darkest pieces of the Trump file come together: the lie used to cover a retreat, goals changed from one day to the next, conflicting accounts of coordination with Israel, the strategic cost shoved onto allies and this apocalyptic religious exaltation. At the center stands not a leader in control of himself but a man who seems to experience his own war as a mix of revenge, fantasies of control and providential calling. When such a man commands the military power of the United States, the danger to America and to the world extends beyond politics. It comes from the leader’s mental illness and from the religious language that sanctifies his impulses, making him even harder to stop.
America Before the Last Line of Defense
Everything above shows that the Trump file is more than the case of a psychologically unstable leader. Donald Trump does not run just any state. He commands the world’s dominant military power, with a nuclear arsenal, alliance networks across several continents and direct influence over markets, energy and global security. When lying, grandiosity, revenge, sadism, strategic chaos and signs of cognitive decline gather in the mind of such a man, the threat does not end with America. It reaches the whole world. The fact that 61% of Americans already say Trump has become more erratic with age, and that only 45% still consider him mentally sharp enough to meet the moment, shows that this fear has already entered the core of American public life.
The gravest danger is a slide into religious war. Around Trump there is already a political, ideological and religious environment in which confrontation with Iran can be lifted out of the cold calculus of policy and recast as sacred battle – something entirely congenial to Netanyahu’s Israel. When a president described by psychologists and psychiatrists in terms of malignant narcissism, paranoia, grandiosity, sadism and cognitive decline is driven forward by language that sanctifies his impulses, war stops being only an instrument of state. It can also be lived and presented as divine mission. At that point the global danger becomes even greater, because the adversary ceases to be merely a state or a regime. It becomes a figure of absolute evil, and the confrontation can be fought and justified in God’s name.
Faced with such a risk, the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution ceases to be a detail for legal seminars and returns to the purpose for which it was written: the defense of the state – and of the world – against a president unable to discharge the duties of office with sound judgment. Section 4 states clearly that the vice president and a majority of the principal officers of the executive branch may send a written declaration to the president pro tempore of the Senate and the speaker of the House, after which the vice president immediately assumes the powers of acting president. If the president contests that move, the same section allows four days for a new declaration, requires Congress to assemble within no more than 48 hours and gives it 21 days to decide. Keeping the vice president in place as acting president requires a two-thirds vote in both chambers. The text says nothing about any specific diagnosis. It speaks of inability to discharge the powers and duties of the office.
The final question is no longer whether Donald Trump has eccentric outbursts or whether his language shocks. The question is whether America can still leave the military, alliances, markets, energy and the peace of the world in the hands of a president whom more and more psychologists and psychiatrists describe as mentally ill, dangerous and possibly affected by cognitive decline. When all of that converges in the man at the head of the world’s greatest power, and when the war with Iran also risks sliding into a religious register, the 25th Amendment stops being a constitutional abstraction. It becomes the last line of defense for America and for the world against a mentally ill president capable of turning delirium into state policy and hurling humanity toward catastrophe on an apocalyptic scale – an outcome to Netanyahu’s liking, and to the liking of the archangels behind him.
Note: This is the English-language version of an article originally published in Romanian on Investigative Report („Romanian version„).
About The Author
[…] 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 […]