Last week in this space I suggested that maybe Donald Trump was not quite all there. I would like to revise that opinion. I think he may be what we used to call stark raving bonkers.
I apologise for my use of rather blunt language. A reader cautioned me that the use of such terms was stigmatising of people with mental health issues. Of course, Donald Trump himself would regard this as woke DEI nonsense. Only this week he used the phrase NUT JOBS to describe four former cheerleaders who dared criticise his chaotic and murderous adventure in Iran. Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens and Alex Jones were not only NUT JOBS but they were also LOSERS with low IQs.
In this spirit, I think Donald Trump would appreciate others using direct speech. So let’s not pussyfoot around talking about his “erratic” or “unpredictable” behaviour: all the signs are that he is positively unhinged.
Consider four episodes this week in which the president’s behaviour was straightforwardly loony.
The first was the Jesus image thing. Let’s say this slowly so that the full insanity of what happened can fully sink in. The most powerful political leader in the world posted an AI image of himself dressed up as the son of God, healing the sick.
How narcissistic do you have to be to do such a thing? What kind of delusions of grandeur do you have; what degree of messianic complex or hypomania?
A useful measure of abnormality would be to consider how an averagely well-run business or organisation would deal with a leader who behaved so aberrantly that it became routine for observers to suggest they had lost their marbles.
In most places, the HR department would be looking at a twin-track policy of “support” and “protection”. The support track could involve medical leave or a “timeout”. There would be confidential health interventions and adjusted duties. The protection track would restructure decision-making authority, limit contact with staff and include a crisis communication plan. Board members would be discussing a managed exit, NDAs, pay-offs etc.
But not, of course, in the White House or among the diminishing band of Team Trump. With them, there’s simply a roll of the eyes: Donald will be Donald.
But the more disturbing aspect of the Jesus image was the circumstances in which it came to be posted by Trump on his Truth Social account in the wee small hours—and that is the second reason to believe the president is round the bend.
Once everyone else has gone home and is fast asleep, the president—raw, unfiltered—starts his routine of unleashing a stream of consciousness on the world.
“He is unplugged, unshackled, unconstrained when it comes to Truth Social,” wrote the journalist Chris Whipple in his profile of Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles. “All they can do is to try and keep up and do damage control—and rarely do they even do that.”
On the night he shared his Jesus picture, his Truth Social timeline showed a terrifying picture of Trump’s deranged behaviour. A democratic political commentator, Harry Sisson, logs the president’s outpouring, and on the night of 12th/13th April he recorded the Jesus image at 9.49pm. This was followed a minute later by a picture of Trump Tower on the moon.
Reminder: this is a president in the middle of a war he started which is causing untold mayhem around the world.
Between 10pm and 11pm, he posted a dumb meme and two news clips. At 12.43am he announced that the US would be blockading the Straits of Hormuz—that’s right, in the middle of the night. Two hours later, there followed a link to a piece about Joe Biden (posted twice, at 2.35 am and 2.37 am). He had a swipe at a Democratic congressman, Eric Swalwell, (who has now resigned from Congress) at 2.37 am—and a minute later posted an article about his ballroom project. Finally, at 4.10 am, he posted an article about Iran.
“He’s not sleeping, he’s pretending to be Jesus, and he’s posting all night,” concluded Sisson. “He’s not well.”
Who could disagree?
The third nutty thing the president did this week was to go to war with the pope. Now—contrary to some doctrine—the pope is not infallible. It’s okay to disagree with him. But it is at least politically bonkers to go for him, particularly in the week your own team has told you to delete the Jesus image. And it’s even madder to rant and rave about things the pope is entirely innocent of.
Why, unless you’ve become unanchored from any reality, would you falsely say that the pope “thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon.” If instead of erupting on Truth Social, Trump googled the pope’s position on nuclear weapons, he’d find in about four seconds that he’s repeatedly called for a world free from nuclear threat. He does not, except in Trump’s head, believe that Iran should join the nuclear club.
Does Trump know that he’s speaking nonsense? Does he care? On what grounds does he accuse the pope of being “WEAK on Crime” – or are we now at the stage where he just says the first thing that pops into his head? What do we call acting or speaking without filtering or thinking ahead? A DEI label would be “a tendency to externalise first thoughts”. But maybe we could just say the guy is one taco short of a combo plate.
Finally, we witnessed the bizarre spectacle of Trump dragging his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, to watch an Ultimate Fighting Championship pay-per-view fight night at the very same time that his vice president, JD Vance, was supposedly trying to negotiate an end to the Iran war along with Trump’s golfing buddy, Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner. I mean, who in their right mind would do such a thing in the middle of a global crisis they have themselves sparked?
It is now so glaringly obvious that Trump is in some way round the bend that even the New York Times has deigned to notice it—albeit in the measured language favoured by the Grey Lady: “Trump’s Erratic Behavior and Extreme Comments Revive Mental Health Debate” was the muted headline on a piece that caused some ripples this week.
The notable development is that it is the Maga diehards who now acknowledge the true state of affairs. Former representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican who recently broke with Mr Trump, advocated using the 25th Amendment, telling CNN that threatening to destroy Iran’s civilization was “not tough rhetoric, it’s insanity.” Candace Owens, the far-right podcaster, called him “a genocidal lunatic.” Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist and founder of Infowars, said Mr Trump “does babble and sounds like the brain’s not doing too hot.”’
Other former colleagues of Trump are also speaking out. Ty Cobb, a White House lawyer during Mr Trump’s first term, told the journalist Jim Acosta that the president is “a man who is clearly insane”.
With a grandfather sinking into dementia, the best hope is often of some kind of family intervention. The Republican family is going to have to find a way to intervene—and soon. A failure to act has unknowable consequences.
