NOT MY pres drumpf / trump is a sociopathic, psychotic narcissist. He has no redeeming qualities at all. He is the only thing that truly matters in his life and he has no concerns about what happens to others while pursuing whatever he wants for himself. He has no problem lying, cheating, stealing, misleading, manipulating, or resorting to violence to get what he wants, the rest of the world be damned. Most of the people in his administration are less intense versions of him, they have mostly silent consciences but on occasion are able to prevent him from actions that if he had been able to carry them out might have resulted in the death of most of us as well as him and them. Only God knows if we will survive till the end of his term, and I do not write this as a joke because it is not funny. From the New York Times.....
The Trump Administration Is in a Psychotic State
Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner
Mr. Rauch is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Mr. Wehner, a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum, is a contributing Opinion writer.
It has been clear for a long time that President Trump is a person with a disorganized mind and a disordered personality. What the past few months and especially the past few weeks have brought into focus is how his pathologies have cascaded downward and outward through his administration. They have become institutionalized. The reason the administration so often does not act coherently is that it cannot. The world faces something new and baffling and frightening in Mr. Trump’s second term: a psychotic state.
This does not mean that every individual in the government is emotionally or psychologically unstable. Nor is it a clinical diagnosis of the president. The issue is that the administration as a whole lacks a consistent attachment to reality and the ability to organize its thinking coherently. Mr. Trump’s grandiosity, impulsivity, inconsistency and outright breaks with reality have become state policy.
In that respect, Mr. Trump’s second term is different from his first. In 2020 he could confabulate about the election result or babble about treating Covid with injections of disinfectant. But he could not translate his fantasies into reality — at least not usually. In the second term, by contrast, institutional psychosis has been on display since Day 1.
It is the Iran war that has most vividly demonstrated the scope of the problem. In this conflict, the most potent antagonist has been the administration’s own incoherence.
The Trump administration chose to wage a war without deciding on its aims, mapping out a strategy, planning for contingencies or even being able to explain itself. The goal was regime change — until it wasn’t. The demand was unconditional surrender — until it wasn’t. Deadlines were issued and then erased. Threats of total destruction were made and then pulled back. Iran’s nuclear program was a casus belli in February, despite the fact that we were told by Mr. Trump that it was “obliterated” last June. The president called for an international coalition to open the Strait of Hormuz, then said the United States could go it alone, then said the waterway would somehow “open itself.” He claimed that the United States had already won the war, that the war would end soon and that the war would end “when I feel it, feel it in my bones.” As a headline in The Times put it, the president’s position on Iran “can change by the sentence.”
Even as the bombs fell, the administration, concerned about gasoline prices, waived sanctions on some Iranian oil, “giving Iran’s war effort against the U.S. a boost,” as The Washington Post reported. Area experts were shocked when the administration proved unprepared for Iran’s partial closing of the Strait of Hormuz, a tactic experts had anticipated for decades. The administration might have been readier had it not chopped back the State Department’s Middle East desk, gotten rid of its oil and gas experts and eliminated its dedicated Iran office. The administration handicapped its own National Security Council by firing staff members, some at the behest of a conspiracy-minded internet personality, and undercutting its independence — not a good idea before starting a war. Trump’s social media posts seemed self-contradictory and borderline demented.
Incoherence is not incidental in this administration; it is the administration’s modus operandi. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency caused chaos in federal agencies by sacking, then sometimes rehiring employees without any evident rationale — and without making a serious dent in government spending. Mr. Trump flipped from “no more wars” to waging war (in Iran) and using and threatening military force (Venezuela, Greenland, Cuba), seemingly every other month. The policy toward Ukraine was simultaneously supportive and not. Tariffs went up and down and on and off, reflecting the president’s whims. In February he bragged that gas prices were low, then in March that they were high.
This is far from normal.
Normal administrations set up policy processes that assemble evidence from varied sources, collate viewpoints and priorities across multiple agencies and ensure rational deliberation before options reach the president. One of us served in three Republican administrations and participated as interagency reviews took place in a cabinet department, in an executive agency and in the White House itself. A single line in a presidential foreign policy statement might require the input of 20 or more people from the Defense Department, the State Department, the C.I.A., the Department of the Treasury and more.
The policy review process can be tortuous and sometimes mistaken. It can’t substitute for wise presidential judgment. But it is vital. It asks hard questions and assesses competing arguments. It ensures expert input in specific domains, anticipates how policies may ramify and prepares for contingencies.
In all those ways, the systematic review of policy amounts to an institutional mind: a cognitive process that organizes the government’s deliberations to keep them rational and anchored in reality. You might think of it as the government’s equivalent of the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for high-level executive functions such as impulse control and long-term planning. In Mr. Trump’s second term, those functions still exist, but they can be disrupted, circumvented or just plain abandoned at any moment on the say-so of the president and his senior officials. In that respect, the Trump administration is mindless.
Policy judgments should be made by the president, not by subordinate agencies and experts. But irrational processes produce inexplicable outcomes, and that is what we have seen, again and again. The only rhyme or reason is the principle that Mr. Trump proclaimed when explaining his policy toward Cuba: “I think I can do anything I want with it.” That is the principle by which his administration governs.
When an agency goes haywire, the administration might rush to stabilize it — for example, at the Department of Homeland Security, where chaos and brutality led to the killing of two American citizens right on the street in Minneapolis. But until a coherent policy process is restored under a chief executive who understands the need for it, we should expect geysers of mindlessness to keep erupting in unforeseeable ways and places.
Understandably, scholars, journalists and politicians have attempted to fit Trump 2.0 into any number of at least somewhat rational frameworks: populism, isolationism, unilateralism, nationalism, transactionalism, the madman theory, spheres of influence, imperialism and more. Some of those frameworks can help illuminate the president and the people around him. As one of us has argued, he is a patrimonialist — a leader who believes the state is his personal property. And both of us have said that his administration displays hallmarks of fascism. Ultimately, however, institutional psychosis defies rational categories. Predicting this administration’s behavior is impossible under any framework. And if Mr. Trump becomes more desperate as he grows more unpopular, the danger only increases.
Which leaves everyone wondering: What are the implications if the administration of the world’s most powerful country is chaotic in its thinking, unpredictable in its actions and not reliably in touch with reality? It’s impossible to know. America and its allies have dealt with a lot of presidential imperfections and failings, but there is no precedent or even category for the institutional psychosis displayed by the second Trump administration. Precisely because the psychotic state is so unpredictable, setting up systems to manage it will not work.
This puts the country and its allies in the precarious but not hopeless position of overrelying on the rational guardrails that remain. Some of these guardrails are within the executive branch: in the federal bureaucracies and the military services, where nodes of ordinary practice and process carry on as best they can. Still more important are guardrails in the other branches of government. The courts have remained independent and tethered to reality. Congress has quietly nixed some of Mr. Trump’s wildest nominees and overruled some of the administration’s destructive impulses, such as its attack on the science budget. State governments, especially in blue states, have been using the courts and their own policies to resist Mr. Trump’s agenda and demand accountable behavior from Washington.
Perhaps most important, the public supports effective and responsive government, not the wild swings of a fugue state — and it is making its feelings known.
Institutional psychosis is ultimately self-defeating and unsustainable. Reality checks will return because reality always reasserts itself. But severe damage will have been done, damage that may take a generation or more to repair.
As the Trump era winds down, the country may relearn something that never should have been forgotten. Institutions need to be reformed, not destroyed; governing well requires skill and careful attention to detail rather than leaders acting on impulse and ignorance; and character and mental stability matter perhaps most of all.
Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of “The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.” Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum who served in Ronald Reagan’s, George H.W. Bush’s and George W. Bush’s administrations, is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.”
A version of this article appears in print on April 12, 2026, Section SR, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump Is Turning America Into a Psychotic State.
Trump’s Erratic Behavior and Extreme Comments Revive Mental Health Debate
Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent, is covering his sixth presidency and wrote a book about President Trump’s first term with Susan B. Glasser.
President Trump’s erratic behavior and extreme comments in recent days and weeks have turbocharged the crazy-like-a-fox-or-just-plain-crazy debate that has followed him on the national political stage for a decade.
A series of disjointed, hard-to-follow and sometimes-profane statements capped by his “a whole civilization will die tonight” threat to wipe Iran off the map last week and his head-spinning attack on the “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy” pope on Sunday night have left many with the impression of a deranged autocrat mad with power.
The White House rejected such assessments, saying that Mr. Trump is sharp and keeping his opponents on edge. But the president’s eruptions have raised questions about America’s leadership in a time of war. While the country has had presidents whose capacity came under question before, most recently the octogenarian Joseph R. Biden Jr. as he aged demonstrably before the public’s eyes, never in modern times has the stability of a president been so publicly and forensically debated — and with such profound consequences.
Democrats who have long challenged Mr. Trump’s psychological fitness have issued a fresh chorus of calls to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove the president from power for disability. But it is not just a concern voiced by partisans on the left, late-night comics or mental health professionals making long-distance diagnoses. It can be heard now among retired generals, diplomats and foreign officials. And most strikingly, it can be heard now on the political right among onetime allies of the president.
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.”
Some of the questions about Mr. Trump’s soundness come from people who once worked with him and have since become critics. Even before the civilization post, Ty Cobb, a White House lawyer in Mr. Trump’s first term, told the journalist Jim Acosta that the president is “a man who is clearly insane” and that his recent string of belligerent, middle-of-the-night social media posts “highlights the level of his insanity.” Stephanie Grisham, a former White House press secretary for Mr. Trump, wrote online last week that “he’s clearly not well.”
Mr. Trump fired back in a long, angry social media post that did not exactly radiate calm stability. “They have one thing in common, Low IQs,” he wrote of Ms. Owens, Mr. Jones, Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson. “They’re stupid people, they know it, their families know it, and everyone else knows it, too!” He threw the crazy charge back at them. “They’re NUT JOBS, TROUBLEMAKERS, and will say anything necessary for some ‘free’ and cheap publicity.”
The dissent on the right has not extended to Congress, where Republican lawmakers remain publicly loyal to the president, nor has it reached the cabinet, which would have to approve any invocation of the 25th Amendment, rendering that idea moot. But it reflects growing unease among Americans who in recent surveys have increasingly questioned the fitness of Mr. Trump, already the oldest president ever inaugurated, as he approaches his 80th birthday.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll in February found that 61 percent of Americans think Mr. Trump has become more erratic with age and just 45 percent say he is “mentally sharp and able to deal with challenges,” down from 54 percent in 2023. Roughly half of Americans, 49 percent, deemed Mr. Trump too old to be president when asked in a YouGov poll in September, up from 34 percent in February 2024, while just 39 percent said he was not too old.
Democrats have pressed the point in recent days. Mr. Trump is “an extremely sick person” (Senator Chuck Schumer of New York), “unhinged” and “out of control” (Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York) or, more bluntly, “batshit crazy” (Representative Ted Lieu of California). Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, wrote the White House physician requesting an evaluation, noting “signs consistent with dementia and cognitive decline” and “increasingly incoherent, volatile, profane, deranged, and threatening” tantrums.
The president’s defenders pushed back. What critics call psychosis, they call strategy.
“Trump knows exactly what he is doing,” wrote Liz Peek, a columnist for the Hill and Fox News contributor. “Trump will continue to use maximalist (and sometimes outrageous) military and diplomatic pressure in his campaign to rid the Middle East of Iran’s near 50-year campaign of terror.”
Mr. Trump, who in his first term described himself as “a very stable genius” and has regularly boasted of passing cognitive tests meant to detect dementia, dismissed the criticism of his mental state when asked by a reporter last week.
“I haven’t heard that,” he said. “But if that’s the case, you’re going to have to have more people like me because our country was being ripped off on trade, on everything, for many years until I came along. So if that’s the case, you’re going to have to have more people.”
Asked for elaboration, Davis Ingle, a White House spokesman, said in an email: “President Trump’s sharpness, unmatched energy, and historic accessibility stand in stark contrast to what we saw during the past four years.” He argued that Mr. Biden had declined physically and mentally in that time and that The New York Times and other media had covered it up. (The Times covered Mr. Biden’s health and age extensively in multiple stories.)
Mr. Trump’s stability has been a recurring issue since he first sought the presidency in 2016. Numerous psychiatrists and other mental health professionals have weighed in with their own opinions even without the opportunity to evaluate him. John F. Kelly, his longest serving White House chief of staff in the first term, even bought a book by 27 of those specialists called “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” in an effort to understand his boss and came to the conclusion that he was mentally ill.
This is not the first time a president’s mental fitness has been called into doubt. John Adams, Andrew Jackson and both Roosevelts were from time to time accused of being unbalanced by political foes.
Abraham Lincoln struggled with depression. Woodrow Wilson was never the same after a stroke. Lyndon B. Johnson veered between manic energy and bouts of gloominess. Ronald Reagan seemed to slip late in his presidency, and many wondered whether the Alzheimer’s disease announced years later might have already begun affecting him.
Some Trump admirers have compared him to Richard M. Nixon, who espoused what he reportedly called “the madman theory,” instructing Henry A. Kissinger, his national security adviser leading Vietnam peace talks, to tell negotiators that the president was unstable and unpredictable as a bargaining tool to secure a better agreement. But privately some of Nixon’s own advisers did not think it was all an act.
Mr. Trump has at times tried to leverage his madman reputation. “Make them think I’m crazy,” he told Nikki Haley, his first-term ambassador to the United Nations, referring to the North Koreans. “Do you know what the secret is of a really good tweet?” he once asked William P. Barr, then his attorney general. “Just the right amount of crazy.”
Yet Mr. Trump told The New York Post last week that this time, at least, he was not pretending. “I was willing to do it,” he said of his threat to destroy Iran’s civilization.
The public focus on Mr. Trump’s state of mind, goes further than with almost any past president. “Other than Nixon, there has never been this level of concern over time,” said Julian E. Zelizer, a Princeton historian and editor of a book on Mr. Trump’s first term.
Indeed, the situation today eclipses even Nixon. Unlike in the 1970s, “so much of this is playing out in public,” especially with social media and cable television, Mr. Zelizer said. And, he added, “as a president who naturally disregards any guardrails or sense of decorum, Trump feels much freer, even than Nixon, to unleash his inner rage and to act on impulse.”
In his second term, Mr. Trump seems even less restrained and more incoherent at times. He uses more profanity, speaks longer and regularly makes comments rooted in fantasy rather than fact. He keeps saying that his father was born in Germany when in fact he was born in the Bronx. He repeats an invented story about his uncle, an M.I.T. professor, telling him about teaching the terrorist known as the Unabomber.
He wanders off into odd tangents — an eight-minute ramble at a Christmas reception about poisonous snakes in Peru, a long digression during a cabinet meeting about Sharpie pens, an interruption of an Iran war update to praise the White House drapes. He has confused Greenland with Iceland and more than once boasted of ending a fictional war between Cambodia and Azerbaijan, two countries separated by nearly 4,000 miles. (He evidently means Armenia and Azerbaijan).
Even before lashing out at Pope Leo XIV on Sunday night, and then posting an image of himself as a Jesus-like figure before deleting it, Mr. Trump had shocked many with his outbursts at critics. He accuses those who anger him of sedition, a crime punishable by death. He claimed bizarrely that the Hollywood director Rob Reiner, who was allegedly stabbed to death by his son, was killed “due to the anger he caused” by opposing Mr. Trump. When Robert S. Mueller III, the former F.B.I. director and special counsel, died, Mr. Trump said, “Good, I’m glad he’s dead.”
In recent days, he declared that “Iran’s New Regime President” was “much less Radicalized and far more intelligent than his predecessors.” Except that Iran’s new president is the same as the old president. There has been no change in presidents. Mr. Trump may have meant the new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, but he is considered even more hard-line than his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in the war.
One difference from the first term is that there are few if any advisers like Mr. Kelly who consider it their responsibility to keep Mr. Trump from going too far. “When he does what he does, everyone around him keeps their eyes to the floor and says nothing,” Mr. Zelizer said. “Unlike the first term, they don’t even seem to maneuver behind the scenes to stop him.”
But there may be political latitude for it with his base. “There is an element of American politics in the age of polarization, particularly within the G.O.P., that likes this style of leadership,” Mr. Zelizer said. “What can be more anti-establishment than someone who is willing to be out of control?”
But there may be political latitude for it with his base. “There is an element of American politics in the age of polarization, particularly within the G.O.P., that likes this style of leadership,” Mr. Zelizer said. “What can be more anti-establishment than someone who is willing to be out of control?”
Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The Times. He is covering his sixth presidency and sometimes writes analytical pieces that place presidents and their administrations in a larger context and historical framework.
The Latest on the Trump Administration
War in the Middle East: Control of the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s uranium stockpiles were sticking points in the U.S.-Iran peace talks, Iranian officials said. Iran sees American demands as reaching far beyond what the United States achieved in war. As Vice President JD Vance said no deal had been reached, President Trump was in Miami watching a mixed martial arts fight. The lack of a breakthrough after 21 hours of negotiations leaves the Trump administration facing several unpalatable options.
History Blowing Away Wind Energy: An unlikely coalition of the descendants of a Japanese American internment camp and Trump-aligned wind power opponents helped kill an Idaho wind farm, but A.I.-driven energy demand keeps rising.
Anti-Drone Lasers: The Federal Aviation Administration gave the military the green light to use high-energy lasers to shoot down suspected drones in U.S. airspace, ending a two-month standoff over whether the weapons endangered airplanes.
James Blair: The president announced that Blair, a deputy chief of staff, is taking over Trump’s outside political operation and its $300 million-plus budget, in a move to better prepare for a potentially difficult midterms cycle.
Melania Trump on Epstein: Trump said that he had known his wife wanted to speak about Jeffrey Epstein at some point, and that he “thought she had a right to talk about it,” even if he had not known what exactly she planned to say.
Pentagon Press Rules: The Pentagon has asked a federal judge to allow it to continue requiring escorts whenever journalists enter the military complex, a restriction that it argues is essential to guarding against national security leaks.
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